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From  the  collection  of  the 


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library 

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San  Francisco,  California 
2006 


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1847 


1853 


LIBRARY 

ESTABLISHED  1£»72 

LAWRENCE,  MASS. 

9 


THE    DIAL 


A  FORTNIGHTLY  JOURNAL  OF 


(Krtttctsnt  atto  Jtscusstmt  of  literature  mtfr 


VOLUME  LXIV 

January  3  to  June  6,  1918 


CHICAGO 
THE  DIAL  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 


INDEX  TO  VOLUME  LXIV 


AIKEN,  CONRAD,  THE  POETRY  OF     ....... 

ANNOUNCEMENT 

ANTIQUATED  YOUTH 

ART,  AND  WHAT  OF? 

ARTIST  AND  TRADESMAN 

BACKGROUND  WITHOUT  TRADITION 

BARRYMORE'S  IBBETSON,  JOHN 

BRIEUX,  EUGENE 

BROADWAY,  A  GORDON  CRAIG  FROM ' 

CABELL,  JAMES  BRANCH,  A  GOSSIP  ON      ..... 

CHANGING  PERMANENCE,  OUR 

CHEKHOV,  ANTON .     ;> 

CHESTERTON'S  ENGLAND,  MR ,.> 

CIVILIANS,  THE  SOUL  OF ,:..., 

CLIPPED  WINGS '/    iv^ 

CONSCIOUS  CONTROL  OF  THE  BODY     .     .     .     . 

COSMOPOLITE,  A  THWARTED 

CRITICS,  CORRUPTED  DRAMATIC 

CROCE'S  THOUGHT,  THE  RICH  STOREHOUSE  OF      .     »•   ^ 

CULTURE,  THE  DETERMINANTS  OF 

CURIOSITY  SHOP,  NEW — AND  A  POET 

DEMOCRACY  BY  COERCION 

EDUCATION  AND  SOCIAL  DIRECTION '.,$ 

EDUCATION,  THE  CREATIVE  AND  EFFICIENCY  CONCEPTS  OF 

ENEMY,  OUR,  SPEAKS 

ESSAY-LOVERS,  A  HINT  TO 

ESTABLISHING  THE  ESTABLISHED 

FICTION,  THE  BREVITY  SCHOOL  IN    .     .     .     ...     .-Jj 

FREE  VERSE,  THE  RHYTHMS  OF      ......     v|^ 

GENTILITY,  A  VANISHING  WORLD  OF 

GOD  AS  VISIBLE  PERSONALITY 

GREEK  MEETS  GREEK      .     . , 

GRENSTONE  LAD,  A  

HARVEST,  A  VARIED 

IDEALISM,  REVOLUTIONARY,  A  PRIMER  OF 

IMAGIST  NOVEL,  AN 

IMPERTURBABLE  ARTIST,  AN 

INTERNATIONALISM  AS  THE  CONDITION  OF  ALLIED  SUCCESS 

INTOLERANCE,  AMERICAN,  A  STUDY  OF 

IRELAND'S  NEW  WRITER  OF  FICTION 

JAMES,  WILLIAM,  A  Swiss  VIEW  OF 

KEATS  AS  THINKER 

KENTUCKY  CUMBERLANDS,  THE  FOLK  CULTURE  OF  THE 

"LABOR,  RIGHT  OR  WRONG" 

LETTERS  TO  UNKNOWN  WOMEN 

I.  To  the  Slave  in  "Cleon" 

II.  To  Sappho 

III.  To  Helen 

LIBRARY,  THE  PUBLIC,  AND  THE  PUBLIC  NEED     . 

LINCOLN  IN  BIOGRAPHY  AND  LETTERS 

LITERARY  BURLESQUE,  REENTER 

LITERARY  CLAPTRAP 

LITERATURE,  IF  THIS  BE,  GIVE  ME  DEATH    .     .     .     . 


John  Gould  Fletcher 291 

The  Editors 521 

Kenneth  Macgowan 390 

Laurence  Blnyon 93 

Lord  Dunsany 473 

C.  K.   Trueblood 194 

Marsden  Hartley 227 

Benj.  M.   Woodbridge        ....      67 

Kenneth  Macgowan 478 

Wilson  Follett 392 

William  E.  Dodd 197 

Louis  S.  Friedland 27 

R.  K.  Hack 65 

Myron  R.  Williams 241 

Randolph  Bourne 358 

H.  M.  Kallen 533 

Henry  B.  Fuller 68 

Kenneth  Macgowan 13 

.  J.  E.  Spingarn 485 

Max  Sylvius  Handman       ....   438 

Conrad  Aiken Ill 

Clarence  Britten 235 

John   Deivey 333 

Helen  Marot 341 

Randolph  Bourne 486 

B.  I.  Kinne          288 

Henry  B.  Fuller 233 

Randolph  Bourne 405 

Amy   Lowell .     51 

Randolph  Bourne     .      .      .      .      .      .   234 

Edward  Sapir 192 

H.  B.  Alexander 63 

Swinburne  Hale 23 

Henry  B.  Fuller 539 

Randolph  Bourne 69 

Randolph  Bourne 451 

RuthMcIntire 527 

Norman  Angell 427 

Alfred  Booth  Kuttner  .      .      .      223,  282 

Ernest  A.   Boyd      * 445 

H.  M.  Kallen 401 

William   Chase  Greene       ....     64 
William  Aspen-wall  Bradley     ...     95 

Charles  A.  Beard 152 

Richard  Aldington    .      .      .      226, 430,  525 

226 

....  430 

525 

Babette  Deutsch 475 

L.  E.  Robinson 148 

Clarence  Britten 450 

James  Weber  Linn 401 

5.  7.  Kinne    .  .      .    199 


INDEX  iii 

PAGE 

LITTLE  THEATRE,  A  HAPPY  ENDING  FOR  THE      ....     Kenneth  Macgowan 187 

LONDON  LETTERS     .     .  • Edward  Shanks   .    103,  189,  286,  396,  480 

LONG  WAIT  IN  VAIN,  A M.  C.  Otto 355 

LORDS  OF  LANGUAGE Scofield  Thayer 536 

MAGICS,  THE  Two Conrad  Aiken 447 

"MILLION-FOOTED  MANHATTAN" Harold   Stearns        ......   239 

MISTAKES,  A  YEAR  OF Harold  Stearns 293 

MYSTICISM,  THE  MIDDLE  WAY  IN C.  K.  Trueblood 534 

NATIONAL  FRONTIERS,  THE  PASSING  OF ',  .  Thorstein  Veblen     .      .      .      .      .      .  387 

NOVELIST  TURNED  PROPHET,  A Louis  Untermeyer 483 

OXFORD  SPIRIT,  THE R.  K.  Hack 350 

PARIS  LETTERS Robert  Dell  .     59,  141,  230,  344,  435,  530 

PAST,  ON  CREATING  A  USABLE Van  Wyck  Brooks    .  j 337 

PATRIOTISM  WITHOUT  VISION V.  T.  Thayer     .......     19 

PEACE,  LASTING,  THE  STRUCTURE  OF H.  M.  Kallen    .     .     9,  56,  99,  137,  180 

PEUR  DE  LA  VIE,  LA Harold   Stearns 482 

PILGRIM  SONS  OF  1920 P.  W.  Wilson     .......  522 

PLAYS,  NEW,  AND  A  NEW  THEORY     . Padraic  Colum 295 

PLOT,  A  NOVEL  WITH  A Myron  R.  Williams 153 

POET,  WHY  A,  SHOULD  NEVER  BE  EDUCATED      ....  Louis  Untermeyer    .     .     .     .     .     .   145 

POETS  AS  REPORTERS Conrad  Aiken 351 

POETS,  THE  DETERIORATION  OF .      .     .     Conrad  Aiken 403 

POLITICS,  THE  PAINTED  DEVIL  OF Harold  Stearns 109 

PROMISED  LAND,  A  PILGRIM  INTERPRETS  THE      ....     Elsie  Clews  Parsons 107 

PSYCHOLOGY,  APPLIED,  ON  TRIAL Joseph  Jastrow 353 

PURPOSE  AND  FLIPPANCY Randolph  Bourne 540 

QUADRANGLES  PAVED  WITH  GOOD  INTENTIONS      ....     Randolph  Bourne 151 

"QUEER  FELLOW,  A" William  Aspenwall  Bradley     .      .      .   297 

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Paul  Rosenfeld         279 

"SAGE  AND  SERIOUS"  POET,  THE      .     ....     .     .      .     R.  E.  Neil  Dodge 487 

SANCHO  PANZA  ON  His  ISLAND      . Edward  Sapir 25 

SCIENCE,  THE  TRUE  AUTHORITY  OF     .......     Robert  H.  Lowie 432 

SENSE  AND  NONSENSE Harold  Stearns 439 

SHERMAN'S  GARDEN,  PROFESSOR,  THISTLES  AND  GRAPES  IN  .     Henry  B.  Fuller 105 

SINCLAIR,  MAY,  SENTIMENTALIST Herbert  J.  Seligmann 489 

STATESMAN  SACRIFICED,  A Robert  Morss  Lovett 441 

SUPERSTITION  BECOME  RESPECTABLE Joseph  Jastrow 289 

THIRTEEN,   A  LUCKY .      .      .    '.      Louis  Untermeyer 70 

THOMAS,  EDWARD        Edward  Garnett 135 

TONE-POET,  A  MODERN  RUSSIAN Russell  Ramsey        .     .     .     .     .     .21 

TORY  TOMB,  SHADES  FROM  THE Harold  J.  Laski      ......  349 

TRAPS  FOR  THE  UNWARY Randolph  Bourne 277 

TROTZKY,  A  DOUBTFUL  ALLY Harold  Stearns        .     .     .     . '    *     .143 

UKRAINE,  POETRY  vs.  POLITICS  IN  THE Louis  Untermeyer    .     .     .     .     .     .  238 

UNIVERSITY,  THE,  AND  DEMOCRACY      . Charles  A.  Beard 335 

VAGABOND,  A  SCHOLARLY .     Myron  R.  Williams 402 

VICTORIAN  SUBURBIA,  ART  IN  Robert  Morss  Lovett 191 

VICTORIANS,  A  RESIDUARY  LEGATEE  OF  THE Robert  Morss  Lovett 16 

VOICE  OF  REASON,  THE Harold  Stearns 399 

WAR,  THE,  AND  AMERICAN  LITERATURE         .     .     .     .     .     Robert  Herrick '.       7 

WAR,  UNROMANTIC Robert  Herrick       .      .      .      .      .      .133 

WAR'S  HERITAGE  TO  YOUTH Van  Wyck  Brooks 47 

WEST,  REBECCA — NOVELIST Henry  B.  Fuller      .     .     .     .     .     .  299 

YET  ONCE  MORE,  O  YE  LAURELS!      .  Conrad  Aiken                                 .      .   195 


INDEX 


VERSE 

PACK 

AFTER  ONE   EVENING Leslie  Nelson  Jennings      ....       8 

DESIRABLE  RESIDENTIAL  NEIGHBORHOOD Clara  Shanafelt 481 

DISTANCE Babette  Deutsch 140 

FOR  THE  YOUNG  MEN  DEAD Florence  Kiper  Frank 396 

GARDENS Annette  Wynne 526 

HAVEN            Leslie  Nelson  Jennings       .      .      .      .190 

IN  DEDICATION Leslie  Nelson  Jennings       ....    477 

LARGESSE J.  M.  Batchelor 62 

ON  THE  BREAKWATER Helen  Hoyt 344 

REPROOF Edward  Sapir 102 

RETURN,  THE Guy  N earing  434 

SWALLOWS,  THE      . Padraic  Colum 50 

To  DOROTHY Maxwell  Bodenheim 288 

To  RUPERT  BROOKE Maurice  Browne 229 

Two  RAINS,  THE Amy  Lowell 98 

YOUNG  WORLD,  THE James  Oppenheim 175 


AUTHORS  AND  TITLES  OF  BOOKS  REVIEWED 


Acharya,  Sri  Ananda.     Brahmadarsanam,  or  Intuition  of 

the   Absolute    245 

Adams,   Joseph  Quincy.     Shakespearean   Playhouses 203 

Aiken,  Conrad.     Earth  Triumphant. — The  Jig  of  Forslin. 
— Nocturne     of     Remembered     Spring. — Turns     and 

Movies    291 

Aldrich,    Mildred.     The   Hilltop    on   the   Marne. — On   the 

Edge  of  the  War  Zone 121 

Alexander,    F.    Matthias.      Man's    Supreme   Inheritance. .   533 

Allen,  James  Lane.    The  Kentucky  Warbler 248 

Allen,  Maude  Rex.     Japanese  Art  Motives 407 

Alpha  of  the  Plough.     Pebbles  on  the  Shore 539 

Anderson,  Sherwood.     Mid-American  Chants 483 

Anthony,   Joseph.     Rekindled  Fires 544 

Atherton,   Gertrude.     The  White  Morning 205 

Austin,  Mary.     A  Woman  of  Genius 117 

Austin,  Mary,  and  others.     The  Sturdy  Oak 117 

Aydelotte,  Frank.     The  Oxford  Stamp 350 

Bade,  William   Frederic,  editor.     The  Cruise  of  the  Cor- 

win.     By  John  Muir  156 

Badley,  J.  H.     Education  after  the  War 350 

Baggs,    Mae    Lucy.      Colorado,   the   Queen    Jewel   of   the 

Rockies    300 

Balch,  Emily  Greene.   Approaches  to  the  Great  Settlement  293 
Ball,  Alice  £.,   illustrator  and  editor.     A  Year  with  the 

Birds    461 

Barbagallo,    Corrado,    Guglielmo   Ferrero   and.      A    Short 
History  of  Rome.     Vol.  I:     The  Monarchy  and  the 

Republic 244 

Barbusse,  Henri.     L'Enfer   231 

Barbusse,  Henri.  Le  Feu 133,  232,  486,  490 

Barker,  Granville.     Three  Short  Plays :     Rococo,  Vote  by 

Ballot,  Farewell  to  the  Theatre 295 

Barker,    Granville,    Dion    Clayton    Calthrop    and.      The 

Harlequinade    450 

Barker,  J.  Ellis.     The  Great  Problems  of  British  States- 
manship       362 

Barrie,  Sir  James.     Fanny's  First  Play. — A  Slice  of  Life  450 
Bartimeus.      The    Long    Trick. — Naval    Occasions. — The 

Tall   Ship    545 

Bartley,  Nalbro.     Paradise  Auction 78 

Barton,    Frank  Townend.     Ponies  and  All   About  Them  460 

Barton,  George  A.     The  Religions  of  the  World 74 

Bassett,  Wilbur.     Wander-Ships    499 

Bell,  Archie.    The  Spell  of  China 308 

Bell,  F.  McKelvey.     The  First  Canadians  in  France 120 

Benavente,  Jacinto.     La  Malquerida 121 

Benson,  Arthur  C.     Life  and  Letters  of  Maggie  Benson     30 

Benson,  E.  F.     The  Tortoise 77 

Bird,  Charles  S.,  Jr.,  editor.     Town  Planning  for  Small 

Communities    '. 75 

Blanchan   Neltje,    adapted   from.      Wild    Flowers '  Worth 

Knowing    82 


PAGE 

Blashfield,    Evangeline    Wilbour.      Portraits    and    Back- 
grounds       202 

Blathwayt,  Raymond.    Through  Life  and  Round  the  World     80 

Boirac,  Emile.     The   Psychology  of  the  Future 492 

Borst-Smith,  E.  F.     Mandarin  and  Missionary  in  Cathay  120 

Bosher,   Kate  Langley.     Kitty   Canary 413 

Bosschere,  Jean  de.     The  Closed  Door Ill 

Boyd,  Ernest  A.    Appreciations  and  Depreciations 190 

Boutroux,    Emile,    and   others.      Ce  qu'un    Francais   doit 
savoir  des  Etats-Unis.      (The  "Fait  de  la  Semaine," 

No.  3)    141 

Braithwaite,  William  Stanley,  editor.    Anthology  of  Mag- 
azine Verse :     1917    195 

Brigham,    Richardson.      The    Study    and    Enjoyment    of 

Pictures   81 

Brill,  A.  A.,  and  Alfred  B.  Kuttner,  translators.     Reflec- 
tions on  War  and  Death.     By  Sigmund  Freud 482 

Broadhurst,  George.     Bought  and  Paid  for 890 

Brodhay,  O.  Chester.     Verses  of  Idle  Hours 249 

Brooks,  Charles  S.     There's  Pippins  and  Cheese  to  Come  288 
Browne,   Henry.     Our  Renaissance:     Essays  on   the  Re- 
form and  Revival  of  Classical  Studies 350 

Bryant,  Lorinda  Munson.     American  Pictures  and  Their 

Painters  362 

Bryce,  James,  Viscount.     The  Worth  of  Ancient  Litera- 
ture to  the  Modern  World 860 

Bunkley,  J.  W.     Military  and  Naval  Recognition  Hand- 
book       412 

Burke,  Edward.     My  Wife 78 

Burke,    Thomas.      Limehouse   Nights. — Twinkletoes 545 

Burleigh,    Louise.     The  Community  Theatre 187 

Butler,  Nicholas  Murray.     A  World  in  Ferment 30,  496 

Butler,  Samuel.     God  the  Known  and  God  the  Unknown  192 

Bynner,    Witter.      Grenstone   Poems 23 

Bynner,  Witter.     See  Morgan,  Emanuel. 
Cabell,  James   Branch.     Branchiana. — Branch  of  Abing- 
don. — The   Certain    Hour. — Chivalry. — The    Cords    of 
Vanity. — The  Cream  of  the  Jest. — The  Eagle's  Sha- 
dow.— From  the  Hidden  Way. — Gallantry. — The  Line 
of    Love. — The    Majors    and    Their    Marriages. — The 
Rivet  in  Grandfather's  Neck.— The  Soul  of  Melicent  392 
Cabot,    Mary    R.,    Margaret    Crosby    Munn    and,    editors. 

The  Art  of  George   Frederick  Munn 245 

Cahan,  Abraham.     The  Rise  of  David  Levinsky 359 

Calthrop,    Dion    Clayton,    and    Granville    Barker.      The 

Harlequinade    450 

Calvert.  A.  S.  and  P.   P.     A  Year  of  Costa  Rican  Nat- 
ural   History    492 

Carr,  H.  Wildon.     The  Philosophy  of  Benedetto  Croce...   485 

Carroll,   Lewis.     Alice  in  Wonderland 246 

Carter,   Charles   Franklin.     Stories   of  the   Old   Missions 

of  California 499 

Cervantes,  Miguel  de.     Rinconete  and  Cortadillo 114 


INDEX 


PAGE 

Chambers,   Robert   W.     The   Restless   Sex, 546 

Chapin,   Anna  Alice.     Greenwich   Village 239 

Chase,  Daniel     Flood  Tide 544 

Chekhov,  Anton.     The  Cherry  Orchard 446 

Chekhov,  Anton.  The  Darling,  and  Other  Stories. — The 
Duel,  and  Other  Stories. — The  House  with  the  Mez- 
zanine, and  Other  Stories. — The  Lady  with  the  Dog, 
and  Other  Stories. — The  Party,  and  Other  Stories..  27 

Cheney,  Sheldon.     The  Art  Theatre 187 

Cheradame,  Andre.  The  United  States  and  Pangermania  109 
Chesterton,  Gilbert  K.  A  Short  History  of  England. .  65 
Chesterton,  Gilbert  K.  Utopia  of  Usurers,  and  Other 

Essays    25 

Clark,  George  Herbert.     A  Treasury  of  War  Poetry 351 

Clark,  John  Spencer.     The  Life  of  John  Fiske 355 

Clark,  W.  E.,   J.  W.   Jenks  and.     The  Trust  Problem..   460 

Clarke,  Austin.     The  Vengeance  of  Fionn 190 

Clodd,  Edward.     The  Question:     "If  a  Man  Die  Shall  He 

Live  Again  ?" 289 

Clopper,  Edward  N.,  editor.     Child  Welfare  in  Oklahoma  454 

Coar,  John  Firman.     Democracy  and  the  War 235 

Collins,   Charles  Wallace.      The   National  Budget   System 

and  American   Finance    156 

Colum,   Padraic.      Wild   Earth 445 

Colvin,  Sir  Sidney.     John   Keats :     His  Life  and  Poetry, 

His    Friends,    Critics,    and    After- Fame 64 

Compton-Rickett,  Arthur,  Thomas  Hake  and.  The  Let- 
ters of  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  with  Some  Per- 
sonal Recollections  396 

Conklin,  Hester  M.,  Pauline  D.  Partridge  and.    Wheatless 

and  Meatless  Days   ' 461 

Cook,    Albert    S.,    editor.      A    Literary    Middle    English 

Reader    160 

Coolidge,  Louis  A.     The  Life  of  Ulysses  S.  Grant 76 

Cooper,  Lane,  editor.  The  Greek  Genius  and  Its  Influence  63 
Corkery,  Daniel.  A  Munster  Twilight. — The  Threshold  of 

Quiet    445 

Corwin,  Edward  S.     The  President's  Control  of  Foreign 

Relations   • 453 

Cory,  Herbert  Ellsworth.     Edmund  Spenser:     A  Critical 

Study    487 

Croce,    Benedetto.      ^Esthetic. — Critical    Conversations. — 

Logic. — Problems    of   Esthetics. — Theory   of   History  485 

Crocker,  Bosworth.     Pawns  of  War 409 

Crosby,   P.   L.     That  Rookie  from  the   13th  Squad 248 

Crosland,  T.  W.  H.    The  English  Sonnet 480 

Cudworth,  Warren  H.,  translator.    The  Odes  and  Secular 

Hymn  of  Horace 243 

Cumberland,  W.  W.     Cooperative  Marketing 157 

Curran,  Edwin.     First  Poems 145 

Davis,  Charles  Belmont,  editor.     Adventures  and  Letters 

of  Richard   Harding  Davis 165 

Dawson,   Coningsby.     Carry  On 31 

Deacon,    J.    Byron.     Disasters * 456 

Debussy,  Claude,  composer.  Images. — Le  Martyre  de 
Saint  Sebastien. — Nocturnes. — PelTeas  et  Melisande 

Preludes. — Quartet    866 

Dennys,  Richard.     There  Is   No   Death 452 

Dickinson,    Asa    Don,    adapter.      Wild    Flowers    Worth 

Knowing.     From  Nelt je  Blanchan 82 

Dickinson,  Thomas  H.     The  Insurgent  Theatre 187 

Diderot,   Denis.      Early   Philosophical  Works 360 

Dillon,   Charles.      Journalism  for   High   Schools 460 

Dixon,  Royal.     The  Human  Side  of  Birds 461 

Dole,  Nathan  Haskell.     The  Life  of  Lyof  N.  Tolstoi....     81 

Dostoevsky,  Fyodor.     Crime  and  Punishment 447 

Doubleday,   Roman.     The  Green   Tree  Mystei-y 78 

Doyle,  Sir  Arthur  Conan.     His  Last  Bow 78 

Dumas,  Alexandre.     The  Neapolitan   Lovers 413 

Dunsany,  Lord.     A  Dreamer's  Tales 446 

Dunsany,  Lord.  The  Glittering  Gate. — The  Gods  of  the 
Mountain. — The  Golden  Doom. — King  Argimenes. — 

The  Lost  Silk  Hat.— The  Tents  of  the  Arabs 474 

Dyer,  Walter  A.     Creators  of  Decorative  Styles 801 

Eaton,  Walter  Prichard.  Green  Trails  and  Upland  Pas- 
tures    120 

Edgell,  G.  H.,  Fiske  Kimball  and.  A  History  of  Archi- 
tecture    454 

Edwards,  Agnes.     A   Garden   Rosary 120 

Egerton,  Hugh  E.    British  Foreign  Policy  in  Europe 71 

Eliot,  Charles  W.     Latin  and  the  A.B.  Degree 850 

Elson,  Henry  Wilson.     History  of  the  United  States 73 

Escher,  Franklin.     Foreign  Exchange  Explained 248 

Farrell,  H.  P.     Introduction  to  Political  Philosophy 248 

Fenger,    Frederic   A.      Alone   in   the   Caribbean 402 


PAGE 

Ferrero,  Guglielmo,  and  Corrado  Barbagallo.  A  Short 
History  of  Rome.  VoL  I:  The  Monarchy  and  the 

Republic     244 

Ficke,   Arthur  Davison.     See  Knish,  Anne. 

Flint,  F.  S.,  translator.     The  Closed  Door.     By  Jean  de 

Bosschere    Ill 

Flournoy,  Thomas.     The  Philosophy  of  William  James..   401 
Follett,  Helen  Thomas,  and  Wilson  Follett.     Some  Mod- 
ern Novelists   233 

Food  League,  Patriotic,  of  Scotland.  Savings  and  Sav- 
oury Dishes  461 

France,  Anatole.     Le  Genie  Latin 344 

Franck,  Harry  A.     Vagabonding  Down  the  Andes 498 

Freud,  Sigmund.     Reflections  on  War  and  Death 482 

Frost,  Robert.     North  of  Boston 447 

Fryer,  Eugenie  M.     The  Hill-Towns  of  France 498 

Fryers,  Austin,  producer.    Realities.    By  Henrik  Ibsen  (?)    398 

Fuller,  Henry  B.     On  the  Stairs 405 

Garland,  Hamlin.     A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border 194 

George,   W.  L.     Literary  Chapters 401 

Georgian  Poetry :      1916-7 104 

Gibus,   George.      The   Secret    Witness 78 

Gibson,    Wilfrid    Wilson.      Hill-Tracks 403 

Gibson,   Wilfrid  Wilson.      Whin 288 

Gillrnore,  Maria  Mcllvaine.    Economy  Cook  Book 461 

Gjellerup,   Karl.     An  Idealist. — The  Pilgrim  Kamanita. .   159 

Glaenzer,  Richard  Butler.     Beggar  and  King 351 

Goldberg,    Frank    A.,    Alexander    Petrunkevitch,    Samuel 

N.  Harper,  and.     The  Russian  Revolution 542 

Gordon,  Kate.     Educational  Psychology 353 

Gosse,  Edmund.    The  Life  of  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne  396 

Graham,  Stephen.     A  Priest  of  the  Ideal 115 

Graves,  Robert.     Fairies  and  Fusiliers 103,  15y 

Greene,   Frederick  Stuart,  editor.     The  Grim  Thirteen..     70 
Gwynn,  Stephen,   and  Gertrude  M.   Tuckwell.     The   Life 

of  Sir  Charles  DiLte 441 

Hake,  Thomas,  and  Arthur  Compton-Rickett.  The  Let- 
ters of  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  with  Some  Per- 
sonal Recollections  396 

Haller,    William.      The    Early    Life    of    Robert    Southey, 

1774-1803     73 

Hamilton,   Clayton.     Problems  of  the   Playwright 295 

Handy,  Amy  L.     War-Time  Bread  and  Cakes 461 

Hardy,   Thomas.     Moments   of   Vision 104 

Harper,     Samuel    N.,    Alexander    Petrunkevitch,     Frank 

A    Goldberg,    and.      The   Russian    Revolution 542 

Harris,  Frank.  Oscar  Wilde,  His  Life  and  Confes- 
sions    537 

Hart,    Albert    Bushnell,    editor.      The    American    Nation, 

Vol.  27  197 

Haworth,    Paul    Leland.      On   the   Headwaters    of    Peace 

River    494 

Hay  ward,   F.  H.     Professionalism   and  Originality 244 

Hearn,   Lafcadio.     Life  and  Literature 68 

Hemenway,   Hetty.      Four   Days 205 

Henderson,    Arthur.      The   Aims    of    Labour 399 

Henderson,  Helen  W.     A  Loiterer  in  New  York 239 

Hendrick,  Ellwood.     Everyman's  Chemistry 81 

Hill,   David  Jayne.     The  Rebuilding  of  Europe 439 

Hillyer,   Robert   Silliman.      Sonnets,   and   Other   Lyrics..  492 

Hitchcock,  Alfred  M.     Over  Japan  Way 82 

Hodgson,   Ralph.     The  Last   Blackbird. — Poems 403 

Holliday,  Robert  Cortes.     Booth  Tarkington 297 

Hollingworth,   H.   L.,  and   A.   T.    Poffenberger.     Applied 

Psychology    353 

Holmes,    John.      Letters    to    James    Russell    Lowell    and 

Others     543 

Holmes,  John  Haynes.     The  Life  and  Letters  of  Robert 

Collyer    243 

Holmes,  R.  Derby.     A  Yankee  in  the  Trenches 412 

Holt,  Edwin  B.,  and  William  James,  Jr.,  translators. 
The  Philosophy  of  William  James.  By  Thomas 

Flournoy    401 

Hopkins,  Arthur.     How's  Your  Second   Act  ? 478 

Hopkins,    Arthur,    producer.      Hedda    Gabler. — The   Wild 

Duck.     By  Henrik  Ibsen 479 

Hotblack,   Kate.     Chatham's  Colonial  Policy 167 

Hough,    Lynn    H.      The    Significance    of   the    Protestant 

Reformation  '. 455 

Houghteling,    James    L.,    Jr.     A   Diary   of  the    Russian 

Revolution     301 

Howells,  William  Dean.     Years  of  My  Youth 460 

Hoxie,  Robert  Franklin.     Trade  Unionism  in  the  United 

States 152 

Hughes,  Dora  Morrell.     Thrift  in  the  Household 461 


INDEX 


Hull,  A.   Eaglefield.     Scriabin 21 

Hutten,  Bettina  von.     The  Bag  of  Saffron 546 

Ibsen,  Henrik.     Hedda  Gabler.— The  Wild   Duck.    Pro- 
duced by  Arthur  Hopkins 479 

Ibsen,  Henrik    (?).     Realities 398 

Irwin,    Inez   Haynes.      The    Lady    of    Kingdoms 248 

Jacks,  L.  P.     The  Country  Air 545 

Jackson,    Margaret    Talbot.      The    Museum 74 

Jackson,  Sir  Thomas  Graham.     A  Holiday  in  Umbria. .     82 
James,  George  Wharton.     Reclaiming  the  Arid  West....   156 
James,    William,    Jr.,    Edwin    B.    Holt    and,    translators. 
The    Philosophy    of    William    James.      By    Thomas 

Flournoy    401 

Jastrow,  Morris,  Jr.  The  War  and  the  Bagdad  Railway  456 
Jenks,  J.  W.,  and  W.  E.  Clark.  The  Trust  Problem  460 
Jenssen,  H.  Wiers-.  See  Wiers-Jenssen. 

Jesse,    F.    Tennyson.      Secret    Bread 153 

Johnson,    Robert    Underwood.      Italian    Rhapsody,    and 

Other  Poems  of  Italy. — Poems  of  War  and  Peace. .  409 
Jourdain,    Margaret,    translator.     Diderot's   Early   Philo- 
sophical Works   360 

Joyce,    James.      A    Portrait   of   the   Artist    as    a   Young 

Man     446 

Jurist,  An  American.     America  after  the  War 439 

Keen,  W.  W.  Medical  Research  and  Human  Welfare. .  303 
Kellogg,  J.  H.  A  Thousand  Health  Questions  Answered  81 
Kellogg,  Vernon,  and  Alonzo  E.  Taylor.  The  Food 

Problem  201 

Keppel,  Frederick  P.  The  Undergraduate  and  His  College  151 
Kerlor,  W.  de,  translator  and  editor.  The  Psychology 

of  the  Future.     By  Emile  Boirac v. 492 

Kerner,    Robert   J.     The   Jugo-Slav   Movement 642 

Kilmer,   Joyce,   editor.     Dreams   and   Images 534 

Kilpatrick,   Van  Evrie.     The  Child's  Food  Garden 461 

Kimball,  Fiske,  and  G.  H.   Edgell.     A  History  of  Archi- 
tecture       454 

King,    Caroline.      Cook    Book 461 

Klein,  Charles.     The  Gamblers 390 

Knish,  Anne   (Arthur  Davison  Ficke),  Emanuel  Morgan 

(Witter  Bynner)    and.     Spectra:     New  Poems 410 

Korsakov,  N.  A.  Rimsky-.     See  Rimsky-Korsakov. 

Kosor,  Josip.     People  of  the  Universe 286 

Kreymborg,   Alfred,   editor.     Others:     An   Anthology   of 

the  New   Verse,   1917 Ill 

Kropotkin,   P.     Mutual  Aid 82 

Kuttner,   Alfred   B.,   A.   A.    Brill  and,   translators.      Re- 
flections on   War  and  Death.     By  Sigmund  Freud. .  482 
Lanux,   Pierre  de.     Young  France  and  New  America. .     47 

Latimer's   Progress,   Professor 544 

Latzko,   Andreas.     Men  in  War 486 

Legrand,  Philippe  E.  Daos.  (The  New  Greek  Comedy)  363 
Leonard,  Orville  H.  The  Land  Where  the  Sunsets  Go. .  202 

Liebknecht,   Karl.     Militarism    115 

Lincoln,  Abraham.     Uncollected  Letters 148 

Lincoln,  Joseph  C.     Extricating  Obadiah 78 

Lindsay,   S.   M.,  William  F.   and  Westel  W.  Willoughby 
and.      The    System   of   Financial    Administration    of 

Great  Britain    248 

Linn,  Edith  Willis.     A  Cycle  of  Sonnets 492 

Livesay,  F.  Randal,  translator.     Songs  of  Ukrania 288 

Lodge,   Sir  Oliver.      Raymond 289 

Loeb,     James,     translator.       The     New     Greek     Comedy 

(Daos).     By  Philippe  E.  Legrand 363 

Long,    William    J.,    editor.      Alice    in    Wonderland.      By 

Lewis   Carroll 246 

Longstreth,  T.   Morris.      The  Adirondacks. 498 

Lorente,   Mariano   J.,   translator   and   editor.      Rinconete 

and  Cortadillo.     By  Miguel  de  Cervantes 114 

Louis,  Paul.     Trois  Peripeties  dans  la  Crise  Mondiale.     59 

Lowie,  Robert  H.     Culture  and  Ethnology 438 

Luckiesh,  M.     The  Language  of  Color 490 

Lull,  Richard  Swan.     Organic  Evolution 301 

MacDowall,   M.  W.,  adapter.     Asgard  and   the   Gods.— 
Epics   and   Romances   of   the   Middle   Ages.      From 

W.  Wagner  114 

Machen,   Arthur.     The  Terror    205 

Mackay,  Constance  D'Arcy.    The  Little  Theatre  in  the 

United  States   187 

MacMillan,   Kerr  D.     Protestantism  in  Germany 455 

MacQuarrie,   Hector.     Over  Here 493 

Malleson,  Miles.     Youth 390 

Mardrus,  J.  C.,  translator.     Hassan  Badreddine 345 

Mare,  Walter  de  la.     Motley,  and  Other  Poems 288 


Masefield,   John,   translator.      Anne    Pedersdotter.      By 

H.  Wiers-Jenssen  200 

Mason,  A.  E.  W.  The  Four  Corners  of  the  World 117 

Masters,  Edgar  Lee.  Songs  and  Satires. — The  Spoon 

River  Anthology.— Towards  the  Gulf 447 

Matthews,  Brander.  These  Many  Years 234 

Maurier,  George  du,  dramatized  from.  Peter  Ibbetson.  227 

McCabe,  Joseph.  The  Romance  of  the  Romanoffs 114 

McClendon,  J.  F.  Physical  Chemistry  of  Vital  Phe- 
nomena    204 

McClintock,  Alexander.  Best  o'  Luck 120 

McKenna,  Stephen.  Ninety-Six  Hours'  Leave 491 

McLaren,  A.  D.  Peaceful  Penetration 455 

Meigs,  William  M.  The  Life  of  John  Caldwell  Calhoun  460 
Meynell,  Alice.  A  Father  of  Women,  and  Other  Poems  403 

Meynell,  Alice.  Hearts  of  Controversy 302 

Merrick,  Leonard.  The  Actor-Manager.— Cynthia. — 

The     Position     of     Peggy     Harper.— While     Paris 

Laughed.— The  Worldlings  527 

Millard,  Thomas  F.  Our  Eastern  Question 82 

Millay,  Edna  St.  Vincent.  Renascence,  and  Other 

Poems  145 

Mille,  William  C.  de.  The  Woman 390 

Monkshood,  G.  F.  The  Less  Familiar  Kipling  and 

Kiplingana  543 

Moore,  Henry  Ludwell.  Forecasting  the  Yield  and  the 

Price  of  Cotton  493 

Moore,  Henry  T.  Pain  and  Pleasure 116 

Morgan,  Emanuel  (Witter  Bynner),  and  Anne  Knish 

(Arthur  Davison  Ficke).  Spectra:  New  Poems...  410 

Morley,  Christopher.  Shandygaff 53!) 

Morley,  Christopher.  Songs  for  a  Little  House 35] 

Morley,  John,  Viscount.  Recollections 16 

Morris,  William.  The  Earthly  Paradise 397 

Morse,  Frances  Clarey.  Furniture  of  the  Olden  Time  491 

Mortimer,  Maud.  A  Green  Tent  in  Flanders 120 

Muir,  John.  The  Cruise  of  the  Corwin 156 

Munn,  Margaret  Crosby,  and  Mary  R.  Cabot,  editors. 

The  Art  of  George  Frederick  Munn 245 

Murphy,  Thomas  D.  Oregon  the  Picturesque 71 

Murray,  Gilbert.  Faith,  War,  and  Policy v 30 

Nesbitt,  Florence.  Household  Management 456 

Nexo,  Martin  Anderson.  Pelle  the  Conqueror 158 

Nobbs,  Gilbert.  At  the  Right  of  the  British  Line 72 

Oberholtzer,  Ellis  Paxson.  A  History  of  the  United 

States  since  the  Civil  War,  Vol.  1 457 

Ogg,  Frederic  Austin.  National  Progress,  1907-17. 

(The  American  Nation,  Vol.  27) 197 

Oppenheim,  E.  Phillips.  The  Pawns  Count 547 

Oppenheimer,  Rebecca  W.  Diabetic  Cookery 461 

Orczy,  Baroness.  Lord  Tony's  Wife 547 

Osborn,  E.  B.,  editor.  The  Muse  in  Arms 103 

O'Sullivan,  Seumas.  Mud  and  Purple 190 

O'Sullivan,  Vincent.  Sentiment 78 

Partridge,  Pauline  D.,  and  Hester  M.  Conklin.  Wheat- 
less  and  Meatless  Days 461 

Passelecq,  Fernand.  La  Question  Flamande  et  1'Alle- 

magne  232 

Paton,  W.  R.,  translator.  The  Greek  Anthology, 

Vol.  Ill 452 

Patterson,  William  M.  The  Making  of  Verse.— The 

Rhythm  of  Prose 51 

Pearse,  Padraic.  Collected  Works 190 

Pennell,  Joseph.  Pictures  of  War  Work  in  America..  542 
Petrunkevitch,  Alexander,  Samuel  N.  Harper,  and 

Frank  A.  Goldberg.  The  Russian  Revolution 542 

Pitman,  Frank  Wesley.  The  Development  of  the 

British  West  Indies,  1700-1763 ;....  361 

Plowman,  Max.  A  Lap  Full  of  Seed 40.'! 

Poffenberger,  A.  T.,  H.  L.  Hollingworth  and.  Applied 

.Psychology  353 

Pollard,  A.  F.  The  Commonwealth  at  War 235 

Pontoppidan,  Henrik.  Enslew's  Death. — Favsingsholm. 

— The    Promised    Land. — Publicans    and    Sinners. — 

Storeholt.— Torben  and  Jytte 158 

Poole,  Ernest.  The  Dark  People 410 

Poole,  Ernest.  The  Harbor.— His  Family.— His  Second 

Wife  540 

Porto-Riche,  Georges  de.  Le  Marchand  d'Estampes..  142 
PreVost,  Abbe1.  Manon  Lescaut. — M£moires  d'un 

Homme  de  QualitS 345 

Price,  G.  Ward.  The  Story  of  the  Salonika  Army 363 

Princeton  Faculty,  Members  of.  The  World  Peril...  19 
Proud,  E.  Dorothea.  Welfare  Work 204 


INDEX 


Raphael,    John    N.,    dramatist.      Peter    Ibbetson.      By 

George   du   Maurier 227 

Ravage,  M.  E.     An  American  in  the  Making 107 

Ray,  P.   Orman.     An   Introduction  to   Political  Parties 

and   Practical   Politics 303 

Reade,  Arthur.     Finland  and  the  Finns 498 

Reinhardt,   Max.      Sumurun    390 

Richardson,  Dorothy   M.     Pilgrimage:     Pointed  Roofs; 

Backwater;    Honeycomb    451 

Riche,  Georges   de   Porto-.     See  Porto-Riche. 
Rickett,  Arthur  Compton-.     See  Compton-Rickett. 
Rimsky-Korsakov,    N.    A.,    composer.      Le   Coq    d'Or. — 

Scheherazade. — Sniegourochka    279 

Robbins,  C.  A.     The  Unholy   Three 78 

Rogers,  Julia  E.     Trees  Worth   Knowing 82 

Rookie   Rhymes 155 

Rose,  Mary  S.     Everyday  Foods  in  War  Time 461 

Roth,  Samuel.     First  Offering 145,  249 

Rothschild,   Alonzo.     Honest   Abe 148 

Royal  Society  of  Literature,  Transactions  of  the 499 

Rumsey,  Frances.     Mr.  Gushing  and  Mile,  du  Chastel.     77 

Russell,   Bertrand.     Mysticism   and   Logic 398 

Russell,  Bertrand.     Political  Ideals 69 

Russian  Mission,   Members  of.     America's   Message  to 

the  Russian  People   542 

Sassoon,  Siegfried.     The  Old  Huntsman 403 

Savic,  Vladislav  R.     South-Eastern  Europe 494 

Schafer,  Joseph.  A  History  of  the  Pacific  Northwest.  408 
Scheifley,  William  B.  Brieux  and  Contemporary  French 

Society     67 

Scudder,   Vida   D.     Le   Morte   Darthur   of   Sir   Thomas 

Malory   and  Its   Sources 453 

Selincourt,  Hugh  de.      Nine  Tales 241 

Seltzer,  Adele,  translator.     Men  in  War.     By  Andreas 

Latzko    486 

Sembat,  Marcel.     Perdons-nous  la  Russie?     (The  "Fait 

de  la  Semaine,"  No.  9) 141 

Semple,    Ellen    Churchill.      The    Anglo-Saxons    of    the 

Kentucky    Mountains     95 

Shackleton,  Robert.     The  Book -of  New  York 239 

Shackleton,    Robert.      Touring    Great    Britain 498 

Shakespeare,   The  Arden 480 

Shaw,  George  Bernard.  The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets  450 
Shaw,  George  Bernard.  Mrs.  Warren's  Profession..  391 
Sherman,  Stuart  P.  On  Contemporary  Literature. . . .  J.U5 

Simonds,  William   Day.     Starr  King  in  California' 121 

Sinclair,  May.     The  Tree  of  Heaven 489 

Smith,  Bertram.     Days  of  Discovery 547 

Smith,   E.   F.   Borst-.     See  Borst-Smith. 

Smith,   E.  Kirby.     To  Mexico  with  Scott 31 

Smith,   Logan  Pear-sail.     Trivia 155 

Sommers,    Cecil.     Temporary  Heroes 205 

Spindler,   Frank   N.     The   Sense   of  Sight 116 

Squire,  J.  C.  The  Lily  of  Malud,  and  Other  Poems..  403 
Stefansson,  Jon.  Denmark  and  Sweden  with  Iceland 

and   Finland    542 

Stephens,  James.     The  Crock  of  Gold.— The  Demi-Gods  445 

Stimson,   F.   J.     My   Story 156 

Stires,   Ernest  M.     The  High  Call 235 

Stitt,   Innes,   and  Leo  Ward.     To-Morrow,   and   Other 

Poems    534 

Stork,    Charles     Wharton,    translator.  '    Anthology    of 

Swedish    Lyrics , 75 

Stuck,    Hudson.      Voyages    on    the    Yukon     and    Its 

Tributaries    243 

Sturgis,   Mrs.    R.    Clipston.      Random   Reflections    of   a 

Grandmother   460 

Swinburne,  Algernon  Charles.     Letters 396 

Synge,   John.     The   Playboy  of   the   Western   World.— 

Riders  to  the  Sea.— The  Shadow  of  the  Glen 445 

Tagore,   Rabindranath.      Sacrifice,    and   Other   Plays...  295 

Tarbell,   Ida  M.     The   Life   of  Abraham   Lincoln 148 

Tarkington,    Booth.      The    Gentleman    from    Indiana.— 

Monsieur  Beaucaire.— Seventeen.— The  Turmoil 298 

Taylor,    Alonzo    E.,    Vernon    Kellogg    and.      The    Food 

Problem    201 

Thayer,     William    Roscoe,     editor.       Letters     of    John 

Holmes   to  James   Russell   Lowell  and  Others 543 

Thomas,    Edward.      The    Happy-Go-Lucky    Morgans.— 

The   Heart  of  England.— The  Life   of  Richard  Jef- 

feries.— Light    and    Twilight.— Rest    and    Unrest.— 

Rose-Acre      Papers.— The      South      Country.— The 

Woodland  Life  135 

Thomas,   Edward.      A  Literary    Pilgrim   in    England...   302 


PAGE 

Thomas,    Edward.      Poems 403 

Thorndike,  Lynn.     The   History  of  Medieval  Europe..  303 

Tobenkin,   Elias.     The  House  of  Conrad... 358 

Tracy,    Gilbert    A.      Uncollected    Letters    of    Abr.aham 

Lincoln   148 

Trotter,  L.  J.     History  of  India 360 

Trotzky,   Leon.     The   Bolsheviki  and   World   Peace 143 

Tuckwell,  Gertrude  M.,  Stephen  Gwynn  and.     The  Life 

of  Sir  Charles   Dilke 441 

Underbill,    John    Garrett,    translator.      La    Malquerida. 

By  Jacinto  Benavente   121 

Vachell,   Horace  Annesley.      Fishpingle 78 

Vallotton,  Benjamin.     Potterat  and  the  War 241 

Vandervelde,  Emile.     Le  Socialisme  contre  l'Etat..436,  532 
Van  Dongen,  Kees,  illustrator.     Hassan  Badreddine. . .  345 

Van  Dyke,  Henry.     Fighting  for  Peace 235 

Van  Loon,  Hendrik  Willem.     A  Short  History  of  Dis- 
covery       453 

Vanzype,  Gustave.      Two  Belgian  Plays:    Mother  Nature 

and   Progress    295 

Veblen,  Thorstein.      The   Nature   of   Peace 246,  444 

Verrill,  A.  Hyatt.     The  Book  of  the  West  Indies 157 

Vreeland,  Hamilton,  Jr.     Hugo  Grotius 493 

Wagner,   W.,   adapted   from.     Asgard   and    the    Gods. — 

Epics  and  Romances   of   the  Middle  Ages 114 

Walker,  H.  F.  B.     A  Doctor's  Diary  in  Damaraland..     81 

Walpole,  Hugh.     The  Green  Mirror 199,  287 

Walsh,   Correa   Moylan.     The   Climax  of  Civilization. — 

Socialism. — Feminism    203 

Ward,    Leo,   Innes    Stitt    and.     To-Morrow,    and    Other 

Poems     534 

Ward,  Mrs.  Humphry.     Missing 117 

Warwick,  Anne.     The  Best  People 546 

Washburn,  Margaret  Floy.     The  Animal  Mind 412 

Watson,  Frederick.     Children  of  Passage 412 

Watson,   Malcolm.     Rural  Sanitation  in  the  Tropics...   120 

Watts,  Mary  S.     The  Boardman  Family 540 

Wenley,  R.  M.    The  Life  and  Work  of  George  Sylvester 

Morris   76 

West,  Andrew   F.,  editor.     Value  of  the  Classics 350 

West,  Rebecca.    The  Return  of  the  Soldier 299 

Wheeler,  W.  R.,  editor.    A  Book  of  Verse  of  the  Great 

War    ^. 351 

Whibley,   Charles.      Political   Portraits 349 

Whipple,  George  Chandler.     State  Sanitation 249 

Wiers-Jenssen,  H.     Anne   Pedersdotter 200 

Wilde,  Oscar.      The  Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol.— De   Pro- 

fundis   536 

Wilde,  Oscar.     Decorative  Arts  in  America 301 

Willcox,   Louise   Collier,   editor.      A  Manual    of   Mystic 

Verse   534 

Williams,  Albert  Rhys.      In  the  Claws  of  the  German 

Eagle    82 

Williams,   Charles.      Poems   of  Conformity 534 

Williams,  Jesse  Lynch.     Why  Marry  ? 390 

Willoughby,    William    F.    and   Westel    W.,    and    S.    M. 
Lindsay.     The  System  of  Financial  Administration 

of  Great   Britain 248 

Wilson,  Woodrow.     In  Our  First  Year  of  War:    Mes- 
sages and  Addresses 293 

Winter,  Nevin  O.     Florida,  the  Land  of  Enchantment..  300 

Wolseley,  Viscountess.     In  a  College  Garden 82 

Woman  of  No  Importance,  A.     Memories  Discreet  and 

Indiscreet 204 

Wood,  Eric  Fisher.     The  Note  Book  of  an  Intelligence 

Officer 302 

Wood,    Mary    Morton.      The    Spirit    of    Revolt    in   Old 

French  Literature 361 

Woodbridge,  Elisabeth.     Days  Out,  and  Other  Papers.  539 
Woolcott,    Alexander.      Mrs.     Fiske:    Her    Views    on 

Actors,   Acting,   and   the   Problems   of   Production.  499 
Woolner,  Amy.      Thomas  Woolner,  R.A.,  Sculptor  and 

Poet    191 

Workman,  Fanny  Bullock,  and  William  Hunter  Work- 
man.    Two  Summers   in  the  Ice  Wilds  of  Eastern 

Karakoram  491 

Wright,  Willard  Huntington,  editor.     The  Great  Mod- 
ern French  Stories    499 

Wyatt,  Edith.     The  VT;nd  in  the  Corn 351 

Yeats,  W.   B.     Per   Arnica  Silentia   Luns 286 

Younghusband,  Sir  George.     A  Soldier's  Memories. .72,  495 
Zabriskie,  Luther  K.     The  Virgin  Islands  of  the  United 

States  of  America 490 

Zahm,  J.  A.     The  Quest  of  El  Dorado 408 


INDEX 


CASUAL  COMMENT 


PAGE 

Academic  Control  and  a  New  College  of  Political  Science  496 

Ancient  Wisdom  Sometimes  Comes  to  Our  Aid 158 

Anthologist,  The  Incorrigible 207 

Artists,  Eight  American,  Nominated  to  Accompany  Our 

Armies   304 

Birrell,  Augustine,  on   Two  American  Doctors 496 

Blake  Collection,  An  Important : 79 

B.  L.  T.  and  THE  DIAL 119 

Books — America's  Demand  for  Them  During  the  War. . .   306 
Booksellers'  Association,  American,  The  Annual  Conven- 
tion of  the 469 

Business  as  Usual  Except  in  the  Arts 33 

Butler,   President,   to  the  Trustees  of  Columbia 118 

Criticism,  Are  the  Courts  Usurping  the  Functions  of?..   159 

Debussy — Death  Did  Not  Come  to  Him  Unexpectedly 365 

Dell,  Robert — His  Expulsion  from  France 547 

Democratizing  of  Knowledge,  The 458 

Durant,  Mr. — His   Provocative  Letter  to  THE  DIAL 364 

Education,  The  Quarrels  in  the  Field  of 364 

Espionage  Act,  The 497 

F.  P.  A.  and  "The  Bookman" 118 

Gjellerup,  Karl,  and  Henrik  Pontoppidan,  The  Idealism  of  158 
Hamilton,   General   Sir   Ian,    Has   Harsh   Words   for  the 

Censor    82 

Illinois's  Centennial  as  a   State,  the  Celebration  of 84 

James,   William    80 

Jaques,  A  Melancholy,  Writes  from  I'an  Atlantic  Port".   118 
Labor  Party,  The  British — Its  Report  on  Reconstruction.  206 
Laborites,  The — The  Alliance  Between  Them  and  the  In- 
tellectuals   in    England 207 

Letters  from  the  Young  Men  of  Our  New  Army 83 

Librarians'  Salaries  496 

Libraries,    Our   Public— What   Do   They   Cost   Us? 304 

Library    Association,    American,    The    War    Service    of 

the    119,  497 

Library,  Our  Great,  in  Washington,  Annually  Reminds  Us  159 

"Living  Age,"  The 411 

Magazines,  Monthly.  The  Debuts  of  Three  More 305 

Music,  The  ^Esthetic  Function  of 410 


PAGE 


National  Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters,   The  Gold  Medal 

of  the 20S 

Nobel  Prize,  The,  for  Literature  Goes  to  Denmark 158 

Opposition,  Legitimate,  and  Partisan  Politics 458 

Pageant,  The — Its  Possible  Role  in  Our  National  Life...  79 
Peace — Would  Any  Lover  of  It  Derive  Joy  from  the 

Fortunate  By-Products  of  War  ? 80 

Pedagogues,  The — Will  They  Leave  Us  No  Cozy  Corners 

in  the  House  of  Letters  ? 24G 

Poem — On  Printing  One  in  Place  of  a  Leading  Article..  20fi 
Poetic  Renaissance,  Our  So-Called,  and  the  Spectrist 

School  Jin 

Pontoppidan,  Henrik,  and  Karl  Gjellerup,  The  Idealism  of  158 
Press,  Our — In  What  Degree  Is  It  Responsible  for  the 

Dismal  Uniformity  in  American  Life  ? 365 

Press,  Our  Contemporary — Its  Flexibility  of  Mind 459 

Red  Cross,  The,  One  Happy  Scheme  for  Raising  Money 

for  305 

Reviewing  and  Advertising — What  Part  Do  They  Play  in 

the  Making  of  a  Book  ? 497 

Roosevelt,  The  Hon.  Theodore,  and  Caution  in  Statement  247 
Russian  Revolution,  The — The  Completion  of  Its  First 

Year  206 

Sammies,  The — A  Vivid  Description  of  Them  in  France.  208 

Shanks,  Mr.  Edward,  Writing  from  London 159 

Shaw,  George  Bernard,  on  the  Freedom  of  the  Press....  246 

Sherman,  Senator — His  Kind  of  Opposition 458 

Spectrism,  The  Genesis  and  Course  of 411 

Statesmen— Why  Do  They  Not  Abandon  the  Habit  of 

Giving  Speeches  ? 79 

Symon,  J.  L. — His  Complaint  that  Novels  Are  Too  Short  33 

Veblen,  Thorstein,  Self-Appointed  Censors  of 246 

War,  The  Blackest  News  of  the 304 

War  Is  Not  Necessarily  Conducive  to  Great  Literature. .  410 

Wartime  Economy,  A  Sane 206 

Wilson,  President — The  German  Imperialists  and  His  Red 

Cross  Speech 496 

Wilson,  President — Why  Have  American  Liberals  Been 

Slow  to  Support  His  International  Programme?....  864 

"Zone  System,"  The  So-Called,  of  the  War  Revenue  Act.  247 


COMMUNICATIONS 

American  Liberals  and  the  War Witt  Durant 366 

Books    on    Palestine t Harold   Kellock 209 

"La    Malquerida," J.  Garcia  Pimentel 121 

Literary  Middle  English  Reader,  A Henry   Barrett   Hinckley 160 

Oxford  Method  in  English  Instruction,  The Eleanor  Prescott  Hammond 500 

"Reponse,  Le  droit  de." -, Marguerite   Fischbacher 550 

Unpublished  Poem  by  Poe,  An John  C.   French 121 

Why  Critics  Should  Be  Educated Samuel    Roth 249 


DEPARTMENTS 

LONDON   LETTERS 103,  189,  286,  396,  480 

PARIS   LETTERS 59,  141,  230,  344,  435,  530 

BRIEFS  ON   NEW  BOOKS 80,  71,  114,  155,  200,  243,  300,  360,  407,  452,  490,  542 

NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 77,  117,  206,  544 

CASUAL  COMMENT 32,  79,  118,  158,  206,  246,  304,  364,  410,  458,  496,  647 

BRIEFER    MENTION 81,  120,  248,  412,  460,  498 

COMMUNICATIONS  121,  160,  209,  249,  366,  500,  650 

NOTES  AND  NEWS .' 36,  83,  122,  161,  210,  250,  306,  367,  414,  462,  501,  551 

SELECTIVE  LISTS  OF  SPRING  BOOKS,  1918 307,  368 

SUMMER  READING  LIST 549 

LISTS  OF  NEW  BOOKS 37,  85,  123,  163,  213,  252,  320,  374,  416.  464,  503,  553 


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The  United  States 
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This  is  a  collection  of  war  writings  by 
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is  far  more  than  a  war  record.  It  is  a 
wonderful  and  complete  exposition  of  the 
cause,  the  need  and  the  inevitable  re- 
sult. .  .  Tom  Kettle  was  a  scholar,  a 
gentleman  and  a  patriot.  He  has  writ- 
ten a  great  book  to  crown  the  last  efforts 
of  a  life  full  of  activities  for  justice, 
mercy  and  truth." — Chicago  News. 

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yet  appeared  in  print  so  well  calculated 
to  fire  the  patriotic  spirit  of  Americans 
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THE     DIAL  [Januarys 


The  Cambridge  History  of 
English  Literature 

Edited  by  A.  W.  WARD,  Lnr.D.,  Master  of  Peterhouse,  and 
A.  R.  WALLER,  M.A.,  Peterhouse 

In  14  Volumes,  royal  8vo,  of  about  600  pages  each.  Price,  per 
volume,  $2.75. 

Supplementary  Volumes,  to  be  issued  later,  will  consist  of  extracts  in  prose  and  verse, 
illustrative  of  the  text,  and  in  addition  will  contain  about  100  reproductions  of  title-pages,  por- 
traits, facsimiles,  or  other  illustrations. 

Vol.         I. — From  the  Beginnings  to  the  Cycles  of  Romance. 

Vol.       II.— The  End  of  the  Middle  Ages. 

Vol.      III. — Renascence  and  Reformation. 

Vol.      IV. — From  Sir  Thomas  North  to  Michael  Drayton. 

Vol.       V. — The  Elizabethan  and  the  Jacobean  Drama.     I. 

Vol.      VI. — The  Elizabethan  and  the  Jacobean  Drama.     II. 

Vol.    VII. — Cavalier  and  Puritan. 

Vol.  VIII.— The  Age  of  Dryden. 

Vol.      IX. — From  Steele  and  Addison  to  Pope  and  Swift. 

Vol.       X. — The  Rise  of  the  Novel:  Johnson  and  His  Circle. 

Vol.     XI. — The  Early  Georgian  Era. 

Vol.    XII. —The  Nineteenth  Century.     I. 

Vol.  XIII.— The  Nineteenth  Century.     II. 

Vol.  XIV.— The  Nineteenth  Century.     III. 

Send  for  Full  Descriptive  Circular 

The  Cambridge  History  of 
American  Literature 

Edited  by  WILLIAM  PETERFIELD  TRENT,  M.A.,  LL.D. 
Professor  of  English,  Columbia  University 

JOHN  ERSKINE,  PH.D. 
Professor  of  English,  Columbia  University 

STUART  PRATT  SHERMAN,  PH.D. 
Professor  of  English,  University  of  Illinois 

CARL  VAN  DOREN,  PH.D. 
Head  Master,  Brearley  School 

To  be  published  in  3  volumes.     Royal  8°.     $3.50  per  volume. 
Volume  I  contains  material  covering  the  Colonial  and  Revolutionary 
Literature. 

The  work  is  similar  in  scope  and  method,  and  uniform  in  binding 
to  The  Cambridge  History  of  English  Literature,  now  complete  in 
fourteen  volumes.  It  is  unique,  and  a  very  important  work. 

Volume  One  Now  Ready.      Send  for  Descriptive  Circular. 

NEW  YORK  ft      p      PUTNAM'S    SONS  LONDON 

2  Wast  45th  Street     *"•    r*    ru  •  I^MITI  9    9MI^9     24  Bedford  Street 

Just  West  of  5th  Ave.  PUBLISHERS  Strand 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


The  Perils  and  Beauties  of  Campaigning  in  Africa 

MARCHING  ON  TANGA  "*•  *>-s° 

By  CAPTAIN  FRANCIS  BRETT  YOUNG 
Already  in  Its  Third  Edition  in  England 

The  story  of  a  British  campaign  in  German  East  Africa,  bringing;  out  with  equal  vividness  the  wonders 
of  the  African  tropics  and  the  unique  character  of  the  extraordinary  military  undertaking. 

"It   is  hard  to  recall  any  book   about  this  war  of  "A  magical  book." — Everyman. 

a    quality    at    once    so    imaginative    and    so    reaL" —  "It  could  not  have  been  done  better." — The  Globe. 

Westminster  Gazette.  "As  engrossing  as  any  romance." — The  Scotsman. 

TO  ARMS!     (La  Veillee  des  Armes)  Net.9t.so 

Translated  from  the  French  of  Marcelle  Tinayre  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey 
Introduction  by  John  Finley.     In  France  the  Work  Has  Reached  Its  48th  Edition. 

It    gives    a   thrilling   picture   of  how   Paris,  and   behind    Paris,    France    faced    the    coming    of   war.      It    is 

said  by  those   who  have   read   it   in    French   to  be   one  of  the  most  inspiring  of  all  War  Books  that  have  dealt 

with    the    heroic    spirit    of    the    French    people.  The    suggestion  of  a  bugle  call  in  the  title  rings  throughout 
the  book. 

A  CRUSADER  OF  FRANCE  "«<•  *' -s° 

The  Letters  of  Captain  Ferdinand  Belmont.     Killed  in  Action  1915. 

Translated  from  the  French  by  G.  Frederic  Lees.     Introduction  by  Henry  Bordeaux 

A  book  of  extraordinary  beauty  and  winning  personality,  well  entitled  to  be  called  "The  French  Student 
in  Arms."  "No  purer  life  has  given  itself  for  France,  no  more  exalted  filial  piety  has  ever  expressed  itself 
more  fully,  more  constantly,  or  more  sincerely  than  the  writer  of  these  beautiful  letters." 

THE  LOST  NAVAL  PAPERS  "«<• " -so 

By  BENNET  COPPLESTONE 

London  Punch  says : — "Mr.  Copplestone  has  shown  unusual  boldness  in  connecting  the  activities  of  his 
super-policeman,  Dawson,  with  the  more  prominent  events  of  the  War.  We  earnestly  desire  that  he  should 
devote  another  volume — a  whole  one — to  the  inimitable  Madame  Guilbert ;  but  whatever  he  writes  about  will  be 
welcome,  provided  it  be  written  in  the  vein  of  the  volume  before  us." 

THE  FALL  OF  THE  ROMANOFFS  "•*•  ** -°° 

By  the  Author  of  Russian  Court  Memoirs 

The  remarkable  story  of  how  the  ex-Empress  and  Rasputin  caused  the  Russian  Revolution.  A  book  of 
secret  history  telling  for  instance  how  the  boy  Tzare  witch  asked  M.  Kerensky  if  his  father  was  legally  em- 
powered to  deny  him  the  succession.  It  gives  an  eye- witness's  account  of  the  interview  between  the  Tzar 
and  the  members  of  the  Duma,  of  the  meuting  of  the  Tzar  and  his  wife  after  the  abdication. 

FURTHER    MEMORIES  Fully  Illa.trated.     N.t,  $3.50 

By  LORD  REDESDALE.    Introduction  by  Edmund  Gosse 

New  York  Herald  says: — "The  book  presents  a  remarkable  picture  of  a  remarkable  man.  We  see  him 
now  a  man  with  wonderful  ambition  and  zeal,  possessed  with  all  the  mental  energy  and  acuity  that  he  ac- 
quired after  much  hard  labor." 

WE  OF  ITALY  Net.  $2.00 

By  MRS.  K.  R.  STEEGE 

Consisting  mainly  of  a  selection  of  letters  written  by  Italian  soldiers.  It  reveals  in  their  clear  and  most 
intimate  manner  what  is  in  the  heart  of  young  Italy,  what  her  soldiers  are  fighting  for  and  how  passionately 
loved  are  those  they  have  left  behind  them. 


UNDER  FIRE  (LE  FUE)       ""•  *' -so 

By  HENRI  BARBUSSE 

Ninth  American  Edition  in  Press 

Translated  from  the  French  by  Fitzwater  Wray. 
Over  300,000  sold  in  France. 

The  Brooklyn  Daily  Eagle  says: — "It  is  a  terrible 
and  a  beautiful  book.  It  is  terrible  because  it  is  so 
patently  true — and  to  tell  the  truth  of  this  war 
from  the  soldier's  point  of  view  is  to  recount  the 
terrible.  It  is  beautiful  also  because  it  is  true — 
true  to  humanity  and  human  nature,  unswerving, 
unbiased,  unemotional,  honest  and  sympathetic.  It 
aims  to  plead  no  cause,  to  point  no  moral.  But  it 
does  both.  And  it  is  beautiful  because  it  is  beauti- 
fully written." 


A  STUDENT  IN  ARMS  E"*h>  «•«•  *' -so 

By  DONALD  HANKEY 
First  and  Second  Series 

Current  Opinion  says: — "One  of  the  outstanding 
books  of  the  war  is  'A  Student  in  Arms.'  It  has 
its  own  peculiar  quality — a  blend  of  realism  and  ten- 
derness— and  it  penetrates  the  soldier's  nature  with 
touching  fidelity." 

Chicago  Post: — "As  a  descriptive  writer  the  author 
'puts  it  across'  in  an  unusually  effective  manner. 
More  than  most  of  the  war  books  which  have 
come  to  us  this  is  one  to  be  read  and  reread." 


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THE     DIAL  [January3 


TWO  REMARKABLE  BOOKS 


The  Messiah  of  the  Cylinder 

By  VICTOR  ROUSSEAU 

WHEN  we  published  this  book  recently  we  spoke  of  it  as 
a  startling  original  and  powerful  novel,  different  from 
anything  ever  published.     This  was  strong  talk  but  it 
was  exactly  what  we  thought  of  the  story.     Below  we  quote  from 
some  of  the  criticisms  of  the  story  which  have  reached  us  so  far. 

Herald,  Chicago:  A  daring  leap  into  the  future. 

Tribune,  Chicago:  He  certainly  gives  us  something  to  think  about. 

Post-Express,  Rochester:  A  very  startling  narrative. 

Post-Despatch^  St.  Louis:  Startling  and  weird. 

Tribune,  New  York:  Ingenious  and  impressive.   An  interest-gripping 

book. 

Oregonian,  Portland:  Recalls  the  genius  of  Poe. 

Post,  Chicago:  Shows  the  imagination  of  a  Poe. 

Plain  Dealer,  Cleveland:  Has  a  brand  new  start  and  a  startling  one. 

Post,  New  York:  Mr.  Rousseau  has  written  an  engrossing  story. 

A  Son  of  the  City 

By  HERMAN  GASTRELL  SEELY 

THIS  is  another  story  of  the  unusual  type,  the  kind  of  yarn 
which  happens  but  once  in  a  while.     There  have  been  all 
kinds  of  books  on  boy  life  in  the  country,   and  some  of 
them  are  masterpieces.     It  has  remained  for  Mr.  Seely,  how- 
ever, to  show  us  boy  life  in  the  city,  and  to  picture  it  in  such  an 
interesting  way  that  any  city-born  man  will  recognize  himself 
and  his  boyhood  chums  in  the  characters.     It  is  humorous  and 
something  else — a  rare  bit  of  boy  psychology. 

The  Voice  of  the  Critics 

Boston  Transcript:  Holds  the  reader's  interest  from  start  to  finish. 

New  York  Times:  A  series  of  happily  caught  impressions. 

Chicago  Tribune:  A  welcome  book,  bringing  back  many  delight- 

ful memories. 

Chicago  Examiner:  A  book  about  boys  for  boys,  but  one  that  grown- 

ups will  enjoy  even  more. 

Detroit  Free  Press:  Reading  this  book  is  a  pleasant  way  of  growing 

young  again. 

At  All  Bookstores 

Publishers   A.    C.    McCLURG    &   CO.  Chicago 

When  writing  to  advertisers  please  mention  THE  DIAL. 


THE,,  DIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  757 


JANUARY  3,  1918 


THE  WAR  AND  AMERICAN  LITERATURE  Robert  Herrick  .  .  . 
AFTER  ONE  EVENING  .  .  Verse  .  Leslie  Nelson  Jennings 
THE  STRUCTURE  OF  LASTING  PEACE  . 
CORRUPTED  DRAMATIC  CRITICS  .  .  . 

A  RESIDUARY  LEGATEE  OF  THE  VIC- 
TORIANS   

PATRIOTISM  WITHOUT  VISION    .     .     . 
A  MODERN  RUSSIAN  TONE-POET    .     . 

A  GRENSTONE  LAD 

SANCHO  PANZA  ON  His  ISLAND     . 
ANTON  CHEKHOV 


H.  M.  Kallen     .     . 
Kenneth  Macgowan 

Robert  Morss  Lovett 
V.  T.  Thayer    .     . 
Russell  Ramsey  .     . 
Swinburne  Hale    . 
Edward  Sapir    . 
Louis  Friedland 


1 
8 
9 

13 

16 
19 
21 

23 
25 
27 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 30 

A  World  in  Ferment. — Through  Life  and  Round  the  World. — Life  and  Letters 
of  Maggie  Benson. — Faith,  War,  and  Policy. — To  Mexico  with  Scott. — Carry  On. 
— Mutual  Aid. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 32 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 35 

LIST  OF  BOOKS  RECEIVED  .  37 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor  HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

Contributing  Editors 

CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY  HENRY  B.  FULLER  JOHN  E.  ROBINSON 

THE  DIAL  (founded  in  1880  by  Francis  F.  Browne)  is  published  fortnightly,  twenty-four  times 
a  year.  Yearly  subscription  $3.00  in  advance,  in  the  United  States,  Canada  and  Mexico.  For- 
eign subscriptions  $3.50  per  year. 

Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892,  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
March  3,  1879.  Copyright,  1917,  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Inc. 

Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
Secretary-Treasurer,  at  608  South  Dearborn  Street,  Chicago. 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3,  1918 


Macmillan  Books  of  Permanent  Value 


"A  Great  Age  but  a  greater  man." — Chicago  Evening  Post. 

Viscount  Mor ley's  Recollections 

By  John  Viscount  Morley,  O.  M. 

"John  Morlcy's  'Recollections'  is  one  of  the  most  important  works  of  our  time,  revealing  an  ex- 
traordinary individuality  of  mind  and  character.  But  it  is  more  than  that — it  is  a  permanent  con- 
tribution to  the  history  of  literature  and  politics  during  the  whole  period  of  1860  to  1914.  Every- 
body should  read  it." — WILLIAM  LYON  PHELPS.  Two  Volumes,  $7.50.  Fourth  Edition  No<w  Ready 


History  of  the 
Civil  War 

By  James  Ford  Rhodes 
"There  is  hardly  a  page  of  this  book  which 
does  not  contain  some  fruitful  suggestion. 
It  is  a  clear  distillation  of  the  present  sum 
of  knowledge  about  the  Civil  War — a  concise 
summary  almost  beyond  praise  for  its  mastery 
of  the  subject  matter;  its  sense  of  proportion 
and  its  literary  effectiveness." — New  York 
Tribune.  $2.50 

The  Foreign  Policy 
of  Woodrow  Wilson, 
1913-1917 

By  Edgar  E.  Robinson  and 
Victor  J.  West 

Of  great  importance  and  value  for  an  under- 
standing of  the  policy  followed  by  Presidest 
Wilson  in  dealing  with  the  many  complex 
problems  that  have  arisen  out  of  the  world 
war.  $1.75 


America  Among 
the  Nations 

By  H.  H.  Powers 


An  interpretation  of  our  relation  to  foreign 
nations  in  terms  of  the  great  geographical, 
biological,  and  psychic  forces  which  shape 
national  destiny.  $1.50 


By  W.  T.  Sedgwick 

Head  of  the  Department  of  Biology,  and 

H.  W.  Tyler 

Head  of  the  Department  of  Technology 

The  literature  of  science  has  always  been 
more  or  less  technical  both  in  the  subject 
matter  and  the  form  of  its  presentation,  and 
Professors  Sedgwick  and  Tyler  have  rendered 
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American  Literature 


From  time  to  time  I  am  asked  like  many 
other  writers  to  discuss  some  tendency  in 
our  national  literature.  (It  is  assumed 
that  we  have  a  national  literature,  as  of 
course  every  self-respecting  people  must 
have  a  literature.)  I  am  expected  to  tell 
what  is  happening  to  it  and  to  prophesy 
its  splendid  evolution.  Often  this  takes 
the  form  of  an  inquiry  about  American 
fiction,  as  fiction  is  the  bulkiest  and  the 
most  popular  of  the  literary  modes.  Again 
it  is  that  irrepressible  mauvais  sujet  of  the 
literary  family — the  drama,  which  is 
always  being  reformed  but  never  achiev- 
ing the  solid  reputation  desired  by  its 
friends.  All  such  preoccupations  seem  to 
me  futile:  they  resemble  the  preoccupa- 
tions of  the  adolescent  as  to  when  he  will 
become  a  man.  When  he  is  one  he  will 
know  it  without  an  extended  investigation. 
Such  self-conscious  concern  for  the  future 
of  the  American  novel,  for  the  develop- 
ment of  an  American  literature,  would 
indicate  that  as  a  people  we  are  not  yet 
sufficiently  serious  minded  to  create  an 
enduring  literature. 

The  way  in  which  the  world  war  has 
got  into  American  writing,  or  rather  the 
way  in  which  it  has  failed  to  get  into  it,  in 
any  deep  sense,  confirms  me  in  this  belief. 
The  publishers'  lists,  to  be  sure,  are  not 
wanting  in  titles  of  war  books,  nor  do  our 
reviews  and  magazines  lack  articles  on 
every  conceivable  aspect  of  the  great  strug- 
gle. But  such  books  and  articles  hardly 
pretend  to  be  more  than  journalism,  ephem- 
eral record,  momentary  reactions  to  the 
stupendous  drama.  The  war  has  not  yet 
got  under  the  skin  of  our  writers  so  that 
it  has  become  of  their  blood  and  bone.  It 
is  still  "news"  to  them,  with  the  sensation 
value  of  daily  news.  At  first,  in  those  first 
breathless,  dazed  months  it  was  to  be 
expected  that  the  habits  and  preoccupa- 
tions of  our  writers  like  those  of  our  busi- 
ness men  would  rest  in  their  fixed  grooves. 


There  was  for  a  long  time  the  inevitable 
inclination  to  regard  the  war  as  something 
remote  from  the  personal  interests  of  the 
New  World,  as  from  its  political  interests 
— something  to  be  looked  upon  from  a 
safe  distance  with  curiosity  mingled  with 
aversion.  Indeed,  in  certain  quarters  it 
was  ignored  as  far  as  possible  so  that  an 
unperturbed  spirit  might  follow  its  accus- 
tomed path.  Thus  in  the  second  year  of 
the  great  war  a  substantial  magazine  of 
the  "literary"  class  could  announce  with 
an  ostrichlike  complacency  an  editorial  pol- 
icy of  wholly  avoiding  the  war  and  keeping 
its  pages  free  from  the  emotions  and 
alarums  that  were  distracting  the  civilized 
world. 

For  two  or  three  years  after  the  fa- 
tal summer  of  1914  there  continued  to 
flow  from  American  presses  an  undimin- 
ished  stream  of  purely  American  books, 
novels  of  Alaskan  wilds,  of  cowboys  and 
ranches,  of  new  millionaires  and  old  "soci- 
ety," of  extinct  New  England  towns  and 
musty  religious  problems,  etc.,  etc.  This 
mixed  stream  of  national  literary  interest 
has  not  yet  dried  up,  scarcely  diminished  in 
volume,  although  by  now  American  authors 
must  have  exhausted  pretty  well  their 
before-the-war  crops  of  manuscript  and, 
incidentally,  must  have  discovered  the  war 
as  a  human  phenomenon,  if  not  as  imag- 
inative material  for  their  craft.  But  now 
that  at  last,  this  nation  has  been  absorbed 
into  the  conflict,  the  reflection  of  it  in  our 
letters  should  appear  presently.  No  doubt 
instead  of  western  stories  or  drummer 
tales  or  sociological  anxieties  we  shall  have 
a  shower  of  war  diaries,  trench  yarns,  and 
spy  stories,  as  well  as  more  technical  and 
philosophical  discussions  of  this  one  most 
insistent  human  interest. 

This  shift  of  subject,  of  course,  will  not 
make  literature,  in  the  real  sense,  any  more 
than  the  daily  reports  from  the  battle 
fronts  make  literature.  To  fuse  this  war 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


experience  into  literature,  to  make  out  of  it 
a  distinctively  American  contribution  to  the 
human  record  of  the  war,  there  must  pass 
something  from  the  tragic  experience  into 
the  minds  and  the  souls,  not  only  of  Amer- 
ican writers  but  also  of  American  readers 
— for  to  the  making  of  any  literature  must 
go  first  an  understanding  public.  In  the 
welter  of  American  war  books  already  put 
forth  there  has  been  slight  evidence  of 
this  spiritual  transmutation  of  the  raw 
material.  Little  enough,  it  might  be  added, 
in  French  and  English  war  books.  To  put 
the  matter  more  bluntly, — if  the  war  were 
to  end  to-day — and  the  literary  account 
of  it  were  to  be  made  up  now — there 
would  be  a  wealth  of  matter  for  the  histo- 
rian, but  little,  very  little,  to  enter  on  the 
imaginative  record  of  mankind.  And  we 
Americans  would  swiftly  revert  to  our 
cowboys  and  girl  heroines,  to  our  old 
games  and  problems. 

The  war,  however,  will  not  end  to-day 
nor  to-morrow,  and  our  participation  in 
its  dangers  and  sacrifices,  in  its  spiritual 
drama  above  all,  must  inevitably  grow 
with  amazing  rapidity.  Soon  there  will  not 
be  a  nook  in  all  our  great  country  that  can 
safely  ignore  the  war,  nor  a  man  or  woman 
who  can  successfully  put  aside  its  persist- 
ent questioning  and  searching  of  the 
human  mind.  We  cannot  think  as  we  once 
thought,  we  cannot  feel  as  we  once  felt, 
we  cannot  plan  as  we  once  planned.  We 
shall  know  that  we  have  passed  into  a  new 


world  of  self-consciousness,  and  for  good 
or  ill  the  doors  of  the  old  world  are  closed 
upon  us — forever.  The  war  will  no 
longer  pass  before  our  eyes  in  the  head- 
lines of  the  newspaper  as  some  inexplica- 
ble and  remote  phenomenon,  that  cannot 
touch  our  being.  It  will  pass  into  our 
hearts  and  souls.  And  then  the  war,  hav- 
ing got  under  our  skins,  having  become 
part  of  the  national  consciousness,  must 
inevitably  pass  into  our  literature  as  the 
larger,  the  more  absorbing  part  of  our- 
selves. 

Specifically  I  take  it  the  war  will  give  us 
American  ideas, — a  larger  knowledge  of 
the  world  in  which  we  live  and  of  the 
tangled  interests  of  the  peoples  of  the 
world.  We  shall  shed  some  of  our 
complacent  provinciality  and  ignorance. 
Again  it  will  give  us  larger  and  more  com- 
plex perceptions  of  human  relations.  And 
finally  it  will  enrich  us  with  emotions,  not 
purely  personal.  The  generation  of  Amer- 
icans that  will  emerge  from  these  years  of 
world  trial  will  have  less  in  common  with 
the  past  generations  of  Americans  and 
more  in  common  with  other  peoples.  As 
a  people  we  shall  have  grown  in  under- 
standing not  only  of  ourselves  but  of  the 
world  outside.  And  it  is  from  understand- 
ing— also  one  might  say  from  suffering 
and  trial — that  is  created  that  fine,  sensi- 
tive, complex  consciousness  of  life  neces- 
sary for  the  making  of  a  serious  literature. 
ROBERT  HERRICK. 


After  One  Evening 

Surely,  we  have  not  come  so  far  to  stand 

Dumb  in  the  presence  of  our  hearts'  desire! 
By  more  than  sight,  by  more  than  touch  of  hand 

We  must  make  known  the  old  informing  fire. 
Surely,  there  is  a  language  we  can  speak, 

Since  winds  may  preach  and  silver  tongues  of  rain 
Chasten  with  fervor  many  a  mountain  peak 

And  cleanse  the  gray  communicants  again! 

This  little  movement  of  our  lips  has  wrung, 
Some  violence  out  of  silence,  like  a  threat. 

O  now  that  all  the  earth  has  risen  to  shout 
Praises  of  grass,  and  buds  grow  quick  among 
The  willow  spinneys,  can  we  not  forget 

Symbols  and  words  that  answer  but  with  doubt? 
LESLIE  NELSON  JENNINGS. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 

VI. 

SOME  PROBLEMS  OF  READJUSTMENT:     POLITICAL   BOUNDARIES  AND  NATIONAL  RIGHTS 


"No  annexations,  no  contributions,  no 
punitive  indemnities"  has  become  a  famil- 
iar formula  for  the  settlement  of  the  war's 
issues,  dear  to  the  hearts  of  doctrinaire 
political  radicals  and  to  the  minds  of  sen- 
timentalizing pacifists.  Its  generality  and 
vagueness  are  the  best  of  its  endearing  vir- 
tues. It  is  as  unreflective,  as  unregarding 
of  the  concrete  and  specific  constituents  of 
an  organization  of  democratic  peace  as  the 
formulae  of  the  pan-Germanists  among 
the  Central  Powers  or  the  panic-Americans 
and  bitter-enders,  like  Col.  Theodore 
Roosevelt  and  Bolo  Pasha,  among  the 
democracies  of  the  Entente.  The  notion 
on  which  the  latter  advocate  their  read- 
justment is  the  notion  of  vac  victis,  and  for 
the  junkers  of  Germany  nothing  could  be 
more  apropos  to  keep  the  people  of  Ger- 
many at  war  in  their  interest.  The  notion 
which  guides  the  anti-annexationists  is  in 
effect  that  of  the  status  quo  ante,  and  that 
is  only  just  less  desirable  to  the  irrespon- 
sible German  governing  class  than  German 
victory.  The  formula  against  annexa- 
tions, contributions,  and  indemnities  really 
looks  backward.  It  denies  to  the  war  the 
salutary  consequences  in  the  reorganiza- 
tion of  mankind  which  alone  can  a  little 
mitigate  its  horror.  If  acted  upon,  it 
would  in  a  generation  bring  on  a  new  war 
with  the  same  motives  in  play  as  in  this 
one.  Considered  squarely,  it  is  a  piece  of 
what  William  James  used  to  call  vicious 
abstractionism,  generated  without  consid- 
eration of  the  specific  issues  and  living 
problems  it  is  intended  to  relieve  and  to 
settle;  situations  and  problems  which, 
moreover,  have  themselves  so  changed  in 
character  and  implication  since  the  be- 
ginning of  the  war,  that  the  bearing  of  any 
formula  upon  them,  including  the  formu- 
lae of  democracy  and  nationality  that 
dominate  these  studies,  require  a  con- 
stant and  watchful  readjustment  which 
renders  a  priori  assumptions  of  any  sort 
venturesomely  speculative. 

Assumptions,  however,  must  be  made, 
and  their  danger  is  lessened  in  the  degree 


in  which  they  utter  the  enduring  motives 
in  human  nature  and  social  action.  In 
the  light  of  these,  as  well  as  in  view  of  the 
originating  conditions  and  purposes  of  the 
present  war,  a  lasting  peace  cannot  be  a 
negotiated  peace.  A  lasting  peace  must 
needs  be  a  dictated  peace,  and  the  dicta- 
tor's victory  must  needs  be  at  least  so 
thoroughgoing  as  to  compel,  should  it  be 
found  desirable,  those  members  of  the  Cen- 
tral-European establishment  whose  policy 
is  responsible  for  the  atrocities  on  the  high 
seas,  in  Belgium,  in  France,  in  Poland, 
and  in  Armenia,  to  stand  public  trial  for 
murder.  Peace  without  this  degree  of 
victory  is  too  likely  to  be  only  an  armistice : 
students  of  ancient  history  may  recall  the 
"negotiated"  peace  of  Nikias  between 
Athens  and  Sparta  during  the  Peloppen- 
esian  war,  a  peace  that  served  only  to  pro- 
long the  intolerable  agony  of  the  noblest 
family  of  mankind  that  antiquity  knew. 
Even  a  German  peace  would  be  better,  be- 
cause more  enduring,  than  a  negotiated 
one  and  a  German  peace  would  mean  sub- 
mission to  the  German  hegemony  over  civ- 
ilization. It  would  mean  this  even  if  the 
government  of  Germany  were  well-inten- 
tioned toward  mankind.  It  would  mean 
this  because  outside  of  the  regions  of  sen- 
timentality and  dialectic  might  is  right,  be- 
cause history  is  the  record  of  claims  and 
privileges  of  the  few  over  the  many  yielded 
by  the  many  to  force,  deferred  to  through 
custom,  and  finally  revered  and  idolized 
through  old  age.  The  claims  and  priv- 
ileges of  dynasties  and  churches  are  the 
most  notorious  instances,  and  the  less  con- 
spicuous ones  are  infinite.  International 
democracy  will  have  to  be  established  by 
force  and  sustained  by  force,  before  it  be- 
comes naturalized  in  the  economy  of  civ- 
ilization by  education,  self-sustaining 
through  habit,  and  finally  sacred  through 
immemorial  old-age.  Even  national  de- 
mocracy, it  must  be  remembered,  is  a  very 
young  and  tender  plant  in  this  Christian 
civilization  of  ours,  a  plant  not  yet  quite 
secure  even  in  countries  where  it  sprang 


10 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


fully  panoplied  from  the  heads  of  the 
Fathers.  Force  alone  can  replace  anarchy 
in  international  relations  by  law,  even  as 
it  has  done  so  in  personal  relations. 
Whether  that  force  be  military,  or  of  an- 
other specification,  is  indifferent.  The  illu- 
sion that  in  personal  relations  "right  is 
might"  derives  from  the  fact  that  the 
might  which  sustains  the  right  that  is  might 
is  not  so  visible  in  those  relations  as  in 
the  relations  between  states.  Right  is 
might  only  by  the  force  of  the  collective 
pressure  of  society  toward  this  "right." 
The  rule  of  law  is  the  rule  of  the  largely 
unseen,  but  the  ready  and  watchful  power 
of  the  state  whose  visible  symbol  is  the 
policeman  on  his  beat. 

Hence,  lasting  peace  is  to  be  grounded 
upon  two  postulated  events.  First,  a  dem- 
ocratic victory  with  the  permanent  main- 
tenance of  sufficient  organized  force, 
whether  military,  or  economic,  or  both,  to 
keep  secure  the  fruits  of  this  victory.  Sec- 
ondly, such  definition  of  the  settlement  and 
such  use  of  the  insuring  force  as  to  invig- 
orate and  expand  the  creative  instrumen- 
talities that  are  inevitably  making  for  the 
internationalization  of  mankind.  These 
instrumentalities  have  gone,  in  our  survey, 
by  the  names  democracy  and  nationality. 
And  the  significant  thing  about  them  is  that 
they  are  ideals  even  more  than  they  are 
instrumentalities. 

There  exist,  however,  within  the  coun- 
cils of  the  Entente  itself  strongly  en- 
trenched interests  unwilling  to  consider  a 
settlement  in  terms  other  than  those  of  the 
traditional  diplomatic  piracy.  Between 
the  luckily  abolished  Russian  bureaucracy 
and  France  and  England,  between  Italy 
and  these  powers  and  Rumania  and  these 
powers,  agreements  exist  which  if  carried 
out  would  have  led  to  a  new  war  within  less 
than  a  generation,  agreements  altogether 
counter  to  the  announced  fundamentals  for 
which  England  and  the  United  States 
entered  the  war.  Happily,  events  have 
taken  the  issue  from  the  hands  of  intrigu- 
ing diplomacy  in  Russia,  and  President 
Wilson,  speaking  for  the  people  of  the 
United  States,  is  determined  to  keep  un- 
sullied the  record  of  our  country  in  this 
crisis  in  the  affairs  of  mankind.  But  a 
traditionally  ordained  residuum  remains, 


like  the  commercial  "war  after  the  war," 
and  the  land-grabbing  claims  of  the  vari- 
ous lesser  allies  of  the  Entente,  and  the 
claims  of  its  numerous  proteges — the  "small 
nations"  of  Europe,  Poles  and  Letts  and 
Lithuanians  and  Jugo-Slavs  and  Ukrain- 
ians and  Finns.  These  clamor  for  their 
establishment  as  sovereign  states  with  all 
that  this  implies.  Each  of  them  has  at 
its  mercy  minorities  of  other  nationalities 
whom  it  bitterly  opposes,  the  attitude  of  the 
Polish  nationalists  toward  the  Jews  leav- 
ing nothing  to  be  desired  even  by  a  Prus- 
sian in  ferocious  cruelty.  The  problem  of 
readjustment  is  at  bottom  the  problem  of 
reconciling  these  counter-claims,  of  re- 
defining the  post-bellum  economic  pro- 
gramme and  the  actual  territorial  lusts  of 
the  major  powers  in  harmony  with  the 
principles  of  democracy  and  nationality. 

It  has  already  been  indicated  how  com- 
pletely these  principles  controvert  the 
traditional  assumptions  of  exclusive  state- 
sovereignties  from  which  international 
"law"  and  diplomatic  deviation  derive; 
how  they  utter  the  more  deep-lying  condi- 
tions and  forms  of  the  organization  of 
Europe — those  that  are  so  obvious  that 
they  go  unnoticed  save  when  an  assault 
upon  them  is  made.  What  they  point  to, 
in  the  post-bellum  reorganization  of  man- 
kind, is  far  less  a  shifting  of  ante-bellum 
boundaries  than  a  redefinition  of  the  rights 
and  duties  pertaining  to  peoples  living  out- 
side as  well  as  within  those  boundaries,  in 
their  relations  to  one  another.  At  no  point 
on  the  map  of  Europe  are  ethnic  coinci- 
dent with  political  boundaries.  The  polit- 
ical nationalism  which  seeks  to  create  these 
coincidences,  thus  multiplying  the  number 
of  irresponsible  sovereignties,  is  as  vicious 
as  it  is  blind.  It  seeks  merely  to  multiply 
the  type  of  situation  in  which  this  civil  war 
began.  The  festering  areas  of  this  situation 
were,  of  course,  the  Balkans,  where  the 
conflicts  were  in  play  of  the  Balkan  peoples 
with  Turkish  dominion,  of  Serbian  eco- 
nomic necessity  with  Bulgarian  national 
confraternity,  of  Serbian  national  sympa- 
thy with  Austro-Hungarian  economic 
greed,  and  the  group  and  personal  aspira- 
tions of  all  these  peoples  with  German 
economic  greed  and  cultural  paranoia. 
War  only  universalized  and  dynamified 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


11 


these  conflicts.  Under  the  political  system 
of  independent  state-sovereignties,  it  was 
unavoidable. 

Where,  however,  the  principles  of  de- 
mocracy and  nationality  operate,  the  state 
is  not,  it  will  be  remembered,  the  para- 
mount and  all-compelling  social  organiza- 
tion. It  is  one,  among  many  others, 
coordinate  with  them,  and  serving  a  very 
definite  and  highly  specialized  function 
with  regard  to  them — the  function  of  um- 
pire, of  regulation  and  equalization,  in  the 
issues  that  arise  between  them.  In  terms 
of  its  function  the  state  is  an  administra- 
tive area,  not  a  cultural  nor  a  racial  one, 
and  the  problems  and  technique  of  admin- 
istration are  constituted  of  quite  other  con- 
siderations than  those  of  race  and  culture. 
These  others,  and  these  alone,  have  any 
claim  to  enter  into  the  definition  of  polit- 
ical boundaries,  and  they  are  reduceable 
to  just  one — the  scientifically  ascertainable 
limits  of  administrative  efficiency  in  view  of 
the  economic  and  cultural  interdependence 
of  mankind.  The  geography  of  an  area, 
the  relation  of  its  contiguous  nationalities 
to  waterways  and  harbors  and  railways 
are  much  more  significant  for  the  happi- 
ness of  these  nationalities  in  their  political 
correlations  than  any  form  of  racial  he- 
gemony. Thus,  the  unity  of  the  British 
Empire  is  functionally  of  a  very  different 
kind  from  the  unity  of  the  United  States  of 
America  or  the  Austro-Hungarian  Em- 
pire. Great  Britain's  colonies  and  prov- 
inces, peopled  by  her  own  nationalities, 
have  a  tremendously  completer  indepen- 
dence than  America's  constituent  "sov- 
ereign" states;  Austria's  Hungary  has  the 
sovereignty,  and  more,  of  Britain's  Can- 
ada; Austria's  Bohemia,  that  of  an  Amer- 
ican state;  her  Bosnia  none  at  all.  The 
constituent  nationalities  of  Russia,  prior  to 
the  revolution  without  any  sovereignty 
whatsoever,  are  now  aiming  at  complete 
political  independence  regardless  of  all 
other  considerations,  regardless,  that  is,  of 
the  very  conditions  on  which  their  national 
lives  must  be  built. 

Now  political  experience  makes,  on  the 
whole,  against  the  small  nation-state.  It 
is  always  quarreling  with  its  equals  and  an 
object  of  desire  to  its  superiors.  Its  sov- 
ereignty rests  on  sufferance,  even  with  "in- 


ternational guarantees"  (occasion  turns 
these  into  "scraps  of  paper") ,  and  its  pros- 
perity is  a  provocation.  Experience  would 
create  quite  other  satisfactions,  for  the 
claims  of  the  Entente's  proteges,  than 
political  sovereignty.  The  case  of  the 
Jugo-Slavs  is  here  the  crucial,  the  test  case. 
These  eight  or  more  varieties  of  the  Sla- 
vonic species  have  all  the  traits  of  nation- 
ality. Among  them  the  Serbo-Croats  are 
politically  the  most  significant  and  cultur- 
ally the  most  self-conscious.  They  con- 
stitute, indeed,  ethnically,  as  well  as  other- 
wise, a  single  nationality.  Their  political 
entanglements  have  precipitated  the  war. 
They  are  citizens  in  the  two  sovereign 
states  Serbia  and  Montenegro,  and  sub- 
jects in  the  Magyar  dependencies  of 
Bosnia  and  Herzegovina.  The  pro- 
gramme of  political  nationalism  would 
combine  these  areas  into  a  greater  Serbia 
under  the  present  Serbian  ruling  house. 
The  Montenegrin  king  is  naturally  reluc- 
tant to  surrender  his  dynastic  prerogative, 
and  is  said,  in  spite  of  his  acquiescence,  to 
be  flirting  with  Austrian  nuntios.  The 
Berlin-Buda-Pesth  financiers,  again,  and 
the  promoters  of  Mittel-Europa,  cannot 
imaginably  relax  their  grip  on  Bosnia 
and  Herzegovina.  In  the  conduct  of  the 
Hungarian  rulers  toward  their  Slavonic 
subjects  Prussianism  had  a  perfect  incarna- 
tion. This  conduct  is  to  be  sharply  dis- 
tinguished from  that  of  the  Austrians 
toward  their  Slavonic  fellow-citizens.  The 
former  is  far  more  a  model  of  frightful- 
ness  than  Prussia  in  Alsace  and  Lorraine; 
the  latter  manifested  the  wise  statesman- 
ship that  distinguished  England's  relations, 
since  the  Boer  war,  to  her  dependencies. 
Francis  Ferdinand,  the  murdered  arch- 
duke, planned  to  extend  the  Austrian  pol- 
icy to  the  whole  of  the  Dual  Kingdom. 
Rumor  will  not  down  that  his  murder  was 
arranged  in  Berlin  and  Buda  in  order  to 
prevent  the  federal  coordination  of  all  the 
nationalities  in  the  empire,  a  coordination 
which  would  have  made  the  way  toward 
Mittel-Europa  a  difficult  one  indeed,  and 
would  have  deprived  the  politico-national- 
ist Serbo-Croats  of  their  most  dynamic 
motive.  The  present  emperor,  it  happens, 
is  even  more  set  upon  this  coordination 
than  the  late  Archduke.  His  plans  and 


12 


THE    DIAL 


hopes,  neither,  suit  junker  Germany  nor 
nationalist  Slav.  His  plans  and  hopes, 
however,  whether  through  self-interest  or 
intelligence,  are  in  harmony  with  the  geo- 
graphical and  economic  determinants  of 
the  fate  of  all  the  nationalities  herein  in- 
volved, the  independent  states  of  Serbia 
and  Montenegro  included.  These  states 
have  undergone  wars  for  the  sake  of  rail- 
ways and  access  to  the  sea.  Those  desir- 
ables, and  many  more,  may  come  to  their 
people  by  a  political  union  with  Austria- 
Hungary.  Such  a  union  would  be  a  vio- 
lation of  the  formula  "no  annexation" ;  but 
if  it  is  a  union  on  a  democratic  basis,  un- 
der effective  guarantees,  it  becomes  as  true 
that  Austria  is  annexed  to  them,  as  they 
to  it. 

Such  guarantees,  however,  require  a 
radical  change  in  the  constitution  of  the 
Dual  Monarchy,  a  great  easement  upon  its 
sovereignty.  They  would  need  profoundly 
to  alter  the  incidence  of  taxation,  the  scope 
of  suffrage,  and  the  conditions  of  cultural 
and  religious  organization.  Even  with  the 
very  desirable  creation  of  the  wished-for 
Greater  Serbia  as  a  part  of  the  new  Aus- 
trian Commonwealth  of  politically  equal 
nationalities,  the  guarantees  could  not  be 
merely  written  into  the  law  of  the  land 
alone.  To  be  effective,  they  would  have 
to  be  trans-national,  enforcible  by  interna- 
tional intervention.  Prescription  is  futile 
without  enforcement,  as  the  notorious  ex- 
ample of  the  much-chastened  and  newly 
enlightened  Rumania  shows.  Under  the 
provisions  of  the  treaty  of  Berlin  which 
established  this  dynastic  and  landlord-rid- 
den state  (now  striving  nobly  and  with 
heroic  effort  toward  democracy,  economic 
as  well  as  political),  Jews,  on  whom  the 
Rumanian  political  medievalism  bore  even 
harder  than  on  the  Rumanian  peasant, 
were  to  be  established  in  citizenship  equally 
with  their  fellow-countrymen.  Rumanian 
legislation  rendered  these  provisions  com- 
pletely nugatory.  The  taboo  on  "interfer- 
ence in  a  state's  internal  affairs"  kept  the 
Jews  from  appeal  and  redress.  The  Jew- 
ish minority  was  and  is  completely  at  the 
mercy  of  the  non-Jewish  majority.  The 
war  has  led  the  Rumanian  government  of 
its  own  motion  to  plan  to  remove  this 
tragic  injustice,  but  had  there  existed  an 


international  court  with  power  to  enforce 
its  verdicts,  to  which  the  minority  or  the 
powerless  could  have  appealed,  the  history 
not  only  of  the  Jews  but  of  the  downtrod- 
den peasants  of  Rumania  might  have  been 
otherwise  written. 

In  a  readjustment  such  as  the  basic  needs 
of  their  peoples  show  as  wisest  for  Aus- 
tria-Hungary and  her  Slavic  subjects  and 
Slavic  rivals,  the  lesson  is  obvious.  The 
geographically  and  economically  defined 
administrative  area  which  may  be  the  state 
of  Austria-Hungary-Serbia,  would  be 
much  larger  than  the  original.  The  state 
would  be  a  democratic  cooperative  com- 
monwealth of  nationalities  with  their  so- 
cial and  cultural  differences  strengthened 
and  enhanced  by  their  economic  and  polit- 
ical unity.  To  secure  this,  however,  to 
turn  what  is  written  as  a  law  into  what  is 
practiced  as  a  life  would  require  a  superior 
authority  to  which  endangered  minorities 
could  appeal  and  from  which  they  might 
actually  get  justice. 

As  with  Austria-Hungary,  so  with  Rus- 
sia and  her  constituent  nationalities,  with 
France  and  Alsace-Lorraine,  with  the 
other  Balkan  states.  The  chief  problem 
in  a  readjustment  that  shall  be  advantage- 
ous to  the  masses  of  men  rather  than  to 
governments  and  other  vested  interests  is 
the  problem  of  creating  a  machinery  that 
shall  effectively  safeguard  the  rights  of 
minority  nationalities  to  life  and  liberty 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  Without 
such  a  machinery  exclusive  sovereignties, 
and  wars,  are  inevitable.  With  it  the 
nullification  of  international  obligations 
becomes  impossible,  the  whole  political 
programme  based  on  the  present  state-sys- 
tem irrelevant.  The  quarrels  will  fall  to 
the  ground  that  have  arisen  among  Poles 
over  dragooning  the  unwilling  Bohemians, 
who  have  in  recent  years  been  perfectly 
well  off  with  Austria,  into  union  with  their 
chauvinist  fellow  nationals  of  Russia,  who 
have  learned  nothing  from  history  and  re- 
main as  intolerant  and  piratical  as  the 
Shlakta  whose  selfishness  and  sensualism 
destroyed  the  Polish  state.  And  so  the 
quarrels  of  the  Ukrainians,  the  Rutheni- 
ans,  the  Finns,  and  others  with  the  Rus- 
sians. So,  quarrels  anywhere  between 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


13 


nationalities.  Once  democracy,  in  accord, 
of  course,  with  the  living  law  and  the  en- 
during moods  of  a  people,  is  prescribed 
for  an  economico-political  area,  and  minor- 
ities in  such  an  area  are  safeguarded  by 
the  proper  machinery  of  law,  the  creative 


and  cooperative  tendencies  in  human  na- 
ture and  the  compulsion  of  the  industrial 
machine  will,  other  things  being  equal, 
automatically  and  without  restriction  ef- 
fect the  indefinite  duration  of  peace. 

H.  M.  KALLEN. 


Corrupted  Dramatic  Critics 


One  of  these  days  when  the  financial 
depression  in  the  playhouse  at  last  exceeds 
the  mental  depression,  some  Gordon  Craig 
is  going  to  rise  up  and  propose  to  cure  the 
theatre  by  killing  the  critics. 

There  will  be  sympathizers.  The  critics 
themselves,  first  of  all.  For  little  does 
the  public  appreciate  the  joy  of  buying  a 
ticket  at  the  box  office  of  the  speculator  in 
the  Hotel  Astorbilt  or  of  seeing  a  play 
with  no  more  serious  problem  in  mind 
than  whether  Robert  Mantell  wears  a 
toupee  or  how  much  the  feminine  figure 
has  deteriorated  since  the  rigorous  tighted 
days  of  Weber  &  Fields.  But  the  critic 
is  never  likely  to  win  such  sympathetic  un- 
derstanding while  he  retains  his  position 
as  a  professional  person,  and  profits  by  the 
public's  inability  to  penetrate  learned  ho- 
kus-pokus.  Barring  an  occasional  Moliere 
and  Shaw,  the  world  has  failed  to  pene- 
trate the  pretences  of  the  professions  even 
when  they  were  most  vulnerable.  Perhaps 
if  dramatic  critics  were  to  be  officially 
classed  as  day  laborers — unskilled — under 
some  wartime  census,  instead  of  special 
practitioners  with  office  hours  from  8:15 
to  12  p.  m.  there  might  be  hope.  Perhaps 
they  might  then  get  over  a  few  of  their 
worst  habits.  They  might  stop  behaving 
like  mid-Victorian  "literary  men"  accept- 
ing each  play  as  a  figment  without  eco- 
nomic, social,  or  ethical  base.  They  might 
stop  treating  the  American  theatre  as  a 
series  of  separate  plays,  not  as  an  organ- 
ization. They  might  stop  describing  the 
effect  of  the  play  on  themselves,  instead  of 
their — and  your  and  my — effect  on  the 
play,  and  its  presumable  interaction  with 
society.  They  might  stop  weighing  that 
reaction  of  their  mental  epidermis  in  the 
fuddling  old  scales  of  absolute  judgments. 
They  might  begin  to  understand  society 
both  behind  the  curtain  and  in  front.  They 
might  begin  to  understand  the  economics 


of  American  industrialism.  They  might 
even  begin  to  understand  the  economics 
of  the  American  theatre. 

Until  they  do,  they  will  remain  petti- 
fogging "literary  men,"  frank  panderers 
to  theatre  owners  and  theatregoers,  or, 
at  best,  men  who  abuse  the  "commercial 
manager"  without  understanding  what 
makes  him  the  worst  business  man,  as  well 
as  the  worst  artist,  in  the  world. 

In  such  times  as  these,  with  the  profes- 
sional theatre  going  rapidly — though 
doubtless  temporarily,  as  heretofore — to 
the  wall,  the  callousness  of  the  critic  be- 
comes peculiarly  maddening.  Perhaps  as 
maddening  as  the  theatrical  system  on 
which  this  callousness  has  been  polished. 
It  drives  one  to  the  desperate  paradox  of 
affirming  that  the  critic  is  not  familiar 
enough  with  the  commercial  methods  of 
the  playhouse  because  he  is  altogether  too 
familiar  with  them — in  a  wholly  subjective 
way.  I  like  to  think  this  true,  not  because 
it  is  charitable,  but  because  I  know  that 
the  majority  of  our  plays  are  inferior 
trash  and  the  majority  of  our  critics  cor- 
rupt or  corrupted,  and  that  the  economic 
organization  of  the  American  theatre, 
with  its  long-run  system  in  New  York  and 
its  touring  system  on  the  road,  is  re- 
sponsible for  both  conditions.  I  like  to  think 
that  it  is  these  facts  which  have  driven  me 
out  of  the  newspapers  into  THE  DIAL. 

At  any  rate,  in  my  six  years  of  dramatic 
criticism  I  collected  plentiful  evidence  of 
this  critical  corruption;  and  all  of  it  did 
not  leave  me  with  the  impression  that  the 
"commercial  manager"  was  the  root  of 
the  trouble.  The  public  has  been  fully 
supplied,  of  course,  with  cases  unfavorable 
to  the  manager:  the  story  of  Norman 
Hapgood's  fight  with  the  Syndicate;  the 
barring  of  Walter  Prichard  Eaton  and 
Alexander  Woolcott  by  the  Shuberts  and 
of  Metcalf  and  Alan  Dale  and  Louis 


14 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


Sherwin  by  Klaw  &  Erlanger;  the  troubles 
of  Delamarter,  Hammond,  and  Collins  in 
Chicago,  and  of  Salita  Solano  in  Boston. 
But  if  you  are  close  to  the  open  secrets  of 
the  journalistic  profession  you  may  have 
heard  that  while  the  New  York  "Globe" 
and  "Times"  supported  Hapgood  and 
Woolcott  in  their  fights,  it  was  the  news- 
papers which  knuckled  down  in  the  cases 
of  Walter  Prichard  Eaton,  Alan  Dale,  and 
William  Winter,  and  that  at  least  two  crit- 
ics are  supposed  to  have  left  a  New  York 
evening  paper  because  of  the  hostility 
aroused  in  the  breasts  of  a  person  of  the 
prominence  of  David  Belasco  and  com- 
municated to  the  owner. 

If  you  are  as  close  to  the  newspapers 
as  a  critic,  you  would  know  that  there  are 
not  more  than  half  a  dozen  papers  east 
of  the  Mississippi  on  which  a  critic  has 
a  free  hand  and  is  protected  from  corrup- 
tion by  innuendo  as  well  as  intimidation. 
To  state  only  the  most  flagrant  cases,  in 
one  of  the  four  leading  cities  of  the  coun- 
try the  critic  of  the  largest  evening  paper 
is  also  its  advertising  solicitor,  while  a 
morning  paper  pays  its  critic  a  salary  in 
which  is  figured  a  percentage  on  the  re- 
ceipts from  theatrical  advertising.  In  an- 
other of  these  cities,  one  dramatic  editor 
may  be  found  of  a  Friday  inspecting  the 
list  of  Sunday  advertising  before  making 
up  his  theatrical  page,  while  persons  ask- 
ing for  advertising  rates  on  another  page 
are  referred  to  the  dramatic  editor  for 
information;  and  in  the  same  town  a  lead- 
ing progressive  paper  requires  its  critic 
to  write  an  absolutely  fixed  number  of 
lines  about  each  new  opening  paying  for 
a  corresponding  size  of  advertisement. 

If  you  are  as  close  to  the  newspapers  as, 
say,  a  press  agent,  you  may  receive  from 
the  dramatic  department  of  a  very  prom- 
inent New  York  paper  a  letter  containing 
the  following  sentence:  "If  you  will  see 

that  the  Evening receives  the  full 

Sunday  copy  on  Saturday,  we  will  be  glad 
to  help  your  show  along  when  it  opens." 
This  is  the  usual  introduction  to  the  "dol- 
lar criticism"  of  a  chain  of  the  country's 
most  popular  papers,  where  a  rigid  ad- 
herence to  "so  much  for  so  much"  replaces 
the  older  editorial  motto,  "hew  to  the  line, 
let  the  chips  fall  where  they  may." 

Some  of  us  have  been  lucky  enough  not 


to  work  for  this  sort  of  paper.  But,  for 
all  that,  our  way  has  not  been  straight 
and  narrow — and  simple.  We  have  had 
to  meet  the  competition  of  the  other  kind 
of  critic,  and  the  wiles  of  the  commercial 
manager  which  these  papers  are  encour- 
aging. In  the  end  it  is  a  moral  drive  that 
the  honest  critic  has  to  face — and  no  of- 
fensive is  harder  to  stop. 

For  instance,  it  is  the  custom  of  the  the- 
atres to  send  their  press  agents  round  to 
the  newspapers  once  a  week  with  pictures 
and  special  articles,  and  they  pick,  of  all 
days,  Tuesdays.  This  means,  in  cities  out- 
side New  York,  that  the  day  the  critic's 
review  appears,  he  knows  he  must  face  and 
talk  to  men  who  earn  their  bread  by  the 
thing  that  he  may  have  to  do  his  best  to 
kill.  Worse  still,  he  knows  that  these 
men  will  come  from  other  newspaper  of- 
fices where  their  wares  have  been  respect- 
fully received. 

When  the  manager  is  not  reminding 
the  critic  corporeally  of  the  existence  of 
himself  and  his  fortunes,  he  is  doing  it 
by  mail.  Not  a  week  passed  in  which 
some  notice  from  one  of  the  major  the- 
atres in  Philadelphia  did  not  reach  me 
with  the  penciled  message  in  the  bottom 
corner:  "30  line  ad  Saturday,"  or  "2 
col.  ad  tomorrow,"  or  "150  lines  next 
week."  Sometimes  special  notes  came 
along,  too.  Here  is  a  characteristic  one: 
"The  Blank  Theatre  will  use  75  lines  of 
advertising  space  daily  during  the  week 
commencing:  Monday  next.  In  view  of  this 
fact,  can  we  ask  that  you  will  give  extra 
attention  to  our  press  notice  and  see  that 
this  house  is  well  looked  after  both  as  re- 
gards the  Sunday  notice  and  also  Tues- 
day's review?" 

To  conclude  my  personal  experiences 
with  theatrical  corruption,  I  had  one  very 
clear  intimation,  during  my  work  in  Phila- 
delphia, of  what  would  have  happened  to 
me  and  my  job  if  I  had  worked  on  an  av- 
erage newspaper  instead  of  the  best  in 
the  city.  It  involved,  first,  a  request  from 
the  manager  of  two  of  the  leading  play- 
houses that  I  cease  to  review  his  plays  on 
Tuesdays,  while  continuing  to  give  them 
routine  advance  notices,  special  articles 
and  pictures;  and,  second,  the  cutting 
down  of  the  advertising  space  of  all  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


15 


major  theatres  to  four  or  five  lines  each, 
when  I  added  to  my  criticisms  occasional 
reflections  on  the  effect  of  economic  or- 
ganization on  art  in  the  American  theatre. 

So  much  for  the  pressure  of  managers 
and  press  agents.  Its  effectiveness,  it  must 
be  obvious,  does  not  depend  on  the  hon- 
esty of  the  business  office  downstairs.  Its 
purely  spiritual  effect  is  bound  to  be  felt. 
No  critic  can  face  it  month  in  and  season 
out,  if  he  has  any  of  that  sensitiveness 
which  is  not  undesirable  in  a  good  critic. 
He  knows  that  his  fellow  critics  are  jump- 
ing through  the  managerial  hoop,  and  he 
knows  that  no  matter  how  loud  the  busi- 
ness management  of  the  paper  may  be  in 
its  declaration  that  the  advertising  depart- 
ment has  no  connection  with  the  editorial, 
every  time  he  ignores  the  managerial 
pleas  to  which  his  fellows  accede,  his  pa- 
per stands  to  lose  revenue.  In  the  last 
analysis  he  feels  at  the  bottom  of  his  heart 
that  newspapers  prefer  tact  to  truth;  and 
when  he  contemplates  the  calibre  of  the 
art  over  which  all  this  pother  is  raised,  he 
finds  it  easy  to  understand  the  newspaper 
proprietor's  lack  of  interest  in  serious 
criticism. 

Perhaps  some  managing  editor  may 
think  the  American  theatre  and  its  plays 
worthy  the  labor  and  cost  of  solving  this 
problem  of  criticism  versus  advertising. 
But  even  if  it  can  be  solved,  the  solution 
will  leave  untouched  a  far  worse  evil.  It 
is  a  basic  evil.  It  underlies  both  the  Ameri- 
can theatre  and  the  American  newspaper. 

The  long-run  system  of  Broadway,  with 
the  touring  system  through  the  lesser  cities, 
drives  steadily  towards  the  production  of 
plays  that  are  more  and  more  broadly  and 
obviously  popular.  The  huge  profits 
possible  have  made  competition  so  keen 
that  the  costs  of  production  have  risen 
steadily  as  managers  seek  more  costly 
casts  and  scenery  to  insure  success.  The 
increased  costs  have  made  only  the  most 
prosperous  of  runs  possible.  And  the 
most  prosperous  of  runs,  first  in  New  York 
and  then  on  the  road,  must  hinge  on  a 
play  that  has  the  broadest  and  most  com- 
monplace of  appeals,  and  is  bolstered  up 
by  criticism  just  as  obvious.  Our  amuse- 
ment gamble,  calling  for  tremendously 
profitable  successes  to  offset  wasteful  in- 
vestments and  big  chances,  calls  just  as 


loudly  for  startling,  violent  phrases  of 
commendation  to  throw  in  the  face  of  a 
public  that  has  no  other  guide  to  what  it 
may  expect  in  any  particular  theatre. 

The  manager  doesn't  have  to  buy  these 
phrases — if  he  only  knew  it.  They  are 
gladly  supplied  gratis  by  the  man  who 
wants  to  see  his  name  quoted  on  the  bill- 
boards and  in  the  electric  lights.  "There's 
too  much  commercialism  in  the  critics  as 
well  as  the  managers,"  says  George  C. 
Tyler.  It  all  means  a  pandering  to  man- 
agerial cupidity  and  to  the  public's  taste 
for  sensation.  The  result  ranges  from 
banalities  like  "a  happy  hit"  and  "scores 
a  ripping  success,"  through  extravagances 
like  "It  bites.  It  stings.  It  hits!"  to  such 
a  gem  as  "Go  and  see  the  Barrie  play  if 
you  have  to  pawn  your  socks." 

Such  criticism  is  on  the  face  of  it  the  re- 
flection of  an  unhealthy  theatre,  a  theatre 
that  has  become  a  combination  of  8-day 
race,  gladiatorial  contest  and  a  great  pub- 
lic disaster.  People  who  are  interested  in 
such  a  theatre  want  to  "collect"  the  suc- 
cesses— to  be  "in  on"  all  the  "events  of 
the  season."  They  want  the  critic  to  help 
them — to  tell  them  when  to  rush  to  this  or 
that  theatre  where  a  play  is  sure  to  be  all 
the  vogue.  Naturally  the  critic  is  soon 
trying  quite  as  hard  as  the  play  to  be  a 
"success."  In  New  York,  where  plays  are 
unknown  quantities  on  their  first-nights,  he 
conducts  a  guessing  contest  in  popularity. 
On  the  road,  where  plays  bring  a  record 
bf  Broadway  success,  he  must  rise  to  the 
still  higher  function  of  recording  that  suc- 
cess as  capably  and  violently  as  possible. 

Of  course,  the  best  thing  that  can  be 
said  of  most  critics  is  that  they  are  no 
worse  than  the  plays  they  have  to  write 
about;  and  the  worst  thing  is  that  they  do 
not  see  the  system  which  brings  them  such 
plays,  and  how  this  system  has  corrupted 
their  courage  and  reduced  the  quality  of 
their  work  by  capitalizing  the  obvious,  the 
"punchy,"  in  criticism  as  much  as  in  plays. 

Such  criticism  matches  the  system  it  pre- 
tends to  guide.  Criticism  of  that  system — 
the  most  vital  service  a  critic  can  do  the 
American  theatre  to-day — is  too  much  to 
expect.  Until  that  system  shall  have  been 
radically  reformed  we  must  content  our- 
selves with  criticizing  the  critics. 

KENNETH  MACGOWAN. 


16 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


Residuary  Legatee  of  the 
Victorians 


RECOLLECTIONS.     By   John,   Viscount   Morley.     2 
vols.     (Macmillan  Co.;  $7.50.) 

John  Morley  is  the  residuary  legatee  of  the 
Victorian  age.  Born  in  1838,  he  went  to  Ox- 
ford in  the  late  fifties,  the  Oxford  of  reaction 
from  the  Movement,  the  Oxford  of  Bishop  Wil- 
berforce  and  Dean  Stanley  and  Goldwin  Smith, 
of  Mark  Pattison  and  Thomas  Hill  Green. 
He  went  up  to  London  to  become  editor  of  the 
"Fortnightly  Review,"  one  of  three  new  maga- 
zines which  constituted  the  national  forum  in 
which  the  intellectual  controversies  of  the  age 
were  fought  out — in  which  Huxley  defended 
Darwin  and  Agnosticism  against  Gladstone,  and 
Mr.  Frederick  Harrison  expounded  Compte  and 
Positivism,  and  Matthew  Arnold  preached  the 
gospel  of  culture,  and  Mr.  W.  H.  Mallock  sub- 
jected all  the  new  philosophies  to  the  criticism 
of  his  trenchant  logic,  in  the  interest  of  Roman 
Catholic  authority.  All  these  Morley  knew  as 
fellow-journalists,  and  also  the  greater  figures  of 
the  background — Carlyle,  and  John  Stuart  Mill, 
and  Herbert  Spencer;  George  Eliot  and  George 
Meredith.  He  came  into  contact  with  the  three 
foreigners  who  contributed  the  most  powerful 
romantic  strains  to  English  sentiment  and  polit- 
ical thought,  Mazzini,  Victor  Hugo,  and  George 
Sand.  He  set  forth  the  philosophic  sources  of 
the  liberalism  of  the  nineteenth  century  in  his 
studies  of  Diderot,  Rousseau,  Voltaire,  and 
Burke.  He  entered  Parliament  in  1883  under 
the  aegis  of  Joseph  Chamberlain.  He  wrote  the 
biographies  of  the  two  men  whose  political  con- 
ceptions marked  most  profoundly,  one  the  earlier, 
the  other  the  later,  Victorian  period,  Cobden  and 
Gladstone.  Altogether,  if  any  man  is  entitled 
to  recollections  of  the  Victorian  age  that  man 
is  Viscount  Morley. 

And  recollections  these  are  in  form,  not  studied 
autobiography.  Indeed,  from  the  tone  of  auto- 
biography, from  self-analysis,  or  self-portraiture, 
or  self-defence,  these  volumes  are  remarkably 
free.  We  are  not  told  of  the  tragedy,  if  such 
there  was,  of  declining  faith  in  Morley's  abandon- 
ment of  the  evangelicalism  of  his  youth  for  the 
rationalism  of  his  manhood.  We  are  not  told  of 
the  inner  struggle,  if  such  there  was,  of  his 
separation  from  Chamberlain  on  Home  Rule,  or 
from  Asquith  and  Sir  Edward  Grey  on  the  issue 
of  the  present  war.  We  are  not  told  of  love, 


or  marriage,  or  pecuniary  and  social  difficulties 
in  the  great  world  in  which  he  came  to  move. 
There  emerges,  indeed,  the  outline  of  a  splendid 
and  fascinating  career — of  progress  from  brief- 
less barrister  and  publisher's  adviser,  to  editorial 
impresario  and  member  of  Parliament  and  Cabi- 
net Minister,  the  Order  of  Merit  and  a  peerage, 
but  of  the  personal  triumph  of  the  attainment  of 
these  steps,  not  a  word.  The  most  sustained  per- 
sonal passage  is  that  in  which  he  dwells  on  his 
fondness  for  Lucretius. 

And  yet  there  is  a  personal  note  throughout 
the  book  which  marks  Lord  Morley  as,  by  tem- 
perament, the  fit  biographer  of  his  age.  The 
abiding  impression  which  the  book  leaves  is  of 
an  immense  genius  for  friendship.  Morley  was 
personally  or  intellectually  or  politically  almost 
the  next  of  kin  to  an  extraordinary  number  of 
the  great  figures  whose  names  fill  his  pages.  Per- 
haps the  cordiality  with  which  he,  the  son  of  a 
country  doctor,  was  received  and  appreciated  by 
men  of  higher  station  called  forth  an  answering 
loyalty.  At  all  events,  he  is  content  to  appear 
in  his  memoirs  always  as  the  confidant,  the 
acolyte.  One  wonders  whether  in  the  whole 
course  of  his  recollections  he  has  a  keener  pleasure 
than  when  he  records  the  words  which  he  found 
in  Gladstone's  diary,  written  during  the  second 
struggle  for  Home  Rule :  "J.  M.  is  on  the  whole 
about  the  best  stay  I  have." 

It  is  remarkable  indeed  to  what  a  number  and 
variety  of  souls  Morley  played  the  fidus  Achates, 
of  how  many  confidences  he  was  the  recipient,  of 
how  many  farewells  and  valedictories  he  was  the 
speaker.  He  tells  us  with  a  certain  stoic  tender- 
ness of  his  last  meetings  with  John  Stuart  Mill, 
and  George  Meredith.  At  the  unveiling  of  the 
monument  to  John  Bright  he  was  the  orator. 
Herbert  Spencer,  as  death  approached,  selected 
him  as  standing  out  "above  others  as  one  from 
whom  words  would  come  most  fitly."  He  paid 
the  last  tribute  to  Matthew  Arnold  in  the  House 
of  Commons.  Of  Leslie  Stephen  and  Campbell- 
Bannerman  and  Vernon  Harcourt  he  records  in 
these  volumes  his  final  estimate  with  the  beauti- 
ful and  appropriate  phrases  of  a  classical  epitaph. 
Of  Joseph  Chamberlain  he  tells  us,  "As  his  end 
drew  near  we  sent  one  another  heartfelt  words 
of  affectionate  farewell.  Meanwhile  for  thirteen 
strenuous  years  we  lived  the  life  of  brothers." 
Nor  can  we  forget  his  account  of  the  scene  in 
which  he  fulfilled  the  duty  of  a  son  in  breaking 
to  Mrs.  Gladstone  the  news  that  her  husband's 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


17 


retirement  from  his  great  office  was  necessary — 
while  Gladstone  played  backgammon. 

The  poor  lady  was  not  in  the  least  prepared  for 
the  actual  stroke.  Had  gone  through  so  many  crises 
and  they  had  all  come  out  right  in  the  end;  had 
calculated  that  the  refreshment  of  the  coming  jour- 
ney to  Biarritz  would  change  his  thoughts  and  pur- 
pose. I  told  her  that  language  had  been  used  which 
made  change  almost  impossible.  Well,  then,  would 
not  the  Cabinet  change,  when  they  knew  the  perils 
with  which  his  loss  would  surround  them?  I  was 
obliged  to  keep  to  iron  facts.  What  a  curious  scene! 
Me  breaking  to  her  that  the  pride  and  glory  of  her 
life  was  at  last  to  face  eclipse,  that  the  curtain  was 
falling  on  a  grand  drama  of  fame,  power,  acclama- 
tion ;  the  rattle  of  the  dice  on  the  backgammon  board, 
and  the  laughter  and  chucklings  of  the  two  long- 
lived  players,  sounding  a  strange  running  refrain. 

This  quality  of  human  intimacy,  of  companion- 
ship, gives  a  peculiar  charm  to  the  book,  as  of  a 
sunny  and  smiling  landscape.  And  in  a  subtle 
way  this  serves  to  characterize  for  us  the  Vic- 
torian era,  the  epoch  which  we  are  only  just 
beginning  to  see  in  softening  perspective  as  a 
checkered  afternoon  of  sunshine  and  showers 
between  the  stormy  morning  of  the  opening  cen- 
tury and  the  threatening  evening  of  its  close. 
It  was  a  time  of  immense  unsettlement,  religious, 
political,  social,  and  yet  a  time  of  serious  confi- 
dence and  of  earnest  hope.  The  pessimism  of 
Carlyle,  echoed  by  Ruskin,  was  of  the  past,  and 
the  workers  of  the  present,  differing  as  they  did, 
were  united  in  a  belief  in  progress.  Huxley 
believed  that  man,  awakened  to  a  sense  of  his 
true  place  in  Nature  and  the  lease  which  he  held 
of  her,  would  make  intelligence  a  contributing 
factor  in  his  survival.  George  Eliot  assured  Mor- 
ley  "that  she  saw  no  reason  why  the  Religion  of 
Humanity  should  not  have  a  good  chance  of 
taking  root."  Matthew  Arnold  dared  to  talk 
hopefully  of  the  pursuit  of  our  total  perfection, 
and  of  the  state  as  representing  "the  right  reason 
of  the  nation."  Cobden,  Bright,  Gladstone 
believed  in  an  international  right  reason  based 
on  the  political  economy  of  the  Manchester 
school.  These  were  the  thinkers  who  made  the 
psychological  climate  in  which  Morley  grew  up. 
This  hopefulness,  shared  by  workers  in  so  many 
different  fields,  gave  to  the  whole  intellectual 
society  a  contagious  confidence  and  a  mutual 
buoyancy.  The  sense  of  great  problems  pressing 
for  solution  raised  human  intercourse  to  a  higher 
intellectual  level  than  ever  before,  and  made 
intellectual  respect,  even  among  those  who  dif- 
fered most  widely,  a  basis  of  tolerance.  Ex- 
communication was  unknown.  A  spiritual  urban- 
ity, as  distinct  as  the  literary  etiquette  of  the 


Augustans,  gave  manners  to  dissent  and  took 
the  sting  out  of  controversy.  In  giving  this  total 
impression  of  his  time,  Lord  Morley  does  for  us 
what  the  letter  writers  have  done  for  the  earlier, 
and  the  diarists  for  the  later,  Georgian  age. 
Among  the  throng  of  poets,  novelists,  philoso- 
phers, scientists,  publicists  called  up  by  his  "Recol- 
lections," he  moves  with  gentle  dignity  and 
winning  grace.  Of  the  kindness,  the  intimacy, 
the  intellectual  Arcadianism  of  that  now  so  far- 
away Victorian  age  no  one  is  more  perfectly 
representative  than  John  Morley. 

It  is,  of  course,  as  a  representative  of  Liberal- 
ism that  Lord  Morley  is  at  the  present  moment 
a  most  significant,  and,  as  the  survivor  of  its 
bankruptcy,  a  most  pathetic  figure.  He  entered 
Parliament  in  1883,  under  the  ministry  of  Glad- 
stone, which  John  Bright  had  quitted  two  years 
before  when  it  surrendered  to  the  imperialists 
and  stamped  out  the  promising  national  move- 
ment of  young  Egypt  under  Arabi  Pasha.  Mor- 
ley's  first  significant  appearance  in  the  House 
was  in  moving  an  amendment  against  the  govern- 
ment in  regard  to  its  course  in  Egypt  and  the 
Soudan.  When  Gladstone,  as  if  to  avert  his  eyes 
from  the  spectacle  of  the  betrayal  of  nationalities, 
and  the  spectre  of  universal  carnage  which  loomed 
behind  it,  turned  with  atoning  zeal  to  free  Ire- 
land, however,  Morley  became  his  lieutenant. 
In  the  short  ministry  of  1886  he  was  Chief  Secre- 
tary for  Ireland,  and  resumed  that  office  when 
Gladstone  returned  to  power  in  1892.  He  was 
fearless  in  his  reliance  on  humanity  and  good 
faith  in  his  dealings  with  the  Irish.  Unlike  so 
many  liberals  when  confronted  with  the  responsi- 
bilities of  office,  he  scorned  to  take  refuge  in 
repression.  And  always  with  the  true  faith  of 
the  Victorian  Liberal  he  dwelt  on  the  moral 
aspect  of  Irish  Home  Rule,  linking  it  with  the 
great  triumph  of  liberal  political  thought  in 
the  Risorgimento.  "Gladstone,"  he  says  in  a 
characteristic  passage,  "was  the  only  man  among 
us  all  who  infused  commanding  moral  conception 
into  the  Irish  movement — the  only  man  who 
united  the  loftiest  ideals  of  national  life  and 
public  duty  with  the  glory  of  words,  the  moral 
genius  of  Mazzini  with  the  political  genius  of 
Cavour." 

When  the  Boer  War  came  in  response  to  the 
policy  of  Chamberlain  and  Milner,  once  more  it 
was  the  moral  issue  that  preoccupied  Morley. 
He  literally  took  his  life  in  his  hand  when  he 


18 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


went  to  Manchester  to  speak  in  support  of  the 
small  republics  and  against  the  war. 

"The  war  party  had  publicly  advertised  and 
encouraged  attempts  to  smash  the  meeting,  and 
young  men  were  earnestly  exhorted  in  patriotic 
prints  at  least  for  one  night  to  sacrifice  their 
billiards  and  tobacco  for  the  honor  of  their  native 
land.  .  .  The  Chairman  was  B right's  eldest 
son,  but  not  a  word  was  he  allowed  to  utter  by 
an  audience  of  between  eight  and  ten  thousand 
people.  Then  my  turn  came,  and  for  ten  minutes 
I  had  to  face  the  same  severe  ordeal."  But  he 
captured  the  crowd  by  the  assertion  that  he  was 
a  Lancashire  man,  and  was  then  allowed  to  pro- 
ceed to  his  splendid  peroration.  "You  may  carry 
fire  and  sword  into  the  midst  of  peace  and  indus- 
try: it  will  be  wrong.  A  war  of  the  strongest 
government  in  the  world  with  untold  wealth  and 
inexhaustible  reserves  against  this  little  republic 
will  bring  you  no  glory:  it  will  be  wrong.  You 
may  make  thousands  of  women  widows,  and 
thousands  of  children  fatherless:  it  will  be 
wrong.  It  may  add  a  new  province  to  your 
empire:  it  will  be  wrong.  You  may  give  buoy- 
ancy to  the  African  stock  and  share  market:  it 
will  still  be  wrong." 

To  one  fatal  defect  in  the  Liberal  political 
system  of  these  years  Lord  Morley  bears  witness. 
That  he  was  aware  of  the  importance  of  retain- 
ing control  of  the  Foreign  Office  by  the  House 
of  Commons  is  shown  by  his  pregnant  account 
of  the  negotiation  which  he  and  Harcourt  con- 
ducted with  Lord  Rosebery  on  the  latter's 
assumption  of  office  in  1895.  "This  was  to 
secure  the  point  that  the  leader  of  the  H.  of  C. 
was  to  see  all  telegrams  and  dispatches  of  the 
F.  O.  .  .  Harcourt  at  once  drove  up  to 
B.  Square,  surrendered  the  point,  and  generally 
fell  in  with  a  Rosebery  premiership.  No  doubt, 
if  I  had  joined  him  in  making  a  protest  against 
a  foreign  secretary  in  the  Lords,  with  a  definite 
refusal  to  join  unless  that  point  were  conceded, 
this,  as  R.  afterwards  told  me,  would  have  broken 
off  the  plan,  and  he  would  have  thrown  up  his 
task.  It  seems  curious  that  none  of  us  realised 
how  essentially  fatal  to  the  very  idea  of  a  sound 
and  workable  arrangement  was  the  difference 
between  two  schools  of  imperial  policy." 

"Curious  that  none  of  us  realized!"  For  the 
next  twenty  years,  during  more  than  half  of 
which  Lord  Morley  was  a  cabinet  minister,  he 
knew  no  more  of  what  the  Foreign  Secretary  was 
about  than  his  constituents  who  sent  him  to 
Westminster  to  represent  them.  His  recollec- 


tions of  this  period  are  chiefly  those  of  his  corres- 
pondence as  Secretary  of  State  for  India  with 
Lord  Minto,  the  Governor  General,  urging 
always  a  high-minded  and  liberal  treatment  of 
the  people  of  that  dependency.  Indeed,  so  per- 
sistent is  Lord  Morley's  recollection  of  his 
absorption  in  this  one  task  that  he  gives  the  effect 
of  an  elaborate  alibi  from  the  cabinet  of  which 
he  was  a  member.  When  in  1914  he  discovered 
his  total  ignorance  of  the  international  engage- 
ments in  accordance  with  which  England  went  to 
war,  he  resigned.  Of  this  there  is  no  mention  in 
the  "Recollections,"  and  to  present-day  politics 
but  one  reference,  that  to  the  surrender  of 
Asquith  and  Lloyd-George  to  a  coalition  ministry. 

As  it  happened  in  the  fulness  of  time  our  distin- 
guished apostles  of  Efficiency  came  into  supreme 
power,  with  a  share  in  the  finest  field  for  efficient 
diplomacy  and  an  armed  struggle,  that  could  have 
been  imagined.  Unhappily  they  broke  down,  or 
thought  they  had  (1915),  and  could  discover  no  bet- 
ter way  out  of  their  scrape  than  to  seek  deliverance 
(not  without  a  trace  of  arbitrary  proscription)  from 
the  opposing  party  that  counted  Liberalism,  old  or 
new,  for  dangerous  and  deluding  moonshine. 

These  lines  have  a  note  of  disappointment,  even 
of  bitterness,  quite  at  variance  with  the  spirit  of 
the  book.  More  characteristic  is  the  passage  in 
the  last  chapter  in  which  Lord  Morley  pro- 
nounces, in  his  noblest  manner,  his  final  panegyric 
on  the  Victorian  age. 

Whatever  we  may  say  of  Europe  between  Waterloo 
and  Sedan,  in  our  country  at  least  it  was  an  epoch  of 
hearts  uplifted  with  hope,  and  brains  active  with 
sober  and  manly  reason  for  the  common  good.  Some 
ages  are  marked  as  sentimental,  others  stand  con- 
spicuous as  rational.  The  Victorian  age  was  hap- 
pier than  most  in  the  flow  of  both  these  currents 
into  a  common  stream  of  vigorous  and  effective  tal- 
ent. New  truths  were  welcomed  in  free  minds,  and 
free  minds  make  brave  men.  Old  prejudices  were 
disarmed.  Fresh  principles  were  set  afloat,  and  sup- 
ported by  the  right  reasons.  The  standards  of  am- 
bition rose  higher  and  purer.  Men  learned  to  care 
more  for  one  another.  Sense  of  proportion  among 
the  claims  of  leading  questions  to  the  world's  atten- 
tion became  more  wisely  tempered.  The  rational 
prevented  the  sentimental  from  falling  into  pure  emo- 
tional. Bacon  was  prince  in  intellect  and  large  wis- 
dom of  the  world,  yet  it  was  Bacon  who  penned  that 
deep  appeal  from  thought  to  feeling,  "The  nobler  a 
soul  is,  the  more  objects  of  compassion  it  hath."  This 
of  the  great  Elizabethan  was  one  prevailing  note  in 
our  Victorian  age.  The  splendid  expansion  and  en- 
richment of  Toleration  and  all  the  ideas  and  modes 
that  belong  to  Toleration  was  another. 

Never  has  the  intellectual  beauty  of  the  Vic- 
torian age  been  more  truly  and  eloquently  de- 
fined; never  has  it  been  more  brilliantly  and 
sympathetically  exemplified  than  by  Viscount 
Morley's  "Recollections." 

ROBERT  MORSS  LOVETT. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


19 


Patriotism  Without  Vision 


THE  WORLD  PERIL.     By  Members  of  the  Prince- 
ton Faculty.      (Princeton   University  Press;  $1.) 

Seven  Princeton  professors  have  undertaken  to 
educate  public  opinion  to  the  fact  that  Germany 
is  a  world  peril  and  to  clarify  the  principles  for 
which  the  United  States  is  contending.  In  so 
far  as  it  is  typical  of  well  informed  opinion  their 
book  illustrates  the  urgency  of  a  formative  dis- 
cussion if  President  Wilson  shall  enunciate  at 
the  peace  conference  an  intelligent  and  clearly 
formulated  programme  representative  of  the  de- 
terminations of  the  American  people.  The  pres- 
ent trend  of  public  sentiment  is  discouraging  for 
those  who  have  hoped  this  war  might  give  birth 
to  an  international  organization  which  would  sub- 
stitute a  regulated  behavior  for  a  destructive 
competition  of  interests  as  between  absolute  sov- 
ereignties. Those  who  undertake  to  instruct  the 
people  are  content  to  re-emphasize  the  reasons 
which  made  a  break  with  Germany  inevitable, 
rather  than  to  concentrate  attention  upon  the 
ideals  which  must  become  actualized  if  this  war 
shall  not  have  been  in  vain.  German  historians, 
statesmen,  and  writers  upon  international  law  are 
quoted  voluminously  in  demonstration  of  Ger- 
many's purpose  to  rely  upon  the  law  of  necessity 
as  over  against  respectable  acquiescence  in  the 
precepts  of  international  law.  It  is  assumed  that 
international  law,  to  quote  Mr.  Edward  S.  Cor- 
win,  expresses  the  "verdict  of  the  tribunal  of  the 
civilized  world."  And,  in  this  book,  Mr.  Corwin 
seems  willing  to  substantiate  the  illusion.  He  at- 
tempts to  confute  German  adherence  to  the  law  of 
necessity  in  relations  between  nations  by  an  analo- 
gous case  selected  from  an  English  court  of  law! 
It  is  important  to  distinguish  between  a  descrip- 
tion of  fact  and  a  rule  of  behavior.  We  should 
realize  that  the  international  situation  is  one  in 
which  law  is  merely  the  precedent  established 
by  the  strong  nation,  observed  only  in  so  far 
as  national  interests  are  thereby  fostered,  and 
that  it  in  no  way  voices  the  collective  wishes  of 
nations,  and  they  will  unite  in  an  effort  to  sub- 
stitute law  for  an  unregulated  competition  of 
interests.  We  can  admit  that  the  Germans  have 
accurately  described  the  international  situation. 
It  is  necessary,  however,  if  we  would  make  clear 
the  purpose  of  the  United  States,  as  expressed  by 
President  Wilson,  to  prevent  the  Central  Empires 
from  transforming  an  existing  fact  into  an  ap- 
proved and  permanent  rule  of  procedure.  We 
hope  to  assist  in  the  creation  of  a  world  of  law 
out  of  a  present  world  of  chaos  and  anarchy. 


The  importance  of  accurately  understanding 
the  correct  international  situation  is  re-enforced 
by  reading  Mr.  Clifton  R.  Hall's  splendid  paper 
concerning  the  two  Americas.  He  contributes 
one  of  the  best  papers  of  short  compass  which  has 
been  written  upon  the  relations  of  North  and 
South  America.  It  reviews  the  historical  associa- 
tions of  the  United  States  and  the  South  and 
Central  American  republics,  examines  the  Mon- 
roe Doctrine  in  the  light  of  Pan-Americanism, 
portrays  the  development  of  our  trade  since  the 
war,  and  discusses  the  means  of  cooperation  and 
the  requisites  for  those  mutual  understandings 
which  alone  will  unify  the  two  continents.  Our 
exports  to  South  America  have  increased  three 
fold  since  19.13.  They  now  constitute  thirty- 
three  per  cent  of  the  total  imports  to  these  coun- 
tries. The  conclusion  of  the  war  will  involve  the 
American  merchant  in  a  bitter  contest  to  maintain 
what  he  has  recently  won.  In  the  past,  American 
business  firms  have  been  unable  to  compete  with 
government  supported  foreign  organizations.  The 
English  banking  system  and  the  German  cartel 
excluded  the  American  from  the  field.  Until 
1913  the  United  States  banking  laws  forbade 
American  banks  from  establishing  foreign  branch- 
es, and  the  Sherman  Anti-trust  Act  prevented 
combinations  of  exporters  for  purposes  of  foreign 
trade.  If  by  chance  American  merchants  could 
overcome  these  handicaps  they  possessed  no  means 
of  transportation.  European  lines  have  discrimi- 
nated against  Americans  "by  means  of  categorical 
agreements  known  as  'conferences'  in  which  Eng- 
lish, German  and  other  companies  have  joined, 
dividing  the  territory  among  themselves,  fixing 
rates  of  transportation,  pooling  their  earnings 
and  administering  a  system  of  rebates  to  crush 
interlopers." 

Mr.  Hall  outlines  the  measures  which  have 
been  adopted  to  overcome  these  difficulties.  The 
Federal  Reserve  Act  removes  financial  handicaps. 
The  proposed  Webb  Law  makes  possible  com- 
binations of  exporters  in  foreign  trade,  and  the 
government  through  the  Bureau  of  Foreign  and 
Domestic  Commerce  is  now  an  effective  help- 
mate. Secretary  Redfield  has  developed  an  effi- 
cient system  "of  regular  commercial  attaches  to 
collect  data  and  furnish  advice,  special  agents  to 
travel  wherever  needed  to  study  local  conditions, 
and  offices  in  our  principal  cities,  manned  by 
trained  experts,  to  disseminate  information  to 
interested  parties  —  all  this  in  addition  to  our 
increasingly  capable  consular  service."  Finally, 
the  revolution  in  the  shipping  industry  brought 


20 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


about  by  the  war,  together  with  friendly  Con- 
gressional legislation,  seems  to  guarantee  a  period 
of  security  and  development  for  the  American 
merchant  marine. 

We  are  not  to  expect,  however,  that  European 
nations  will  relinquish  their  South  American 
trade  without  a  struggle.  Says  Mr.  Hall,  "Ex- 
perts have  pointed  out  that,  since  the  war  began, 
England  has  made  greater  strides  in  industrial 
efficiency  than  in  fifteen  or  twenty-five  years 
previously  .  .  .  and  that,  when  peace  is  de- 
clared, far  from  abdicating  her  sovereignty  over 
the  world's  trade,  she  will  appear  in  the  lists  re- 
armed, rejuvenated,  and  more  formidable  than 
ever."  Germany,  likewise,  will  seek  to  regain 
the  markets  abandoned  during  the  war.  And, 
"moreover,  the  disconcerting  activity  of  Japan  in 
developing  new  ship  lines  and  in  greatly  increas- 
ing her  emigration  to  South  America  introduces 
an  added  complication  into  an  already  perplex- 
ing problem." 

Not  only  has  Japan  entered  South  America. 
Mr.  Mason  W.  Tyler  discusses  American  inter- 
ests in  the  Far  East.  He  shows  that  under  pres- 
sure of  the  European  War  England  and  the 
United  States  have  yielded  a  virtual  monopoly  to 
Japan.  Japan  has  "forced  China  to  recognize 
her  predominant  position  in  Manchuria,  secured 
an  extension  of  the  lease  of  Port  Arthur  and  the 
Manchurian  Railways  to  ninety-nine  years,  and 
full  rights  to  establish  in  that  region  any  Japa- 
nese enterprise.  In  Shantung  she  not  only  secured 
all  the  economic  rights  hitherto  held  by  Ger- 
many, but  also  greatly  extended  them,  including 
the  right  to  build,  under  Japanese  control,  the 
new  railway  opening  up  the  northern  part  of  the 
peninsula.  She  secured  the  right  to  control  and 
almost  monopolize  the  great  coal  and  iron  fields 
in  the  Yangtze  valley.  Finally  she  secured  at 
least  a  prior  right  to  the  development  of  Fu-Kien 
province  in  southern  China.  Taken  altogether, 
these  concessions  constitute  the  commencement  at 
least,  of  an  economic  monopoly  for  Japan  in 
China."  The  Open  Door  in  the  Far  East  is 
closed. 

Now,  while  Americans  clearly  recognize  that 
the  Great  War  has  ended  their  national  isola- 
tion, public  opinion  stubbornly  remains  blind  to 
the  fact  that  this  makes  inevitable  a  conflict  with 
the  vital  interests  of  other  nations.  The  world 
trade  situation  is  becoming  more  and  more  one 
in  which  governments  are  assistants  if  not  active 
partners  with  their  subjects  in  foreign  enterprise. 
This  presages  an  international  competition  more 
keen  than  existed  before  the  war.  Unless  there 


shall  be  what  Bertrand  Russell  calls  a  neutral 
authority  empowered  to  adjust  interests  and  to 
institute  readjustments  peacefully,  readjustments 
by  force  are  inevitable.  We  should  expect  that 
a  book  written  primarily  to  educate  public  opinion 
regarding  war  issues  would  squarely  face  this 
problem.  The  authors  of  The  World  Peril  have 
not  done  so.  Their  emphasis  is  upon  the  past,  not 
the  future.  Mr.  Thomas  Jefferson  Wertenbaker 
writes  a  chapter  on  Democracy  Imperilled. 
The  sum  of  his  argument  is  to  demonstrate 
that  the  development  of  modern  Germany 
has  been  the  coalescence  of  forces  antagonistic 
to  democracy.  The  implication  is,  crush  the 
Kaiser  and  the  world  automatically  becomes  safe 
for  democracy!  The  contribution  of  Honorable 
Heniy  van  Dyke  is  a  Fourth  of  July  address 
which  conforms  to  traditional  standards.  Only 
in  the  concluding  chapter  of  the  book  is  an  at- 
tempt made  to  outline  the  essentials  for  world 
peace.  In  this  chapter  Mr.  Philip  Marshall 
Brown  rejects  the  principle  of  balance  of  power. 
He  represents  an  opinion  the  direct  opposite  of 
Mr.  Tyler's  who  writes  in  behalf  of  a  world 
balance  of  power.  Mr.  Brown  clearly  perceives 
that  a  peace  which  rests  upon  balance  of  power 
is  a  peace  ultimately  dependent  upon  force.  But 
he  suggests  no  tangible  substitute.  He  insists 
that  a  first  essential  for  future  security  is  a  demo- 
cratic Germany.  Secondly,  the  claims  of  nation- 
alism must  be  recognized  and  in  some  way 
combined  with  local  autonomy.  Tariff  rivalries 
must  give  way  to  freedom  of  trade  between  all  na- 
tions. And  when  he  has  thus  formulated  a  pro- 
gramme for  world  peace  he  proceeds  to  emasculate 
it  in  the  following  words:  "If  the  law  abiding, 
peace  loving  nations,  however,  are  able  to  crush 
this  outlaw  (Germany)  and  then  lay  the  founda- 
tions of  peace  in  accordance  with  sound  prin- 
ciples, they  may  have  but  little  reason  to  concern 
themselves  about  the  formation  of  'councils,' 
'leagues,'  police,  or  even  of  courts.  The  applica- 
tion of  the  Golden  Rule  as  the  rule  of  enlight- 
ened self-interest  among  nations  will  need  hardly 
any  other  sanction  than  its  own  sanction." 

Exclusive  attention  to  the  past  is  peculiarly 
short  sighted  at  this  time.  In  each  of  the  allied 
countries  there  exists  a  democratic  element  which 
favors  a  world  organization  for  peace.  Once 
these  elements  fuse  and  unite  upon  a  construc- 
tive policy,  they  will  sustain  President  Wilson 
and  other  liberal  allied  statesmen  in  the  critical 
period  of  peace  negotiations.  An  indispensable 
preliminary  for  this  synthesis  of  views  is  a  con- 
tinuous discussion  of  the  principles  formulated  in 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


21 


recent  issues  of  THE  DIAL.  Whatever  a  denun- 
ciation of  the  enemy  may  accomplish,  it  makes  no 
approach  towards  that  "concert  of  free  peoples" 
urged  by  President  Wilson.  The  question  is  no 
longer  what  caused  us  to  enter  the  war,  but  what 
ideals  we  desire  to  make  real  through  the  con- 
duct of  the  war.  Their  attainment  is  conditioned 
upon  translating  into  definite  and  concrete  terms 
what  is  now  a  more  or  less  vague  desire  that  na- 
tions abandon  their  insistence  upon  absolute  sov- 
ereignty, that  each  nationality  recognize  itself  to 
be  a  cooperative  unit  in  a  larger  whole,  and  that 
the  conduct  of  nations  be  no  longer  determined 
as  in  the  past  by  reference  to  their  own  concep- 
tions of  vital  interests  but  in  accordance  with 
rules  of  behavior  based  upon  equality  of  oppor- 
tunity for  all  and  special  privilege  for  none. 

V.  T.  THAYER. 


A  Modern  Russian  Tone- "Poet 


SCRIABIN.    By  A.  Eaglefield  Hull.    (E.  P.  Button 
&  Co.;  $1.25.) 

From  his  biographical  sketches  of  Handel  and 
Beethoven,  Dr.  Hull  has  gone  a  long  way  for 
the  subject  of  the  third  book  in  his  series,  choosing 
Alexander  Scriabin,  the  revolutionary  Russian 
tone-poet  who,  in  less  than  twenty  years,  made 
some  of  the  most  interesting  and  important  experi- 
ments which  have  ever  been  made  in  musical  art. 
But  he  has  been  exceedingly  happy  in  his  choice, 
for  he  has  presented  a  most  cogent  and  readable 
analysis  of  Scriabin's  development  and  composi- 
tions— the  best  analysis  available  in  English. 

Scriabin's  name  is  as  yet  scarcely  recognized 
outside  the  narrow  circles  of  the  musical  elect. 
Born  in  1871,  his  father  a  young  lawer,  his 
mother  a  gifted  pianist,  Scriabin  developed  into 
a  musical  wonder-child  at  the  age  of  five.  His 
acute  ear  and  musical  memory  enabled  him  to 
reproduce  any  piece  on  the  piano  at  one  hearing. 
He  showed  many  signs  of  an  independent  mind; 
he  preferred  always  to  invent  rather  than  to  copy ; 
he  extemporized  on  the  piano  with  great  credit 
long  before  he  could  write  music.  At  the  age  of 
eight  his  creative  genius  expressed  itself  in  musical 
composition  and  the  writing  of  poetry;  he  also 
amused  himself  by  cutting  things  out  of  wood  and 
making  miniature  pianos.  He  was  frequently 
taken  to  the  opera,  where  his  ears  were  more 
occupied  by  the  orchestra  than  his  eyes  were  by 
the  stage,  which  may  indicate  why  his  later  devel- 
opment was  along  non-operatic  lines.  At  ten  he 
was  placed  in  the  Army  Cadet  Corps,  where  he 


remained  nine  years,  though  he  showed  no  love 
for  the  science  of  war. 

Scriabin's  first  music  lessons  (on  the  piano) 
were  taken  privately  from  Professor  G.  A.  Conus, 
and  later  from  Zvierieff,  who  also  had  Rach- 
maninoff for  a  pupil.  The  breaking  of  his  collar 
bone  at  this  time  forced  him  during  his  convales- 
cence to  practice  on  the  piano  with  his  left  hand 
only,  which  may  partly  account  for  the  difficulty 
of  the  left-hand  parts  of  many  of  his  compositions. 
Later  he  entered  the  Moscow  Conservatoire, 
where  he  studied  pianoforte  with  Safonoff  and 
counterpoint  with  Taneieff,  both  fine  men  and 
musicians  whose  influence  was  of  inestimable 
benefit  to  Scriabin.  Scriabin  remained  under 
Taneieff  for  several  years,  but  when  the  latter 
withdrew  from  the  conservatoire  and  his  place 
was  taken  by  Arensky,  Scriabin  left  the  class  in 
disgust  at  the  end  of  Arensky 's  first  term  because 
Arensky  "wanted  to  put  him  back  too  far."  He 
finished  at  the  conservatoire  in  1891,  and  entered 
upon  his  life  work  as  virtuoso  and  composer, 
which  was  uninterrupted  until  his  death,  except 
by  a  period  of  six  years  beginning  in  1897.  About 
this  time  also  he  contracted  an  unlucky  marriage, 
which  was  soon  dissolved.  He  spent  much  time 
in  Switzerland  and  France,  besides  touring  Amer- 
ica in  1906-7,  where  for  a  time  he  conducted  the 
New  York  Philharmonic  Orchestra.  For  two 
years  (1909-10)  he  lived  in  Brussels,  in  close 
touch  with  a  brilliant  group  of  artists,  thinkers, 
and  musicians.  Here  his  contact  with  the  arts, 
science,  philosophy,  and  religion  undoubtedly  in- 
fluenced his  naturally  mystic  mind,  for  here  his 
masterpiece  "Prometheus"  was  conceived  and 
most  of  it  written.  Here  also  he  met  his  second 
wife.  He  died  in  Moscow  on  April  14,  1915 
from  blood-poisoning,  after  an  illness  of  only  ten 
days. 

In  summarizing  Scriabin's  achievements  during 
a  busy  fourteen  years,  it  must  be  said  that  he  was 
a  modernist  who  evolved  a  new  system  of  har- 
mony, abandoned  both  major  and  minor  scales,  as 
well  as  modulation,  chromatic  inflection,  even  key 
signatures,  and,  at  the  time  of  his  death,  had  well 
under  way  his  experiments  with  the  unification  of 
music,  color,  and  mimique.  As  if  this  were  not 
enough,  he  also  wove  a  system  of  theosophy  into 
the  art  of  his  latest  period.  Still,  one  wonders 
whether  Dr.  Hull  is  not  more  prophetic  than  his- 
toric in  his  statement  that  "the  sum  total  of 
Scriabin's  work  has  brought  about  an  artistic 
revolution  unequaled  in  the  whole  history  of  the 
arts." 

It  is  too  much  to  expect  that  Scriabin  should 


22 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


be  generally  understood  so  soon  after  his  death. 
No  great  composer  has  ever  achieved  full  appre- 
ciation in  so  short  a  time — and  probably  none  ever 
will  do  so,  at  least  this  side  of  the  millennium. 
Indeed,  Scriabin's  music  has  scarcely  been  played 
in  America.  Outside  of  his  tour  of  this  country, 
the  production  of  "Prometheus"  in  New  York  in 
1915,  and  of  the  Third  Symphony  ("The  Divine 
Poem")  in  Philadelphia  about  the  same  time,  and 
some  of  his  piano  pieces  which  Josef  Hoffman  has 
played,  the  music  of  Scriabin  is  little  known  here. 
And  because  of  the  immense  difficulty  of  Scriabin's 
music,  especially  the  left-hand  parts  of  his  piano 
pieces,  it  will  always  remain  beyond  the  ability  of 
the  common  run  of  amateur  musicians.  Hence, 
sincere  students  of  music  will  welcome  the  anal- 
ysis of  Scriabin's  work  which  Dr.  Hull  has  pro- 
vided. Coincidentally,  here  is  a  virgin  field  for 
the  makers  of  music  for  player-pianos  and  sound- 
reproducing  machines. 

The  perfectly  logical  evolution  of  Scriabin's 
achievements  is  emphasized  in  this  book.  Start- 
ing with  a  style  that  was  distinctly  Chopinesque, 
Scriabin  early  developed  piquancy  and  originality, 
and,  having  once  found  himself,  went  confidently 
forward,  greatly  extending  the  scope  of  piano- 
forte technique.  Especially  is  the  natural  growth 
of  the  new  harmony  shown  in  the  interesting 
chapter  on  the  ten  sonatas,  which  Dr.  Hull 
declares  "in  every  way  worthy  of  ranking  with 
the  very  greatest  things  in  pianoforte  literature." 
Similarly,  Scriabin's  marvelous  skill  in  orchestra- 
tion is  revealed  in  the  chapter  on  the  five  sym- 
phonies. 

Scriabin  abandoned  the  major  and  minor  scales 
without  inventing  a  new  one.  But  he  invented  a 
new  style  of  composition.  The  discoverer  of 
many  new  chords  or  combinations,  he  would  take 
a  single  chord  and  out  of  its  extended  harmonies 
evolve  a  whole  composition.  His  foundation 
chord  is  accepted  as  a  concord,  whether  sweet- 
sounding  or  not,  leaving  only  "suspensions," 
"passing  notes,"  and  "appoggiaturas"  as  discords. 
Strange  his  music  may  sound  to  unaccustomed 
ears,  but  it  has  wonderful  vitality  and  charm, 
especially  on  the  evanescent  and  ethereal  tones 
of  the  piano.  Yet  his  innovations  are  not  mis- 
takes or  the  result  of  ignorance,  for  with  all  his 
adventures  into  the  musically  undiscovered,  he 
had  a  profound  knowledge  of,  and  reverence  for, 
form  and  design,  as  a  study  of  his  symphonies 
and  sonatas  shows.  On  the  framework  of  classi- 
cal form,  which  Schumann,  Liszt,  and  Berlioz 
considered  outworn,  he  weaves  wonderful  pat- 
terns of  exquisite  coloring  and  beauty.  His 


intimate  pieces  seem  quite  as  wonderful  as  Field's 
and  Chopin's,  sometimes  arabesques  of  /Eolian 
vagueness,  and  sometimes  dual  ideas  poised  in 
rondo  form. 

Perhaps  it  is  because  of  the  association  of  color 
with  music  in  "Prometheus"  that  one  looks  eagerly 
to  see  what  Dr.  Hull  says  about  this.  But  Dr. 
Hull  is  rather  non-committal,  for  Scriabin's 
efforts  in  this  direction  were  experimental  and  in 
no  sense  intended  to  be  final.  It  is  foolish  to 
expect  the  relation  between  color  and  music  to 
be  established  in  one  man's  lifetime,  when  that 
between  drama  and  music  has  not  been  finally 
determined  in  three  hundred  years.  Of  course 
the  analogy  between  color  and  sound  dates  back 
to  Aristotle,  and  many  scientists  have  worked  on 
it;  but  the  red  herring  that  is  always  drawn 
across  the  trail  is  the  attempt  to  associate  particu- 
lar colors  with  certain  keys  or  scales.  This 
involves  the  difficulty  that  sound  is  much  more 
quickly  perceptible  than  color,  and  that  what  is 
an  entrancing  arpeggio  or  trill  in  music  is  a 
blinding  maze  when  translated  into  color.  Also 
a  trumpet  note  conveys  an  idea  entirely  different 
from  that  of  the  same  note  on  a  muted  violin, 
though  the  color  organ  emblazons  both  with  equal 
intensity;  that  is  to  say,  the  color  organ  of  the 
scientists  utterly  lacks  timbre.  Scriabin  used  Rim- 
ington's  color  organ ;  but  he  adopted  a  color  scale 
of  his  own,  and  wrote  his  music  in  a  novel  har- 
monic and  scientific  system  to  give  a  color  sym- 
phony a  fairer  opportunity  to  make  itself — should 
I  say  seen  or  heard?  This  was  aided  also  by 
having  the  color  harmonies  follow  the  bass  notes 
of  the  musical  harmonies.  If  there  was  little 
recognized  connection  between  the  music  and 
color,  at  least  the  latter  served  to  divide  the 
senses  of  the  audience  much  as  opera  does.  Scria- 
bin associated  music  and  color  rather  on  psychic 
lines,  trying  to  produce  with  his  colors  the  same 
effect  on  the  mind  that  his  music  produced,  and 
he  must  be  given  credit  for  new  progress  in  this 
direction.  How  much  further  he  would  have  gone 
if  he  could  have  concluded  the  further  experi- 
ments which  were  interrupted  by  his  untimely 
death,  one  can  only  conjecture. 

Any  attempt  at  more  adequate  comment  on  sep- 
arate chapters  is  infeasible;  yet  it  must  be  said 
that  the  discussions  of  the  "mystic  chord,"  music 
and  color,  form  and  style,  and  the  source  of  Scri- 
abin's inspiration  are  a  distinct  contribution  to  the 
literature  of  modern  harmony  and  musical  ten- 
dencies. Whether  one  reads  to  damn  or  praise, 
the  value  of  Dr.  Hull's  commentary  must  be  rec- 
ognized. RUSSELL  RAMSEY. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


23 


A  Gr  ens  tone  Lad 


GRENSTONE  POEMS.     By  Witter  Bynner.     (Fred- 
erick A.  Stokes  Co.;  $1.35.) 

When  Witter  Bynner,  some  fifteen  years  ago, 
discovered  "A  Shropshire  Lad,"  the  direction  of 
his  poetic  future  was  settled.  To  him  those 
amazing  poems  of  Housman  meant  the  purest 
poetry  since  Keats.  Where  else  has  a  simple 
stanza,  or  where  have  a  bare  two  or  three  of 
them,  gone  so  freighted  with  the  burden  of  com- 
pressed beauty? 

Bynner  learned  the  "Shropshire  Lad"  not  only 
by  heart  but  by  soul.  He  is  still  informed  of  it. 
The  influence  is  deeper  than  any  matter  of  liter- 
ary chapter  and  verse.  Bynner  is,  so  far  as  an 
American  can  be,  a  Shropshire  lad.  The  Gren- 
stone  Village  of  "Grenstone  Poems"  is  an  Amer- 
ican Shropshire. 

In  one  direction  Bynner  leaves  his  master. 
There  is  not  much  optimism,  as  all  the  world 
knows,  in  Housman;  there  is  a  great  deal  in 
Bynner — 

.    .    .    a  lad 
Who   had   intended    always  to   be   glad. 

The  intention  to  be  glad  runs  through  all  Byn- 
ner's  verse,  beginning  with  that  long  and  joyous 
essay  in  everything  that  he  published  some  two 
years  out  of  college — the  "Ode  to  Harvard" 
(reprinted  as  "Young  Harvard") — and  continu- 
ing down  through  the  resplendent  democratic 
faith  of  "The  New  World"  to  the  simple  cheer- 
fulness of  "Grenstone  Poems." 

Of  all  Bynner's  poetry  "The  New  World" 
stands  foremost.  He  came  so  near  trjere  to 
writing  a  great  poem  that  one  is  brought  to  won- 
der at  the  accident  that  prevented  him.  I  cannot 
quite  discover  why  it  is  not  a  great  poem.  It  has 
certainly  the  makings  of  one.  Its  theme  is  mag- 
nificent ;  it  is  bodied  forth  from  the  two  greatest 
loves  a  poet  could  have — the  loves  of  woman  and 
democracy — here,  in  their  source  of  "Celia," 
identical;  it  is  full  of  lines  of  beauty  and  elo- 
quence. 

Perhaps,  though,  I  slipped  in  saying  "the  two 
greatest  loves  a  poet  could  have";  there  may  be 
a  greater — and  perhaps  its  not  coming  first  in 
"The  New  World"  is  the  reason  why  that  poem 
does  not  quite  attain  the  ultimate  heights  of 
poetry.  The  love  of  beauty  is,  after  all,  the 
thing  that  has  made  the  most  extraordinary 
poetry  of  the  world — new  or  old — 

Music  that  is  too  grievous  of  the  height 
For  safe  and  low  delight. 


One  does  not  love  simplicity  first  and  therefore 
produce  beauty;  one  loves  beauty  first  and  the 
simplicity  comes  as  one  of  its  attributes:  one  does 
not  make  one's  first  love  democracy  and  then  set 
out  to  turn  it  to  beauty;  but  the  beauty  itself 
must  give  birth  to  the  democracy.  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing was  a  poet  whose  first  vision  was  beauty  long 
before  she  wrote  "The  Cry  of  the  Children"; 
Josephine  Peabody  had  loved  and  followed 
beauty  and  on  that  road  found  "The  Singing 
Man." 

Perhaps  that  is  the  reason  why  "The  New 
World"  fails  of  the  quality  of  greatness — for  all 
its  being  a  very  remarkable  poem.  I  sometimes 
wonder  whether  Bynner  loves  Beauty — just  the 
old-fashioned  capitalized  Dame  that  has  been  so 
worshipped — enough.  I  believe  Housman  and 
Masefield  and  Yeats — and  even  Arthur  Ficke — 
love  her  more.  Bynner  is  a  better  poet  than 
Ficke,  to  my  thinking,  because  he  is  more  in  love 
with  life — "and  life,  some  say,  is  worthy  of  the 
Muse."  Bynner  is  a  great  deal  better  poet  than 
a  host  of  American  others,  but  I  wonder  if  he 
has  sufficient  blind  adoration  for  the  capitalized 
One.  I  wonder  if  the  Goddess  of  Simplicity  has 
not  a  little  prevailed  at  her  expense. 

Certainly  in  "Grenstone  Poems"  it  is  the  pur- 
suit of  simplicity  that  comes  first.  Charming  and 
delicate  as  they  are,  full  of  whim  and  fancy  and 
loveliness,  they  are  imbued  above  all  with  Byn- 
ner's ordered  passion  for  simplicity.  These  poems 
illustrate  his  theory  of  the  democratization  of 
poetry,  which  he  feels  has  been  too  largely  an 
undemocratic  art.  Blake  and  Whitman  and 
Housman  in  their  several  ways  were  poets  of 
a  democratic  vocabulary.  Bynner  is  anxious  not 
only  to  be  clear  in  thought,  not  only  to  convey 
his  idea  in  as  few  words  as  possible,  but  to  make 
the  words  themselves  such  as  are  found  in  every- 
day speech.  He  does  not  wish  poetry  to  be  the 
charming  luxury  of  the  withdrawn  few,  but  the 
daily  fare  of  the  average  man.  And  so  he  writes 
in  such  manner  that  the  average  man  may  read. 

The  theory  is  a  healthy  one;  all  poets  should 
have  a  little  of  it.  There  has  been  for  years  too 
much  "word-mosaic"  turned  out  in  rhyme.  The 
free  verse  writers  have  thrown  overboard  the 
rhyme ;  Bynner  has  striven,  instead,  to  purify  the 
old  music. 

And  yet  I  question  if  Bynner  has  not  in 
"Grenstone  Poems"  gone  a  little  far  in  his  theory 
— if  he  has  not  even  handicapped  himself.  I  feel 
occasionally  in  this  book  that  the  word  or  the 
line  which  would  have  expressed  more  beauti- 


24 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


fully  the  inherent  Bynner  has  been  discarded  for 
something  not  quite  so  happily  expressive  which 
commended  itself  as  more  easily  understandable. 

Is  it  necessary  to  believe  that  people  are  more 
likely  to  read  poetry  if  it  is  written  from  this 
point  of  view?  After  all,  Shakespeare  and  Mil- 
ton have  got  themselves  more  read  than  most 
poets — and  they  are  anything  but  monosyllabic. 
I  do  not  believe  that  a  poet  of  Bynner's  ability 
has  the  right  to  throAv  away  a  large  part  of  the 
English  vocabulary ;  he  needs  it ;  he  cannot  make 
poems  of  his  own  stature  without  the  use  of 
every  tool  that  his  native  language  has  given 
him.  How  express  things  that  are  not  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  ordinary  everyday  mortal 
if  one  is  to  be  limited  to  the  ordinary  everyday 
vocabulary?  And  what  is  poetry  but  the  vision 
beyond  consciousness? 

Bynner  himself  has  only  recently  come  to  the 
full  practice  of  this  theory.  "The  New  World" 
was  written  in  just  its  due  richness.  "Young 
Harvard"  was.  A  bit  of  it,  reprinted  as  a  lyric 
in  the  "Grenstone  Poems,"  stands  up  conspicu- 
ously. Of  course  there  were  hints  of  this  new 
philosophy  in  "Tiger"  and  strong  hints  in  the 
Bynner  translation  of  "Iphigenia  in  Tauris" — of 
which  the  second,  it  seems  to  me,  therefore  had 
to  renounce  any  idea  of  following  Euripides  into 
his  moments  of  more  embroidered  beauty.  Per- 
haps "The  Little  King"  suggested  what  was 
coming.  At  any  rate  "The  New  World"  did 
not.  I  question  if  Bynner  could  harmonize  with 
his  present  theory  the  following  splendid  passage 
from  that  poem,  or  successfully  rewrite  it  to  con- 
form to  that  theory: 

The  times  are  gone  when  only  few  were  fit 

To  view  with  open  vision  the  sublime, 

When  for  the  rest  an  altar-rail  sufficed 

To  obscure  the  democratic  Christ.     .     . 

Perceiving  now  his  gifts,  demanding  it, 

The  benison  of  common  benefit, 

Men,  women,  all, 

Interpreters  of  time, 

Have  found  the  lordly  Christ  apocryphal, 

While   Christ  the    comrade   comes   again — no  wraith 

Of  virtue  in  a  far-off  faith 

But  a  companion  hearty,  natural, 

Who  sorrows  with  indomitable  eyes 

For  his  mistreated  plan 

To  share  with  all  men  the  upspringing  sod, 

The  unfolding  skies — 

Not  God  who  Made  Himself  the  Man, 

But  a  man  who  proved  man's  unused  worth — 

And  made  himself  the  God. 

I  am  grateful  to  Time,  who  got  "The  New 
World"  out  of  Bynner  before  he  found  that 
"benison"  and  "indomitable"  could  no  longer  be 
in  his  vocabulary. 


How  far  the  theory  goes  let  me  illustrate  from 
one  Grenstone  poem — one  of  the  loveliest  of  the 
book,  and  of  all  Bynner's  lyrics: 

Name  me  no  names  for  my  disease 

With  uninforming  breath; 
I  tell  you  I  am  none  of  these 

But  homesick  unto  death — 

Homesick  for  hills  that  I  had  known, 
For  brooks  that  I  had  crossed, 

Before  I  met  this  flesh  and  bone 
And  followed  and  was  lost  .  .  . 

And  though  they  break  my  heart  at  last 

Yet  name  no  name  of  ills. 
Say  only,  "Here  is  where  he  passed, 

Seeking  again  those  hills." 

A  manuscript  of  the  same  poem,  dated  before 
"The  New  World,"  shows  the  last  stanza  thus: 

Save  that  they  broke  my  heart  at  last 

Name  me  no  name  of  ills, 
But  say  that  here  is  where  he  passed, 

Seeking  again  those  hills! 

I  put  it  to  any  critic  that  the  first  version  was 
more  direct,  more  poignant,  than  the  new.  The 
change  is  due  principally  to  the  fact  that  "save" 
has  gone  out  of  usual  speech.  But  isn't  that  the 
fault  of  usual  speech  rather  than  of  "save"? 
Must  we  who  believe  in  democracy  justify  the 
reproach  of  its  opponents  that  it  will  cause  a  lev- 
elling down  rather  than  a  levelling  up? 

There  is  another  defect  of  the  Bynnerian  qual- 
ity that  I  cannot  help  sensing  in  "Grenstone 
Poems."  It  seems  to  me  that  he  is  sometimes 
almost  mathematical  in  the  development  of  his 
simplicity.  He  loves  to  strike  poetic  balances 
and  make  poetic  classifications — almost  to  replace 
poetry  by  a  lengthened  epigram.  There  is  a 
poem — even  called  "The  Balance" — which  is  suc- 
cessfully typical  of  a  whole  series,  many  of  them 
not  so  successful: 

Lose  your  heart,  you  lose  the  maid: 
It's  the  humor  of  her  kind. 
So  trim  the  balance  to  a  shade; 
Keep  your  heart  and  keep  the  maid ! 

Keep  your  heart,  you  keep  the  maid, 
But  yourself  you  cannot  find     .     .     . 
Fling  the  balance  unafraid! 
Find  your  heart — and   lose  the   maid  I 

A  charming  whim  of  writing,  and  worth  repeat- 
ing, but  not  to  take  the  place  of  the  poetry  that 
Bynner  could  do,  and  has  done. 

This  hankering  for  precision,  for  classification, 
appears  also  in  the  elaborately  simple  arrange- 
ment of  the  "Grenstone  Poems."  The  book  car- 
ries a  table  of  contents  that  looks  almost  like  a 
synopsis  for  a  brief,  with  subdivision  and  resub- 
division,  the  "Points"  set  up  in  verse  couplets, 
and  a  hint  of  a  narrative  argument  running 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


25 


through  it.  Into  this  simple  elaboration  are 
sorted  out  nearly  two  hundred  poems,  some  of 
which  fit  excellently,  while  others  are  forced  into 
place  rather  at  their  own  expense. 

For  example,  the  poem  that  I  quoted  begin- 
ning "Name  me  no  name  for  my  disease"  was 
originally  called  "The  Patient  to  the  Doctors." 
In  the  book  it  is  called  "Hills  of  Home"  and 
appears  balanced  against,  on  the  opposite  page, 
"Foreign  Hills,"  another  poem  with  which  it 
has  (really)  nothing  to  do,  both  appearing  under 
Article  I,  "Grenstone,"  Subdivision  1,  "On  the 
Way  to  Grenstone" — the  effect  of  the  whole 
effort  at  anecdotal  veracity  being,  I  think,  to 
devitalize  a  very  good  poem  and  make  it  try  to 
appear  something  it  rather  is  not. 

An  example  that  I  regret  even  more  is  "The 
Fields" — a  delicate  and  lovely  little  war  poem 
— placed  in  Subdivision  2,  "Neighbors  and  the 
Countryside" : 

Though  wisdom  underfoot 

Dies  in  the  bloody  fields, 
Slowly  the  endless  root 

Gathers  again  and  yields. 

In  fields  where  hate  has  hurled 

Its  force,  where  folly  rots, 
Wisdom  shall  be  uncurled 

Small  as  forget-me-nots. 

So  that  the  fields  of  France  must  become  New 
England  meadows,  and  oblige! 

There  is  another  exquisite  war  poem  which 
should  be  quoted.  A  trifle  shortened  from  its 
original  form  in  "The  Nation,"  "War"  shows 
Bynner  at  his  most  deft  and  pointed  best,  where 
his  sense  of  precision  and  poignancy  combine  to 
produce  a  perfect  thing: 

Fools,  fools,  fools, 
Your  blood  is  hot  today. 

It  cools 
When  you   are  clay. 

It  joins  the  very  clod 
Wherein  at  last  you  see 

The  living  God, 

The   loving  God, 
Which  was  your  enemy. 

And  here  is  a  poem  which  gives  the  flavor  of 
the  whole  Grenstone  series — the  thesis  of  "The 
New  World"  translated  into  simpler  terms — the 
love  of  Nature  and  pleasant  things  and  the  dem- 
ocratic God.  It  is  called  "God's  Acre." 

Because  we  felt  there  could  not  be 

A  mowing  in  reality 

So  white  and  feathery-blown  and  gay 

With  blossoms  of  wild  caraway, 

I  said  to  Celia,  "Let  us  trace 

The  secret  of  this  pleasant  place!" 

We  knew  some  deeper  beauty  lay 

Below  the  bloom  of  caraway, 


And  when  we  bent  the  white  aside 
We  came  to  paupers  who  had  died: 
Rough  wooden  shingles  row  on  row, 
And  God's  name  written  there — John  Doe. 

Witter  Bynner  is  the  possessor  of  an  unusual 
and  lovely  gift.  My  only  wish  is  that  he  would 
content  himself  with  being  a  very  good  and 
growing  poet,  instead  of  tending  to  preoccupy 
himself  with  a  theory.  His  gift  is  sufficient,  if 
he  will  permit  it,  to  stand  above  theories.  Can  we 
not  have  the  real  Bynner  as  he  started  out,  and 
first  continued — imaginative,  versatile,  and  una- 
fraid, while  being  deft,  to  be  purely  spontane- 
ous. So  but  the  harvest  be  always  richer  from 
year  to  year,  what  care  we  what  machinery  does 
the  threshing?  SWINBURNE  HALE. 


Sancho  Panxa  on  His  Island 


UTOPIA  OF  USURERS  AND  OTHER  ESSAYS.    By  Gil- 
bert K.  Chesterton.    (Boni  and  Liveright;  $1.25.) 

Whether  it  is  merely  because  Chesterton  has 
given  us  a  characteristic  and,  in  its  own  way, 
peculiarly  illuminating  study  of  Shaw  or  because 
a  subtle  spiritual  comradeship,  underlying  all 
their  obvious  differences,  holds  them  bound  in 
memory,  I  find  it  difficult  to  keep  Shaw  out  of 
my  mind  when  reading  his  fellow-craftsman  in 
the  art  of  paradox.  When  Chesterton  makes  a 
neat  point  or  flares  out  with  some  unexpected 
antithesis,  I  find  myself  wondering  how  Shaw 
would  have  put  the  same  idea.  Both  use  their 
paradoxical  panoply  for  the  purpose  of  charging 
on  us  with  what  they  really  think  or,  at  least, 
with  how  they  even  more  really  feel.  They  are 
always  deadly  in  earnest.  This  is  the  reason 
why  they  can  afford  to  laugh  so  boisterously,  for 
only  such  as  know  what  they  are  about  and  have 
found  a  foothold  in  the  shifting  sands  of  idea 
can  find  time  and  energy  and,  above  all,  courage 
to  laugh.  The  well-balanced  individual  is  too 
busy  pairing  off  alternatives,  too  busy  finding  a 
sensible  middle  ground,  to  be  capable  of  more 
than  a  preoccupied  smile.  Laughter  presupposes 
comfort;  the  proverbial  seat  on  the  fence,  ad- 
vantageous as  it  may  be  in  other  respects,  is  too 
spiked  for  comfort. 

Yet,  like  all  similar  things,  Shaw  and  Chester- 
ton are  vastly  different.  Shaw's  main  concern  is 
with  ideals  and  with  romance ;  he  has  a  great  joke 
on  humanity  because  he  alone  sees  that  ideals  and 
romance  are  but  decorations  that  humanity  has 
built  about  the  commonplace,  though  I  fancy, 
to  judge  from  sundry  wistful  passages  in  the 


26 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


Shavian  writings,  that  he  sometimes  wishes  his 
sight  were  duller.  Chesterton's  concern  is  also 
with  ideals  and  with  romance;  but  his  laughter 
springs  rather  from  a  zestful  sense  of  their  abid- 
ing presence  in  the  commonplace,  from  a  feeling 
of  security  in  the  essential  goodnesses  and  right- 
nesses  of  life  that  leaves  him  free  for  quips  and 
fine  scorns  and  puns — beastly  ones  sometimes. 
Shaw  laughs  heartily  on  an  empty  stomach,  Ches- 
terton easily  on  a  full  one.  Shaw  sees  with 
amazing  clarity  the  just  beyond,  while  the  present 
lies  shadowed  in  a  penumbra ;  Chesterton  sees  the 
just  beyond  only  a  trifle  less  clearly,  but  he  sees 
it  as  a  distorted  shadow  cast  by  the  present  and 
the  past,  especially  the  mystic  past.  Shaw  wan- 
ders about  in  search  of  his  perfect  No  Man's 
Land,  struggling  all  the  while  against  the  foul 
machinations  of  sorcerers  who  invest  spades  with 
glamour;  no  wonder  that  he  tilts  a  lance  at  an 
occasional  windmill.  Chesterton  accepts  the 
machinations  of  the  sorcerers  for  the  wonderful 
actualities  they  are.  Were  Shaw  desophisticated 
and  dehumorized,  he  would  be  Don  Quixote; 
were  Chesterton  desophisticated  but  not  dehu- 
morized, he  would  be  Sancho  Panza. 

.  But  as  sophistication  and  Shavian  humor  are 
what  the  biologists  call  acquired  characters,  we 
are  left  scientifically  free  to  equate  Shaw  with  the 
illustrious  Don,  Chesterton  with  his  no  less  illus- 
trious squire.  And  once  we  have  accustomed 
ourselves  to  interpreting  them  in  the  light  of  an 
exegesis  borrowed  from  Cervantes,  much  becomes 
doubly  clear.  Nature  is  never  more  purposeful 
than  when  she  seems  inattentive  and  accidental. 
Need  we  now  wonder  that  Shaw  is  thin  and 
humane,  that  Chesterton  is  fat  and  human  ?  Are 
not  Shaw's  women  as  unclaspable  as  the  famed 
Dulcinea  del  Toboso,  and  might  not  Chestorton 
find  beauty  and  love  in  any  country  wench?  But 
note  chiefly  this:  Shaw  scorns  the  governance  of 
a  mere  island,  his  fancy  must  hold  sway  over 
vaster  realms,  the  realms  of  a  humanity  untainted 
by  localism.  As  for  Chesterton,  he  is  eminently 
qualified  to  govern  an  island.  Let  Shaw  found 
the  world  state,  he  will  be  content  to  rule  merry 
England  (Chesterton's  England  will  be  merry, 
as  she  has  been)  and  pontificate  for  all  of  Chris- 
tianity that  is  worth  saving. 

In  "Utopia  of  Usurers,"  a  series  of  reprints  of 
essays  first  published  in  periodical  form,  Chester- 
ton has  much  to  say  about  his  island.  He  is  in  a 
bad  humor.  Things  have  not  gone  well  with  the 
island.  Not  only  is  a  dastardly  foe  threatening  it 
from  without,  but  there  is  cause  for  endless  dis- 
gruntlements  within.  The  "all's  well  with  the 


world"  frame  of.  mind  of  "Orthodoxy"  has 
given  way  to  scowls  and  apprehensive  shakings 
of  the  head.  Even  the  cheery  mysticism  of  that 
book  and  of  so  many  of  its  successors  ("The  Inno- 
cence of  Father  Brown"  and  "Magic"  are  types) 
is  somewhat  less  in  evidence  than  it  should  be  in 
writing  coming  from  Chesterton's  pen,  though 
faint-hearted,  vestigial  formulae  are  not  absent 
("Robespierre  talked  even  more  about  God  than 
about  the  Republic  because  he  cared  even  more 
about  God  than  about  the  Republic").  The 
proverb-like  epigrams  that  we  naturally  look  for 
(it  will  be  remembered  that  Sancho  Panza  reveled 
in  proverbs)  are  with  us  again,  but  too  many  of 
them  are  burnished  with  the  anger  of  the 
moment  to  be  readily  quotable  out  of  their  con- 
text. Still,  there  are  some  exceedingly  good  ones. 
For  instance:  "the  materialistic  Sociologists,  .  .  . 
whose  way  of  looking  at  the  world  is  to  put  on  the 
latest  and  most  powerful  scientific  spectacles,  and 
then  shut  their  eyes" ;  or  "when  we  talk  of  Army 
contractors  as  among  the  base  but  active  actualities 
of  war,  we  commonly  mean  that  while  the  con- 
tractor benefits  by  the  war,  the  war,  on  the  whole, 
rather  suffers  by  the  contractor."  Nor  is  that 
charming  whimsicality,  so  often  edged  with  as 
much  naivete  as  paradox,  for  which  Chesterton 
is  most  to  be  loved,  entirely  absent.  Take  this 
opening  of  an  argument,  for  instance,  which  has 
the  matter  of  a  Swift  and  the  temper  of  an  angel : 
"An  employer,  let  us  say,  pays  a  seamstress  two- 
pence a  day,  and  she  does  not  seem  to  thrive  on 
it.  So  little,  perhaps,  does  she  thrive  on  it  that 
the  employer  has  even  some  difficulty  in  thriving 
upon  her."  But  all  through  the  volume  of 
essays  runs  a  genuine  anger,  an  anger  that  is  by 
no  means  always  careful  to  clothe  itself  in  neat 
turns  and  whimsicalities  but,  on  the  contrary, 
may  even  break  out  into  crude  petulance  ("And 
if  anyone  reminds  me  that  there  is  a  Socialist 
Party  in  Germany,  I  reply  that  there  isn't"). 

What  is  it  that  angers  Chesterton  and  fills  him 
with  grim  forebodings  for  the  future  of  his  island  ? 
Many  things  and,  especially,  many  persons.  But 
chiefly  the  capitalists,  the  upper  middle  class,  the 
usurers,  or  however  they  be  termed,  and  the  fear 
of  the  servile  state,  the  state  in  which  art  and 
literature  and  science  and  efficiency  and  morality 
and  everything  else  that  has  value  in  the  eyes  of 
mortal  man  become  the  humble  servants  of  the 
money-changers,  in  short,  the  "utopia  of  usurers." 
In  this  state  the  Venus  of  Milo  advertises  soap, 
and  college  professors  have  to  put  up  with  such 
mental  pabulum  as  can  be  digested  and  manages 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


27 


to  get  published  by  the  captains  of  industry.  Hear 
Chesterton's  own  summary  of  the  nine  essays  de- 
voted to  the  dismal  Utopia:  "Its  art  may  be  good 
or  bad,  but  it  will  be  an  advertisement  for  usur- 
ers ;  its  literature  may  be  good  or  bad,  but  it  will 
appeal  to  the  patronage  of  usurers;  its  scientific 
selection  will  select  according  to  the  needs  of 
usurers;  its  religion  will  be  just  charitable  enough 
to  pardon  usurers;  its  penal  system  will  be  just 
cruel  enough  to  crush  all  the  critics  of  usurers  ; 
the  truth  of  it  will  be  Slavery:  and  the  title  of  it 
may  quite  possibly  be  Socialism."  There  is  ex- 
hilaration in  the  defiance  of  this  from  "The 
Escape" : 

The  water's  waiting  in  the  trough, 

The  tame  oats  sown   are   portioned   free, 

There  is  Enough,   and  just  Enough, 

And   all   is   ready  now   but  we. 

But  you  have  not  caught  us  yet,  my  lords, 

You   have   us    still   to  get. 

A   sorry   army  you'd   have   got, 

Its  flags  are  rags  that  float  and  rot, 

Its  drums  are  empty  pan   and   pot, 

Its  baggage   is — an   empty  cot; 

But  you  have  not  caught  us  yet. 

And  this,  at  the  end  of  the  poem,  will  serve  to 
mark  the  Chestertonian  contempt: 

It  is  too  late,  too  late,  my  lords, 

We  give  you   back  your  grace: 

You  cannot  with  all  cajoling 

Make   the  wet  ditch,   or  winds  that  sting, 

Lost  pride,  or  the  pawned  wedding  ring, 

Or  drink  or  Death  a  blacker  thing 

Than  a  smile  upon  your  face. 

Other  causes  for  Chesterton's  scorn  there  are 
in  the  book, — the  mean-spirited  attempt  of  those 
infernal  bores,  the  well-meaning  people,  to 
deprive  the  workingman  of  his  ale;  the  dunder- 
headedness  of  parliaments  and  administrators;  the 
incredible  mendacity  of  the  press;  the  absurdity 
of  Sir  Edward  Carson  in  the  role  of  loyal  patriot  ; 
the  shameless  ignorance  of  public  affairs  exhibited 
by  the  well  informed ;  the  impertinence  of  Puritan 
meddlers, — but  the  capitalist  and  his  Utopia,  the 
servile  state,  are  at  the  back  of  these  ills,  present 
and  to  come.  Don  Quixote  (in  his  Shavian 
avatar)  is  right.  The  nefarious  enchanter,  capi- 
talism, is  triumphant;  he  has  cast  his  evil  spell 
on  all  the  springs  of  genuine,  straightforward 
being ;  he  is  nigh  unto  choking  the  soul  of  human- 
ity. It  is  high  time  that  the  Quixotes  of  the  world 
bestirred  themselves.  It  is  well  that  the  doughty 
Sancho  Panza  is  caparisoned  for  the  fray.  He 
will  give  a  good  reckoning  of  his  stewardship  of 

the  island.  r  r, 

EDWARD  SAPIR. 


Anton  Chekhov 


THE  TALES  OF  CHEKHOV  (to  be  complete  in  eight 
volumes).  Four  volumes:  The  Darling,  and 
Other  Stories ;  The  Duel,  and  Other  Stories ;  The 
Lady  with  the  Dog,  and  Other  Stories;  The 
Party,  and  Other  Stories.  (New  York:  Macmillan 
Co.;  $1.50  each.) 

THE  HOUSE  WITH  THE  MEZZANINE,  AND  OTHER 
STORIES.  (New  York:  Scribner's;  $1.35.) 

We  are  about  to  come  into  possession  of  Chek- 
hov. It  will  be  a  priceless  possession,  for  Chek- 
hov is  indispensable  to  our  understanding  of  the 
psychology  of  the  great  people  that  has  intro- 
duced into  the  present  world  situation  an  ele- 
ment so  complex,  so  disturbing,  so  tragic  and 
beautiful.  Chekhov  is  the  faithful  reporter, 
unerring,  intuitive,  direct.  He  never  bears  false 
witness.  The  essence  of  his  art  lies  in  a  fine 
restraint,  an  avoidance  of  the  sensational  and  the 
spectacular.  His  reticence  reveals  the  elusive 
and  lights  up  the  enigmatic.  And  what  a  keen, 
voracious  observer  he  was!  Endless  is  the  pro- 
cession of  types  that  passes  through  his  pages — 
the  whole  world  of  Russians  of  his  day:  country 
gentlemen,  chinovniks,  waitresses,  ladies  of  fash- 
ion, shopgirls,  town  physicians,  Zemstvo  doctors, 
innkeepers,  peasants,  herdsmen,  soldiers,  trades- 
men, every  type  of  the  intelligentsia,  children, 
men  and  women  of  every  class  and  occupation. 
Chekhov  describes  them  all  with  a  pen  that 
knows  no  bias.  He  eschews  specialization  in 
types.  In  a  letter  written  to  his  friend  Pleschey"- 
ev,  Chekhov  draws  in  one  stroke  a  swift,  subtle 
parallel  between  the  two  authors,  Shcheglov  and 
Korolenko,  and  then  he  goes  on  to  say,  "But, 
Allah,  Kerim!  Why  do  they  both  specialize? 
One  refuses  to  part  with  his  prisoners,  the  other 
feeds  his  readers  on  staff  officers.  I  recognize 
specialization  in  art,  such  as  genres,  landscape, 
history;  I  understand  the  'emploi'  of  the  actor, 
the  school  of  the  musician,  but  I  cannot  accept 
such  specialization  as  prisoners,  officers,  priests. 
This  is  no  longer  specialization ;  it  is  bias."  Chek- 
hov ignores  no  phase  of  the  life  of  his  day.  This 
inclusiveness,  this  large  and  noble  avidity  that 
refuses  to  be  circumscribed  by  class  or  kind  or 
importance,  makes  the  sum  of  his  stories  both 
ample  and  satisfying.  His  work  illuminates  the 
whole  of  Russian  life,  the  main  thoroughfares, 
the  bypaths,  the  unfrequented  recesses.  Without 
Chekhov,  how  are  we  to  embark  on  the  discov- 
ery of  Russia? 

Within  the  limits  of  his  day  Chekhov  is  the 
perfect  guide  because  his  interpretations  of  a  life 
that  is  alien  to  us  have  the  essential  qualities  of 


28 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


veracity  and  credibility.  It  is  the  spirit  of  wide- 
eyed,  tolerant,  dispassionate  perception  that  gives 
Chekhov's  works  their  character  of  true  evi- 
dence. For  him,  subtle  and  balanced  in  his  sen- 
sibilities, all  reality  is  innately  artistic.  With  no 
apparent  effort,  he  lifts  everything:  the  common- 
place, the  threadbare,  even  the  banal,  to  the  high 
plane  of  art.  The  relations  of  ordinary  exist- 
ence, the  sombre  dullness,  the  gray  emptiness  of 
uninspired  life  acquire  interest  and  meaning.  He 
creates,  as  the  Russian  critic  Leon  Shestov  says, 
"from  the  void."  Others  flee  from  these  things 
as  from  the  valley  of  the  shadow  of  death ;  Chek- 
hov gives  them  color,  harmony,  inevitability; 
they  become  significant,  infinitely  sad,  infinitely 
human.  We  may  wish  to  turn  away  from  these 
aspects  of  reality,  we  may  wish  to  take  refuge 
in  dreams  and  visions  and  hopes,  but  the  artist 
constrains  us  to  stay;  his  tales  become  credible 
and  strangely  familiar.  With  poignant  regret 
we  acknowledge  them  as  a  true  representation 
of  our  own  lives. 

A  representation  of  life,  but  not  an  explana- 
tion. Chekhov,  almost  alone  among  the  great 
Russians,  does  not  set  himself  the  task  of  solving 
the  riddles  of  the  universe.  He  is  the  honest 
physician  who  knows  no  panaceas  and  is  skep- 
tical as  to  palliatives.  Explanations,  command- 
ments, reconciliations,  consolings — he  has  none 
of  these  to  offer.  He  shuns  the  admonitions  and 
the  comfortable  words  of  the  moral  teacher,  the 
impatient  outcries  of  the  embittered  rebel,  the 
grandiose  creations  of  the  symbolist,  the  vicari- 
ous solace  of  the  mystic.  He  counsels  neither 
rebellion  nor  acceptance. 

For  this  shrinking  from  all  forms  of  dogma- 
tism, for  this  absence  of  burning  indignation  and 
passionate  protest,  most  Russians  hold  Chekhov 
strictly  to  account.  They  refuse  to  forgive  him 
for  not  coming  to  conclusions  with  life.  Against 
what  some  of  them  are  pleased  to  call  his  "com- 
placency in  political  and  social  matters"  they 
invoke  the  lines  of  the  poet  Nekrassov: 

He  loves  not  the  land  of  his  fathers 
Who  sings  without  sorrow  and  anger. 

Chekhov  was  not  unaware  of  his  countrymen's 
predilection  for  strong,  flaming  words  on  the 
"accursed  problems  of  life."  But  he  was  resolved 
to  remain  true  to  his  temperament.  And  what 
was  Chekhov's  temperament?  In  one  of  his  letters 
to  his  friend  Souvorin,  after  dwelling  on  the 
soothing  effects  of  Nature  on  his  spirits,  he 
writes,  "Nature  reconciles  man,  that  is,  makes 


him  indifferent.  And  in  this  world  one  must  be 
indifferent.  Only  dissatisfied  people  can  look  at 
things  clearly,  can  be  just,  and  do  work.  Of 
course,  this  includes  only  thoughtful  and  noble 
persons;  egoists  and  empty  folk  are  indifferent  as 
it  is."  These  words,  I  think,  will  give  us  a  clue 
to  an  understanding  of  Chekhov's  attitude  to 
life.  Nor  do  they  stand  alone.  Again  and  again, 
in  his  letters,  Chekhov  replies  in  the  same  strain 
to  those  who  complain  that  he  has  not  solved  the 
moral  or  ethical  questions  that  arise  in  his  sto- 
ries. I  quote  from  a  few  of  his  letters  to  Sou« 
vorin: 

The  business  of  the  writer  of  fiction  is  only  to  de- 
pict how  and  under  what  circumstances  people  speak 
and  think  about  such  problems  as  God,  pessimism,  etc. 
The  artist  should  not  be  a  judge  of  his  personages 
and  of  what  they  say,  but  only  an  unbiassed  witness. 
I  overhear  a  conversation  on  pessimism  between  two 
Russians,  and  my  business  is  to  report  the  conversa- 
tion as  I  heard  it,  and  let  the  jury,  i.  e.,  the  readers, 
decide  as  to  its  value.  My  business  is  only  to  be 
talented,  that  is,  to  be  able  to  distinguish  between 
important  and  unimportant  testimony,  to  be  able  to 
illuminate  the  characters  and  speak  in  their  lan- 
guage. .  .  And  if  an  artist  in  whom  the  crowd 
has  faith  dares  announce  that  he  understands  nothing 
of  what  he  sees — this  alone  constitutes  a  large  acqui- 
sition in  the  realm  of  thought  and  is  a  great  step 
forward."  "In  my  talks  with  the  writing  brethren 
I  always  maintain  that  it  is  not  the  business  of  the 
artist  to  decide  narrowly  specific  questions.  It  is 
bad  if  the  artist  undertakes  something  he  does  not 
understand.  For  special  problems  there  are  special- 
ists. .  .  But  an  artist  is  to  judge  only  of  what  he 
understands.  His  sphere  is  just  as  limited  as  that  of 
any  other  specialist.  This  I  repeat  and  on  this  I 
always  insist.  That  in  his  sphere  there  are  no  prob- 
lems but  only  answers,  may  be  said  by  one  who  never 
wrote  and  never  had  to  deal  with  images.  The 
artist  observes,  selects,  guesses,  contracts.  These  acts 
alone,  in  their  nature,  presuppose  the  existence  of 
problems.  If  he  had  no  problem  before  him  there 
would  be  no  need  of  selecting  and  of  guessing.  .  . 
You  are  right  in  demanding  from  an  artist  a  serious 
attitude  to  his  work.  You  confuse  two  conceptions: 
the  solution  of  the  problem  and  the  correct  statement 
of  the  problem."  "You  scold  me  for  being  objective 
and  attribute  this  in  me  to  an  indifference  toward  good 
and  evil  and  to  a  lack  of  ideals,  etc.  When  I  depict 
horse-thieves  you  want  me  to  say:  'To  steal  horses 
is  evil.'  But  everybody  knows  this  without  my  saying 
it.  Let  the  thieves  be  judged  by  a  sworn  jury — my 
business  is  to  show  them  as  they  are.  .  .  Of  course,  it 
would  be  fine  to  harmonize  art  with  sermons,  but  in 
my  case  it  would  be  very  difficult,  and,  so  far  as  my 
technique  goes,  almost  impossible.  You  realize,  do 
you  not,  that  to  depict  horse-thieves  within  the  space 
of  seven  hundred  lines  I  must  always  speak  and 
think  as  they  do,  feel  as  they  feel?  Otherwise,  if 
I  were  to  add  subjective  elements,  the  image  would 
become  blurred  and  the  story  would  not  be  compact,  as 
all  short  stories  should  be." 

This  artistic  credo  does  not  express  the  spirit 
of  heartless  indifference.  It  conies  from  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


29 


resolve  to  present  reality  as  seen  by  a  calm,  bal- 
anced, comprehensive,  luminous  temperament. 
Chekhov's  attitude  is  one  of  clear-eyed  refusal  to 
grapple  with  the  unattainable.  In  the  stories 
and  plays  of  this  artist  there  is  no  coldness  and 
hardness.  Despite  the  reticence  and  the  stern 
suppression  of  emotion  personal  to  the  author, 
you  discern  in  these  works,  in  the  letters,  and  in 
the  volume  on  the  convict-colony  at  Sakhalin,  the 
tender,  sensitive  physician,  the  mild,  understand- 
ing eye,  the  kindly,  aching  heart. 

To  the  everlasting  question  of  the  Russians, 
"What  is  to  be  done?"  Chekhov  answers,  some- 
times with  a  sad  wistfulness,  sometimes  with  a 
tender  compassion,  now  with  a  merry  twinkle, 
now  with  quiet  resignation,  "I  do  not  know." 
"Is  there  a  way  out?"  And  again  the  reply,  "I 
do  not  know."  For  him,  too,  the  rest  is  silence. 
Life  goes  on,  but  it  has  no  swing,  no  forward 
propulsion.  It  is  a  strange,  rhythmless  life  that 
Chekhov  surveys,  a  life  without  great  adventures 
or  feverish  activity.  It  is  life  playing  on  muted 
strings,  under  gray  skies,  and  in  a  time  of  dark 
reaction.  And  Chekhov  stands  awed  in  the 
presence  of  failure,  of  tragic  insufficiency,  of  death- 
in-life,  of  broken  hopes,  broken  hearts.  Disillu- 
sionment has  come  to  blight  the  energies  and  the 
spirit  of  these  men  and  women  and  children.  In 
all  but  a  few  there  is  some  sad  imperfection, 
some  fatal  dmartia  that  makes  them  the  play- 
things of  the  imperturbable  Fates.  And  the 
story  of  every  one  in  the  long  procession  is  only 
another  of  life's  little  ironies.  To  view  this 
stagnation  over  which  the  spirit  of  the  Lord  has 
not  passed,  to  discern  it  all,  to  bear  the  conscious- 
ness of  it  in  the  heart,  one  must  possess  some- 
thing of  the  imperturbability,  the  impassivity, 
the  indifference  of  Nature.  One  must  be,  as 
Chekhov  was,  a  physician  who  knew  himself 
doomed  to  an  early  death. 

I  have  been  asked,  "Are  Chekhov's  stories  true 
to  life?  Do  they  convey  the  impression  of  real- 
ity? Is  the  life  of  the  greater  number  of  men 
and  women  so  colorless,  so  passive,  so  full  of  dull 
regret,  so  unfulfilled  of  all  desire?"  I  do  not 
know.  But  I  have  stood  in  the  great  City,  on 
Broadway,  at  the  time  when  the  clock  struck 
the  hour  of  six,  and  I  have  seen  the  men  and 
women  pour  forth  from  the  shops  and  stores 
and  factories.  Thousands  upon  thousands,  they 
emerge  after  the  long  confinement  of  the  day's 
work,  and  in  a  swift  procession  they  walk  home 
in  the  gathering  dusk.  What  are  the  sudden 


revelations,  the  wondrous  surprises  that  the 
future  has  in  store  for  them — for  the  millions 
like  them  to  whom  the  great  adventures  in  life 
are  a  journey  underground,  supper,  the  marvels 
of  the  motion  pictures,  sleep?  Ah,  Chekhov 
knew!  He  knew  of  the  glory  of  childhood,  the 
dreams  of  youth,  the  miracle  of  hope  and  fresh 
beginnings;  and  he  knew  the  dreary  emptiness 
in  the  hearts  of  those  who  return  home  at  the 
end  of  the  day.  He  knew  of  the  ceaseless  quest 
for  happiness,  for  a  fuller  life,  for  rest.  And 
he  knew  that,  high  or  low,  whatever  the  path 
we  follow,  we  are  never  far  from  the  endless 
procession  of  the  disillusioned. 

But  is  there  no  release,  and  no  fulfilment? 
Whenever  I  stand  where  the  long  line  of  those 
who  hurry  home  in  the  gathering  dusk  passes 
by,  I  can  see,  in  the  west,  through  the  great 
canyon  that  is  the  city  street,  the  glory  of  the 
setting  sun.  There  the  sky  is  strangely  beau- 
tiful. It  seems  to  bend  over  a  new  and  a  dif- 
ferent world.  Who  can  tell?  But  in  that 
world  there  seems  to  be  joy  and  work,  beauty 
and  laughter,  sunshine,  freedom,  stretching  of 
limbs,  rest.  And,  wondering  whether  we  can 
create  that  world,  no  longer  from  the  void,  I 
recall  Chekhov's  many  quiet  words  of  encourage- 
ment and  hope.  Sonia  speaks  such  words  in  the 
closing  scene  of  "Uncle  Vanya": 

"What  can  we  do?  We  must  live  our  lives. 
[A  pause.}  Yes,  we  shall  live,  Uncle  Vanya. 
We  shall  live  through  the  long  procession  of 
days  before  us,  and  through  the  long  evenings; 
we  shall  patiently  bear  the  trials  that  fate 
imposes  on  us ;  we  shall  work  for  others  without 
rest,  both  now  and  when  we  are  old;  and  when 
our  last  hour  comes  we  shall  meet  it  humbly, 
and  there,  beyond  the  grave,  we  shall  say  that 
we  have  suffered  and  wept,  that  our  life  was 
bitter,  and  God  will  have  pity  on  us.  Ah,  then, 
dear,  dear  Uncle,  we  shall  see  that  bright  and 
beautiful  life;  we  shall  rejoice  and  look  back 
upon  our  sorrow  here ;  a  tender  smile — and — we 
shall  rest.  I  have  faith,  Uncle,  fervent,  passion- 
ate faith.  [Sonia  kneels  down  before  her  uncle 
and  lays  her  head  upon  his  hands}  We  shall 
rest.  We  shall  rest.  We  shall  see  heaven  shin- 
ing like  a  jewel.  We  shall  see  all  evil  and  all 
our  pain  sink  away  in  the  great  compassion  that 
shall  enfold  the  world.  Our  life  will  be  as 
peaceful  and  tender  as  a  caress.  I  have  faith; 


I  have  faith." 


Louis  S.  FRIEDLAND. 


30 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


BRIBFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


A  WORLD  IN  FERMENT  :  Interpretations  of 
the  War  for  a  New  World.  By  Nicholas 
Murray  Butler.  Scribner;  $1.25. 

The  world  may  be  in  ferment ;  but  not  so 
Nicholas  Murray  Butler.  He  casts  his  eye  upon 
the  vasty  deeps  of  time  and  remains  the  Presi- 
dent of  Columbia  University,  orotund,  common- 
place, upper-class,  smug.  One  gathers  that  he 
has  heard  of  patriotism,  service,  reconstruction, 
the  Russian  Revolution,  internationalism.  His 
thoughts  upon  them  appear  in  the  addresses  and 
interviews  assembled  in  this  volume.  He  has 
said  everything  that  a  deacon  and  a  director 
would  approve  of,  nothing  more. 

There  is  much  talk  in  these  addresses  of  the 
process  of  thought,  much  speculation  as  to  how 
the  patriot,  the  wise  man,  the  prudent  man,  the 
Butlerized  man  will  think, — in  fact,  there  is 
more  such  talk  than  evidence  of  thought.  For 
winged  thought  does  not  consort  with  a  leaden 
style  of  Rooseveltian  alternatives.  Mr.  Butler's 
opinions  on  industry,  on  international  affairs, 
we  all  know.  Suffice  it  to  say  they  are  untainted 
with  the  heretical  economics  and  psychology 
which  have  been  revealing  us  glaringly  to  our- 
selves. 

This  aspect  of  the  modern  world  Mr.  Butler 
flees.  He  takes  refuge  in  general  statements,  for 
the  more  general  your  statements  the  more  noble 
they  may  be  made  to  seem.  His  volume,  there- 
fore, is  interesting  not  for  any  interpretation  of 
our  time  so  much  as  for  its  revelation  of  an 
anachronism — the  florid  oratorical  mind  still  at 
work  in  the  years  1914-17. 

THROUGH  LIFE  AND  ROUND  THE  WORLD. 
By  Raymond  Blathwayt.    Dutton ;  $3.50. 
LIFE  AND  LETTERS  OF  MAGGIE  BENSON. 
By  Arthur  C.  Benson.     Longmans,  Green; 

$2.50. 

Here  are  an  autobiography  and  a  biography 
of  two  rather  well-known  persons,  both  of  whom 
were  active  in  work  connected  with  the  Church 
of  England,  Mr.  Blathwayt  as  a  curate  and  Miss 
Benson  as  a  founder  of  Bible  societies.  Both 
offer  us  their  reaction  to  the  creed  and  the  dogmas 
of  that  church. 

Mr.  Benson  assures  us  that  there  is  an  immense 
future  before  the  art  of  biography  and  that  he 
believes  it  should  not  deal  with  notable  persons 
alone  but  with  interesting  and  striking  personali- 
ties as  well.  While  we  are  not  inclined  to  allow 
this  plea  to  stand  when  it  is  a  question  of  indulg- 
ing the  exploitation  of  Bensonism,  it  yet  carries  a 
tincture  of  truth.  It  is  true,  for  instance,  in 
regard  to  Mr.  Blathwayt.  Here  is  a  man  pre- 
eminently of  the  world,  a  man  of  wit  and  lofti- 


ness of  purpose,  whose  conclusions  regarding  men 
and  things  are  neither  commonplace  nor  dull.  He 
started  life  as  a  curate,  and  rinding  himself  unable 
to  subscribe  fully  to  the  dogma  he  had  to  teach, 
courageously  gave  up  the  work,  though  doing 
so  meant  poverty  until  he  discovered  an  opening 
in  journalism.  With  the  rather  brief  account 
of  his  life  he  includes  gossipy  bits  of  information 
about  all  sorts  of  notable  people,  and  the  book  is 
a  veritable  gold  mine  for  the  after-dinner  speaker, 
for  it  is  besprinkled  with  quotable  anecdotes. 

The  Benson  family  think  themselves  very 
interesting  to  the  world,  an  opinion  no  doubt 
engendered  by  their  countless  admirers,  but  one 
is  often  wearily  reminded  of  the  Punch  squib, 
"Signs  of  the  Times;  Self-Denial  Week:  Mr. 
A.  C.  Benson  refrains  from  publishing  a  book." 
Their  attitude  of  mind  is,  perhaps,  shown  by  a 
habit  of  Maggie's  referred  to  in  the  biography. 
She  made  up  a  special  book  of  prayers  with  alter- 
nating blank  pages.  On  these  she  put  down  the 
initials  of  the  person  whose  faults  and  needs  the 
prayer  opposite  seemed  best  to  fit.  The  story  of 
her  life  is  set  down  from  the  first  day  to  the 
last.  Nothing  is  omitted,  from  the  most  trivial, 
meaningless  letter  of  childhood  to  the  girlish 
gushings  of  the  teens.  The  life  impresses  her 
brother  as  a  most  useful  one  but  he  hardly  suc- 
ceeds in  persuading  the  reader.  She  seemed 
always  seeking  self-expression  in  writing  or 
Egyptology  or  what  not,  but  found  no  permanent 
satisfaction  except  in  her  friendships.  She  might 
be  said  to  have  succeeded  in  life  because  of  what 
she  gave  here  to  both  men  and  women.  Whether 
she  would  have  wanted  this  exploited  in  a  biog- 
raphy no  one  can  ever  know,  but  there  is  just  a 
possibility  since  she  was  a  Benson. 

FAITH,  WAR,  AND  POLICY.  By  Gilbert 
Murray.  Houghton  Mifflin;  $1.25. 
It  would  hardly  be  possible  for  Gilbert  Mur- 
ray to  write  a  really  illiberal  book,  but  it  has  not 
been  impossible  for  him  to  feel  too  constantly  in 
this  book  the  weight  of  his  representative  posi- 
tion. The  result  is  not  altogether  satisfying. 
You  feel  that  Professor  Murray  has  been  the  vic- 
tim of  those  exceptional  circumstances  which 
exact  their  heavy  toll  of  the  eminent.  In  acting 
as  spokesman  for  England,  he  has  had  to  strain 
his  voice  by  pitching  it  in  the  popular  key,  and  he 
has  had  to  discuss  subjects  about  which  his  opin- 
ions are  far  less  valuable  than  they  are  about  the 
Greek  drama.  What  stands  out  most  sharply  and 
incongruously  in  the  book  is  Professor  Murray's 
complaisance  in  transferring  the  problems  raised 
by  the  war  to  the  shoulders  of  those  very  diplo- 
mats and  statesmen  whose  inadequacy  is  suffi- 
ciently demonstrated  by  the  present  debacle.  He 
argues  rather  superficially  against  democratic  con- 
trol of  foreign  policy,  on  the  ground  that  the 


1918] 


31 


public  cannot  be  expected  to  be  as  well  informed 
on  such  subjects  as  the  diplomats,  and  he  is  will- 
ing to  assume  that,  so  far  as  England  is  con- 
cerned, the  diplomats  may  be  trusted  to  pursue 
a  disinterested  and  honest  policy.  In  discussing 
the  British  Foreign  Office,  Professor  Murray 
adopts  a  tone  which  is  nothing  less  than  smug; 
he  is  frankly  the  apologist,  who  can  allow  him- 
self to  write,  "The  fact  seems  to  be  that,  if,  some 
years  ago,  an  angel  had  set  himself  to  the  task 
of  saving  Europe,  he  would  not  have  begun  by 
altering  British  policy.  He  would  have  begun 
by  something  else."  This  fatal  complacency 
extends  to  everything  British:  "In  peace  we  are 
the  most  liberal  and  the  most  merciful  of  all 
great  empires ;  in  war  we  have  Napoleon's  famous 
testimonial,  calling  us  'the  most  consistent,  the 
most  implacable,  and  the  most  generous  of  his 
enemies.'  It  is  for  us  to  keep  up  this  tradition, 
and  I  believe  that  the  men  who  rule  us  do  keep 
it  up."  It  is  true  that  a  watchful  critic  might 
be  able  to  cite  many  instances  of  a  less  admir- 
able sort,  but  Professor  Murray  is  ready  for  such 
critics.  He  rules  out  cases  that  do  not  come 
under  the  definition  as  exhibiting  traits  that  are 
essentially  "un-English."  There  are  fine  things 
in  the  book,  notably  the  picture  Professor  Mur- 
ray gives  of  Arthur  Heath,  the  brilliant  young 
Oxonian  who  fell  in  the  fighting  at  Loos.  There 
is  a  constant  sympathy  with  the  idealism  of  the 
young  men  who  gave  themselves  so  unsparingly 
to  save  civilization,  and  it  is  in  writing  of  their 
sacrifices  that  Professor  Murray  is  at  his  best. 
But  the  book  as  a  whole  is  disappointing,  since 
it  exhibits  the  author  in  a  role  which  he  is  not 
fitted  to  fill  with  his  usual  distinction. 

To  MEXICO  WITH  SCOTT.  Letters  of  Cap- 
tain E.  Kirby  Smith  to  his  wife.  Prepared 
for  the  press  by  his  daughter,  Emma  Jerome 
Blackwood.  With  an  introduction  by  R. 
M.  Johnston.  Harvard  University  Press; 
$1.25. 

Not  to  the  Mexican  border  with  General 
Hugh  L.  Scott  in  our  own  time,  but  into  Mexico 
with  Winfield  Scott  seventy  years  ago,  the  reader 
is  conducted  in  these  letters  of  a  gallant  officer 
who  fought  and  died  in  a  cause  hardly  less  per- 
plexing than  is  the  Mexican  question  of  to-day. 
Here  is  a  passage  (one  of  many)  that  might  al- 
most have  been  written  yesterday  instead  of  May 
6,  1847:  "Some  Mexican  gentlemen  came  in  this 
morning  from  Puebla.  One  of  them,  a  very  intel- 
ligent man,  educated  in  Hartford,  Connecticut, 
represents  the  country  as  in  a  most  deplorable  con- 
dition, the  Government  as  utterly  disorganized 
.  .  .  not  capable  of  carrying  on  the  war  or 
making  peace.  The  roads  are  filled  with  bands  of 
robbers  under  the  name  of  guerillas,  who  are  as 


ready  to  plunder  and  murder  the  Mexicans  as 
they  are  to  attack  us."  Striking  and  also  rather 
discouraging  is  the  applicability  of  these  letters 
to  present  conditions  in  the  turbulent  republic 
to  the  south.  The  writer  fell  at  Molino  del 
Rey,  September  8,  1847,  in  his  forty-first  year, 
and  his  letters  extend  over  the  two  years  preced- 
ing his  death.  Professor  Johnston  and  members 
of  Kirby  Smith's  family  have  done  their  part  well 
in  preparing  and  annotating  these  letters  for  pub- 
lication. 

CARRY    ON.      By    Lieutenant    Coningsby 
Dawson.     Lane;  $1. 

Lieutenant  Coningsby  Dawson  of  the  Cana- 
dian field  artillery  is  chiefly  an  author.  As 
many  grateful  readers  will  remember,  he  has 
written  "The  Garden  without  Walls,"  "The 
Raft,"  and  "Slaves  of  Freedom,"  which  he  waited 
to  finish  before  taking  up  arms  for  England. 
However,  he  was  not  always  an  author,  for 
upon  his  graduation  from  Oxford  in  1905  he 
studied  theology  at  the  Union  Seminary,  New 
York,  and  remained  there  a  year  before  he 
reached  the  conclusion  that  his  life  work  lay 
in  literature.  Now,  from  the  trenches,  he  has 
written  a  series  of  intimate  letters  to  the  folk 
at  home,  replete  with  natural  affection,  with 
description  which  is  fairly  vivid  and  reflection 
suggestive  of  a  parson.  He  is  essentially  a  theo- 
logian in  his  thinking  in  the  sense  that  he  attempts 
to  put  a  good  showing  on  a  bad  mess,  translates 
butchery  into  sacrifice,  and  mass  psychology  into 
duty  and  honor.  When  a  great  soul  engages  in 
this  revaluation,  the  result  can  be  magnificent, 
a  tribute  to  the  sheer  superiority  of  man  over 
the  world;  but  Lieutenant  Dawson  is  too  much 
of  a  dear  fellow  to  be  in  danger  of  erecting  a 
"City  of  God"  upon  the  agony  of  our  civiliza- 
tion. However,  he  is  particularly  effectual  in 
putting  himself  on  paper,  and  his  book  affords 
a  clear  view  into  the  theological  soul.  The  best 
part  of  it  is  that  his  letters  are  so  full  of  inci- 
dent that  unless  you  are  particularly  interested, 
you  need  not  bother  with  the  theological  inter- 
pretation at  all. 

The  interest  that  leads  men  into  repainting 
the  world  to  their  liking  arises  in  that  self-con- 
sciousness usually  known  as  egotism.  Further, 
the  self-regarding  habit  leads  men  to  value  with 
a  great  ado  of  words  and  affection  anything 
touching  upon  their  personal  life,  and  they  easily 
achieve  sentimentality.  Dawson  proves  this  by 
not  being  the  exception.  He  is  the  kind  of  man 
who  loves  to  dwell  (in  his  own  words)  on  "when 
I  was  a  kiddie."  He  hasn't  set  sail  from  Halifax 
before  he  feels  he  has  "become  a  little  child 
again  in  God's  hands."  Spending  all  of  a  morn- 
ing on  the  dock  tending  to  the  baggage  leads 


32 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


him  to  realize  "there  are  so  many  finer  things 
I  could  do  with  the  rest  of  my  days — bigger 
things."  On  the  voyage,  he  marvels  "all  the 
time  at  the  prosaic  and  even  coarse  types  of  men 
who  have  risen  to  the  greatness  of  the  occasion." 
He  means  his  fellow-soldiers.  Sir  Willoughby 
Patterne  wrote  travel  letters  too. 

When  he  reaches  the  trenches,  his  theologizing 
immediately  goes  into  action.  The  horrors  of 
the  battle  field  receive  a  description  that  sets 
one  tingling ;  hopes  stir  that  perhaps  this  terrible- 
ness  will  deter  men,  at  least  those  who  have  seen 
with  their  own  eyes,  from  ever  countenancing  its 
recurrence;  but  the  tingle  dies  away  in  de- 
spondency over  man's  irrepressible  trick  of  turn- 
ing evil  into  good  when  you  read  Lieutenant 
Dawson's  conclusion:  "There  is  a  marvellous 
grandeur  about  all  this  carnage  and  desolation 
.  .  .  when  you  see  how  cheap  men's  bodies 
are,  you  cannot  help  but  know  that  the  body  is 
the  least  part  of  personality."  There  is  much 
more  of  this  sort  of  immoralizing.  With  con- 
siderable analysis,  he  indicates  how  this  war 
wrecks  even  the  lives  and  the  hopes  of  its  sur- 
vivors, renders  them  unfit  for  future  work,  "does 
to  the  individual  what  it  does  to  the  landscape 
it  attacks — obliterates  everything  personal  and 
characteristic."  Accordingly,  after  the  fashion 
of  this  type  of  mind,  it  follows  that  "from  these 
carcass-strewn  fields  of  khaki,  there's  a  cleansing 
wind  blowing  for  the  nations  that  have  died." 
And,  in  the  conclusion,  all  the  nations  of  the 
earth  are  invited  to  step  into  the  breeze.  One 
despairs  at  the  hopefulness  of  man. 

MUTUAL  AID.   A  Factor  of  Evolution.   By 

P.  Kropotkin.    Knopf;  $1.25. 

This  is  a  new  edition  at  a  popular  price  of 
the  book  in  which  Kropotkin  attacks  the  idea  that 
mankind  has  progressed  through  the  "survival 
of  the  fittest,"  that  the  strong  have  oppressed  the 
weak  and  benefitted  by  their  removal.  He  aims 
to  show  that  on  the  contrary  all  forms  of  animal 
life  have  lived  and  are  living  better  because  of 
mutual  aid.  The  author  speaks  with  equal  ease 
of  ants,  of  South  American  birds,  and  of  mam- 
mals, and  his  work  gives  every  evidence  of  ex- 
haustive research.  As  regards  man,  dealing  with 
him  chronologically,  Kropotkin  asserts  that  histo- 
rians have  all  wrongly  put  the  stress  on  battles 
and  armies  rather  than  on  the  great,  unseen  fer- 
mentation of  progress  among  the  masses.  There 
are  chapters  on  mutual  aid  among  savages,  among 
barbarians,  and  in  the  mediaeval  city,  and  on  the 
causes  of  its  decay.  Kropotkin  feels  that  com- 
munal possession  of  the  soil  and  other  like  enter- 
prises open  the  only  way  of  escape  from  social 
oppression. 


CASUAL  COMMENT 


GENERAL  SIR  IAAN  HAMILTON,  who  com- 
manded the  British  forces  at  Gallipoli,  has  harsh 
words  for  the  censor.  "From  my  individual  point 
of  view,"  he  writes,  "a  hideous  mistake  has  been 
made  on  the  correspondence  side  of  the  whole 
of  this  Dardanelles  business.  Had  we  had  a 
dozen  good  newspaper  correspondents  here  the 
vital,  life-giving  interest  of  these  stupendous  pro- 
ceedings would  have  been  brought  right  into  the 
hearts  and  homes  of  the  humblest  people  in 
Great  Britain.  .  .  cables  .  .  .  were  turned  by  some 
miserable  people  somewhere  into  horrible  bureau- 
cratic phrases  or  dead  languages,  i.  e.,  'We  have 
made  an  appreciable  advance,'  'The  situation  re- 
mains unchanged'  and  similar  phrases.  As  far  as 
information  to  the  enemy,  this  is  too  puerile  alto- 
gether." The  General  concludes  with  an  epi- 
gram which  our  own  eager  Prussians,  welcoming 
reaction  in  the  name  of  war-time  necessity,  may 
profitably  ponder, — "Democracy  and  autocracy 
must  fight  with  their  own  weapons;  if  they 
change  foils  in  the  scuffle,  then  like  Hamlet  and 
Laertes  they  both  of  them  are  doomed."  Sir 
Hamilton  is  really  generous  in  his  selection  of 
examples  of  stupidity.  He  might  have  sharpened 
his  barbs  of  satire  on  "An  Atlantic  Port"  or 
"Somewhere  in  France."  Only  an  insensitive 
soul  could  have  devised  that  ghastly  euphemism 
for  destroyed  young  life,  "wastage,"  and  where 
but  in  a  General  Staff  office  could  have  origin- 
ated a  phrase  like  "inappreciable  losses"?  A  veil 
of  cold  technical  phrases,  like  the  morning  mist 
over  No  Man's  Land,  interposes  itself  between 
the  ugly  realities  of  the  mud  and  steel  of  war 
and  the  readers  "back  home."  And  between 
them  and  the  beauty  of  the  war,  too.  One  might 
forgive  the  censor  for  making  fighting  mechan- 
ical, if  he  at  least  allowed  some  of  the  eerie  and 
tragic  beauty  of  the  Gargantuan  machine  to  be 
reflected  in  the  official  dispatches.  Every  cor- 
respondent, of  course,  has  written  his  purple  pas- 
sages about  the  quick  spreading  splendor  of 
shrapnel  and  the  pyrotechnical  magnificence  of 
high  explosives.  But  the  deeper  aesthetic  percep- 
tions, such  as  we  find  in  "Le  Feu"  and  in  Hugh 
de  Selincourt  for  example,  rarely  peep  through 
the  thick  blanket  of  the  censorship  dark.  Philip 
Gibbs  is  the  one  notable  exception.  In  his  dis- 
patches to  the  New  York  "Times,"  he  contrives 
to  avoid  the  blighting  dehumanization  of  which 
General  Hamilton  justly  complains,  and  the 
equally  sepulchral  obtuseness  of  the  conventional 
correspondent  who  has  seen  so  much  of  the  war 
that  he  may  be  said  almost  to  pride  himself  on 
his  callousness.  Mr.  Gibbs  never  has  ceased  to 
be  shocked  by  the  war — in  all  his  writing  there 
is  a  curiously  constant  quality  of  recoil,  some- 
thing of  the  shattered  anger  of  a  fine  and  sensi- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


33 


tive  nature  before  the  grimness  and  living  agony. 
You  become  increasingly  aware  of  this  quality  in 
his  dispatches — excellent  bits  of  accurate  report- 
ing, too — through  strange  metaphors  like  the 
sunny  slopes  with  their  slow-maturing  fruit  of 
young  life,  and  the  autumn  battle  harvest  of 
laughing  flesh.  Imagination  and  perceptiveness 
such  as  Gibbs  possesses,  however,  are  rare,  and 
the  average  newspaper  man  eventually  succumbs 
to  the  industrious  blue  pencil,  what  the  French 
cleverly  call  "expositions  de  blanc."  Will  Gen- 
eral Hamilton's  criticism  effect  a  reform  ?  '  'I 
doubt  it,'  said  the  Walrus,  and  shed  a  bitter 
tear." 

MR.  J.  L.  SYMON'S  COMPLAINT  IN  "The  Eng- 
lish Review"  that  novels  are  too  short  has  all 
the  air  of  flaming  paradox.  It  was  not  many 
months  ago  that  Henry  B.  Fuller  uttered  a  mov- 
ing plea  for  shorter  fiction,  pointing  out  that 
"swollen  novels"  had  become  as  great  a  pest  as 
"swollen  fortunes."  He  even  distinguished  a 
new  type  of  serial,  beloved  of  newspaper  read- 
ers, which  can  be  drawn  out  in  successive  lengths 
like  a  telescope  and  with  a  little  ingenuity  and 
persistence  can  be  made  to  run  forever.  If  Mr. 
Symon  had  not  assured  us  that  the  novel  is  too 
short,  we  should  never  have  discovered  the  fact 
for  ourselves.  Nowadays  trilogies  appear  to  be 
decidedly  the  thing  among  the  younger  writers 
and  many  of  the  outstanding  works  of  the  day 
have  the  bulk  of  "The  Brothers  Karamazov," 
if  not  that  of  "War  and  Peace."  When  you 
consider  the  substance,  they  are  often  unforgiv- 
ably long  and  of  an  exquisite  tedium.  They 
abuse  the  privileges  of  the  confessional  by  fail- 
ing to  respect  its  natural  limitations.  Yet  there 
has  been  little  complaint,  and  one  is  driven  to 
accept  Mr.  Bennett's  explanation  that  a  provi- 
dent public  likes  its  money's  worth  when  it 
comes  to  fiction.  Mr.  Wells  has  acted  on  that 
assumption  and  so  has  Mr.  Dreiser — often  dis- 
astrously. In  fact,  it  would  never  occur  to 
anyone  to  suppose  that  the  publishers  were  put- 
ting on  the  screws  or  exercising  any  coercive 
force  whatever  on  the  creative  imagination.  If 
one  considers  the  commercial  novel,  then  the  no- 
tion of  the  publishers  that  "a  very  convenient 
length  for  a  novel  is  75,000  words,"  is  certainly 
not  far  amiss.  Here  there  is  no  question  of  art 
at  all,  but  simply  of  so  many  hours  of  "escape" 
from  reality  and  so  much  bulk  in  the  traveling- 
bag;  and  75,000  words  is  surely  ample.  If  some 
sort  of  mechanical  check  were  not  imposed  and 
every  ego  were  allowed  to  expand  to  the  limits 
of  tenuity,  sensible  people  would  soon  ask 
to  be  excused  from  inflicting  gratuitous  boredom 
on  themselves. 


WHEN  GREAT  BRITAIN  DECLARED  WAR  a  certain 
Canadian  critic  prophesied  "business  as  usual  ex- 
cept in  cut  flowers,  jewelry,  and  music."  The 
prediction  was  sound.  First  of  all  Canada  de- 
nied herself  tournees,  sacrificed  her  one  symphony 
orchestra,  and  abandoned  the  hope  of  opera.  A 
tacit  moratorium  protected  all  who  had  rashly 
subscribed  to  any  artistic  enterprise;  luxuries 
must  be  done  without.  Now  we  across  the  line, 
being  at  war,  prove  once  more  that  the  arts  are 
in  no  way  native  amongst  us,  but  are  house 
guests,  for  whose  support,  if  they  lack  the  tact 
to  withdraw,  we  can  no  longer  be  responsible. 
Thus  early  in  the  season  there  are  rumors  of 
more  than  the  conventional  deficits  in  opera  and 
of  orchestras  hard  put  to  it  by  the  curtailment 
of  their  usual  tour  revenues.  As  for  the  theatre, 
it  is  said  that  New  York  has  already  seen — that 
is,  has  already  gone  without  seeing — some  fifty 
failures.  We  can  well  believe  that  most  of  the 
fifty  deserved  no  better,  but  we  cannot  therefore 
congratulate  ourselves  on  any  sudden  reforma- 
tion of  American  taste.  For  Americans  are  also 
denying  themselves  the  better  dramatic  fare  pro- 
vided by  the  little  theatres.  In  Chicago,  for 
instance,  where  for  six  years  Maurice  Browne 
has  somehow  maintained  a  genuinely  artistic 
stage,  the  seventh  year  discovers  a  social  mora- 
torium under  which  so  many  of  the  subscriptions 
toward  his  current  season  have  been  cancelled 
that  he  is  forced  to  close  and  withdraw.  This 
deprivation  would  be  tolerable  if  it  were  a  real 
war  sacrifice,  reluctantly  made;  but,  with  a  very 
few  exceptions,  the  perfunctory  letters  of  can- 
cellation betray  a  more  than  patriotic  alacrity  in 
abnegation.  The  war  comes  as  a  convenient  ex- 
cuse for  redevoting  ourselves  to  the  more  con- 
genial maintenance  of  "business  as  usual."  Other 
peoples  may  inexplicably  crave  such  decorations 
as  good  music  and  significant  drama,  achieve 
them  with  difficulty,  and  surrender  them  grudg- 
ingly: we  Americans,  thank  God,  are  made  of 
sterner  stuff;  we  can  take  the  arts  fashionably 
if  we  must,  and  we  can  leave  them  alone  again 
as  soon  as  decently  we  may.  The  strenuous 
necessities  of  life  we  must  have;  but  the  lux- 
uries of  aesthetic  feeling,  of  disciplined  thinking, 
of  beautiful  expression — these  are  elegances  we 
can  still  do  without. 

*          •  • 

WE  CONTINUE  TO  RECEIVE  LETTERS  from  the 

young  men  of  our  new  army,  showing  the  spirit 
in  which  they  have  taken  up  a  task  that  was  alien 
to  all  their  earlier  thoughts  or  hopes.  They  are 
inspiring  letters,  full  of  a  manly  cheerfulness  and 
the  feeling  of  comradeship;  almost  never  is  there 
a  word  of  complaint  or  a  hint  of  reluctance  to 
meet  unfamiliar  demands  and  to  sink  individual 
purposes  in  the  common  purpose.  There  is,  on 
the  other  hand,  an  eagerness  to  take  advantage  of 


34 


THE    DIAL 


[January  3 


"I  visited  with  a  natural  rapture  the 
largest  bookstore  in  the  world." 

See  the  chapter  on  Chicago,  page  43,  "Your 
United  States,"  by  Arnold  Bennett 

It  is  recognized  throughout  the  country 
that  we  earned  this  reputation  because  we 
have  on  hand  at  all  times  a  more  complete 
assortment  of  the  books  of  all  publishers  than 
can  be  found  on  the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
dealer  in  the  entire  United  States.  It  is  of 
interest  and  importance  to  all  bookbuyers  to 
know  that  the  books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  procured  from  us  with 
the  least  possible  delay.  We  invite  you  to 
visit  our  store  when  in  Chicago,  to  avail  your- 
self of  the  opportunity  of  looking  over  the 
books  in  which  you  are  most  interested,  or  to 
call  upon  us  at  any  time  to  look  after  your 
book  wants. 

Special  Library  Service 

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to  the  interests  of  Public  Libraries,  Schools, 
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partment has  made  a  careful  study  of  library 
requirements,  and  is  equipped  to  handle  all 
library  orders  with  accuracy,  efficiency  and 
despatch.  This  department's  long  experience 
in  this  special  branch  of  the  book  business, 
combined  with  our  unsurpassed  book  stock, 
enable  us  to  offer  a  library  service  not  excelled 
elsewhere.  We  solicit  correspondence  from 
Librarians  unacquainted  with  our  facilities. 

A.  C.  McCLURG  &  CO. 

Retail   Store.   218   to   224   South    Wabash    venue 

Library  Department  and  Wholesale  Offices: 

330  to  352  East  Ohio  Street 

Chicago 


the  new  opportunities  (less  obviously  promising 
than  those  they  had  looked  for,  perhaps)  to  make 
their  influence  tell  for  the  cause  of  brotherhood, 
an  abounding  good-will.  "If  I  were  a  commu- 
nist," writes  one,  "my  happiness  would  be  com- 
plete. We  are,  in  fact,  communists,  and  even 
the  fudge  which  a  sweetheart  sends  belongs  to 
the  squad,  if  not  to  the  whole  barracks.  And 
as  for  uniformity,  it  regulates  every  detail,  even 
to  the  way  the  spare  shoes  are  placed  under  the 
carefully  aligned  cots,  and  the  nine  inches  of  top 
sheet  turned  back  over  the  blanket.  When  I  was 
a  civilian  and  a  student — and  utterly  irrespon- 
sible on  both  counts — my  greatest  concern  was  to 
satisfy  my  conscience  for  cutting  classes,  and  to 
find  some  means  for  filling  up  the  time  between 
midnight  and  bed-time  with  something  less  bore- 
some  than  drinking  black  coffee  at  Franks's  while 
debating  the  merits  of  this  best  of  all  possible 
worlds.  Now  my  greatest  worry  is  lest  some  new 
order  absorb  what  time  I  call  my  own,  or  some 
additional  regulation  prescribe  the  use  and  stow- 
age of  some  as  yet  unregulated  part  of  my  belong- 
ings. I  feel  exactly  like  a  card-index,  a  peripa- 
tetic file  of  all  the  orders  and  regulations  which 
headquarters  has  been  able  to  devise  in  the  last 
two  months."  And  from  a  librarian  who  has 
charge  of  one  of  the  libraries  in  a  southern  can- 
tonment, we  get  word  of  the  progress  of  his  work 
among  the  men  and  of  the  absorbing  interest  he 
has  found  in  it.  For  the  first  time  in  his  life, 
he  writes,  he  is  completely  happy;  and  he  adds 
with  proper  emphasis,  "By  the  Lord,  this  is  a 
man's  job." 

•          •  • 

THE  CELEBRATION  OF  ILLINOIS'S  CENTENNIAL 

AS  A  STATE  is  well  under  way  at  Springfield  and 
Urbana.  At  Springfield  the  Illinois  Blue  Book 
of  1917-18  is  ready  for  distribution.  This  issue, 
while  paying  the  usual  heed  to  the  current  affairs 
of  the  state,  gives  considerable  space  to  a  review 
of  its  one  hundred  years  of  statehood.  The  chief 
article  in  the  book  is  by  Mrs.  Jessie  Palmer 
Weber,  secretary  of  the  State  Centennial  Com- 
mission and  librarian  of  the  State  Historical 
Library.  It  deals  with  Illinois  history.  Other 
forms  of  celebration  devised  at  Springfield  are 
statues  of  Lincoln  and  Douglas  and  a  pageant 
of  Illinois  history  through  the  past  century.  At 
Urbana  progress  is  being  made  on  the  Centennial 
History  of  Illinois,  a  cooperative  work  in  five 
large  volumes  by  members  of  the  faculty  of  the 
state  university.  This  enterprise  has  been  aided 
by  the  formation  of  the  Illinois  Historical  Sur- 
vey as  a  department  of  the  graduate  school,  under 
the  direction  of  Clarence  W.  Alvord,  professor 
of  history.  This  is,  in  effect,  a  "laboratory"  of 
state  history,  well  organized  and  fully  manned, 
and  its  product  is  expected  to  be  a  scientific  his- 
tory of  Illinois  of  high  and  permanent  value. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


35 


NOTES  AND  NEWS 


The  publisher  takes  pleasure  in  announcing  the 
following  additions  to  THE  DIAL  staff:  Mr.  Har- 
old E.  Stearns  assumes  with  this  issue  the  duties 
of  Associate  Editor.  Mr.  Stearns,  after  gradua- 
tion from  Harvard,  became  engaged  in  newspaper 
and  magazine  work  in  New  York.  Shortly  before 
the  war  he  went  abroad  for  the  purpose  of  mak- 
ing a  study  of  the  labor  movement  and  industrial 
conditions  in  France  and  England,  remaining  in 
Europe  during  the  first  part  of  the  war.  For  the 
last  fifteen  months  he  has  been  pn  the  staff  of 
"The  New  Republic." 

Mr.  Clarence  Britten  also  joins  the  staff  of  THE 
DIAL  at  the  present  time.  Mr.  Britten  was  presi- 
dent of  the  "Harvard  Monthly"  while  at  Cam- 
bridge, and  after  graduation  became  engaged  in 
publishing,  carrying  on  his  activities  in  Canada  and 
afterward  in  Boston. 

Mr.  Kenneth  Macgowan,  who  joins  the  staff  of 
Contributing  Editors,  will  write  regularly  of  the 
drama.  Mr.  Macgowan,  after  taking  his  degree 
at  Cambridge,  acted  as  associate  to  H.  T.  Parker 
of  the  Boston  "Transcript."  He  later  became 
literary  and  dramatic  editor  of  the  Philadelphia 
"Ledger."  Last  year  he  acted  as  manager  for 
Joseph  Urban  and  Richard  Ordynski  during  their 
season  at  the  Bandbox.  He  is  now  engaged  in  jour- 
nalism in  New  York. 


Of  the  contributors  to  this  issue  Robert  Her- 
rick  needs  no  introduction.  Mr.  Herrick  has  now 
returned  to  the  faculty  of  the  University  of  Chi- 
cago and  the  present  article  is  the  first  of  a  series 
which  he  will  contribute  to  THE  DIAL. 

Leslie  Nelson  Jennings  lives  in  Rutherford,  Cal- 
ifornia. 

Robert  Morss  Lovett,  who  is  a  member  of  the 
faculty  of  the  University  of  Chicago,  has  contrib- 
uted frequently  to  THE  DIAL. 

Russell  Ramsey  is  engaged  with  the  National 
Child  Welfare  Association  of  New  York. 

Swinburne  Hale,  since  graduation  from  Harvard, 
has  been  engaged  in  the  practice  of  law  in  New 
York  and  has  recently  devoted  himself  to  jour- 
nalism. 

Louis  Friedland  is  editor  of  the  "Russian  Re- 
view." 


In  "Rodin:  The  Man  and  His  Art"  (Century), 
Judith  Cladel  describes  Rodin's  flight  to  England 
during  the  German  drive  toward  Paris  in  the  early- 
days  of  the  war.  Mile.  Cladel  herself  conducted 
the  sculptor  and  his  aged  wife  across  the  channel. 
"He  did  not  wish  to  remain  in  London,"  she  says. 
"Too  many  relationships  would  have  hindered  him 
from  collecting  himself  and  from  preserving  that  dig- 
nity of  solitude,  that  reserve  of  a  refugee,  which 
was  proper  to  his  situation.  He  preferred  to  accom- 
pany us  to  a  small  country  town,  where  for  six 
weeks  he  lived  a  modest  life,  very  retired,  interested 
only,  but  passionately  interested,  in  the  reading  of 
English  newspapers,  which  we  translated  for  him. 
When  we  apprised  him  of  the  burning  of  Rheims 
Cathedral,  he  replied  with  a  laugh  of  incredulity. 
For  two  days  he  refused  to  believe  it.  It  seemed 


OXFORD 

UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

AMERICAN  BRANCH 
NEW  YORK 


HISTORIES  OF  THE 

BELLIGERENTS  SERIES 

Italy 

Mediaeval  and  Modern 

A  History  by   E.   M.   JAMISON,   C.   M.   ADY.   K.   D. 

VEBNON  and  C.  SANFOKD  TERRY. 

Crown  8vo  (7%x5*4),  pp.  viii+664,  with  eight 
maps  and  a  preface  by  H.  W.  C.  Davis.. Net,  $2.90 

"A  clear  outline  of  the  subject  *  *  *  a  bril- 
liant piece  of  work." — London  Times. 

The  Balkans 

A  History  of  Bulgaria,  Serbia,  Greece,  Rumania, 
Turkey 

By  N.   FOEBES,  A.   J.   TOYNBEE,  D.   MITRANY.   and 

D.  G.  HOGARTH. 

Cr.  8vo   (7%x5&),  pp.  408,  three  maps.. Net,  $2.25 

"Accurate,  singularly  free  from  bias,  and  pleasant 
to  read,  it  gives  a  surprisingly  clear  view  of  a  con- 
fusing and  often  difficult  subject." — Athenaeum. 

Portugal  Old  and  Young 

An  Historical  Study  by  GEORGE  YOUNG. 

Crown  8vo  (7%x6%),  pp.  viii+842,  with  a  frontis- 
piece and  5  maps Net,  $2.25 

A  new  volume  in  the  Histories  of  the  Belligerents 
Series  explaining  why  Portugal  is  at  war. 

"One  of  the  best  written  volumes  in  a  well-kno_wn 
series.  He  knows  all  about  Portugal  and  writes 
about  it  in  a  lively  way." — Daily  News. 

"Brightly  written  and  thoughtful  volume." — Lon- 
don Times. 

The  Evolution  of  Prussia 

The  Making  of  an  Empire 

By  J.  A.   R.   MARRIOTT  and  C.   GRANT  ROBERTSON. 
Crown  8vo  <7%x5&),pp.  460, with  8  maps. Net, $2.26 
"A    valuable   book    in    a   time   of   need.      No    other 
English  treatment  of  the  subject  shows  equal  learn- 
ing and  philosophic  insight.     We  may  wait  long  be- 
fore the  appearance  of  another  book  which  presents 
so   well   within   three   hundred   pages   the  origin   and 
growth  of   Prussia   down   to   1848." — Nation. 


The  Eastern  Question 


An  Historical  Study  in  European  Diplomacy  by 
J.  A.  R.  MARRIOTT.  With  nine  maps  and  ap- 
pendixes giving  list  of  Ottoman  Rulers,  Gene- 
alogies and  the  Shrinkage  of  the  Ottoman  Em- 
pire in  Europe,  1817-1914. 

8vo    (9x6),    pp.    viii,    466 Net.    $5.60 

"An  able  and  scholarly  work." — London  Spectator. 


Being  a  detailed  account  of  the  Progress  and  Rise 
of  the  Japanese  Empire.  By  ROBERT  P.  PORTER, 
1916.  A  re-issue  of  the  author's  Full  Recognition 
of  Japan,  with  a  new  introductory  survey  of 
Japan's  share  in  the  war  and  the  questions  aris- 
ing therefrom. 

Medium    8vo    (9^x6%),    pp.    814,    with    7    colored 
maps    Net,  $2.50 

The  Provocation  of  France 

Fifty  Years  of  German  Aggression 

By  JEAN  CHARLEMAGNE  BRACQ. 

Crown  8vo   (7%x5),  cloth,  pp.  vii+202.  .Net,  $1.25 

"A   scholarly   work,    combed   out,    cut   to    the   bone 

and  as  brisk  reading  as  Macaulay." — Brooklyn  Eagle. 


36 


THE   DIAL 


[January  3 


JUST  ISSUED 


by  the  General  Education  Board 
"Latin  and  the  A.  B.  Degree" 

By  CHARLES  W.  ELIOT 

"The  Worth  of  Ancient  Literature 
to  the  Modern  World" 

By  VISCOUNT  BRYCE 

"The  Function  and  Needs  of  Schools 
of  Education  in  Universities 
and  Colleges" 

By  EDWIN  A.  ALDERMAN 

Copies  of  these  papers  may  be  obtained  by  addressing 
General  Education  Board,  61  Broadway,  New  York  City 


BOOKS 


OUR  stock  of  some  thirty  thousand  carefully  se- 
lected volumes  affords  the  book-lover  a  wide 
range  to  choose  from. 

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probably  not  exceeded  by  that  of  any  other  dealer 
in  this  country. 

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cluded while  the  work  of  the  minor  neglected  poets 
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In  Biography,  Belles  Lettres  and  in  Drama  our 
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This  new  and  revised  Catalogue  is  now  ready  and  will  be 

sent  free  on  request. 
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AMERICANA 

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to  him  an  invention  of  the  press  designed  to  stir  the 
public  and  increase  recruiting.  At  last,  convinced, 
he  said,  with  inexpressible  sadness:  'The  biblical 
times  have  come  back  again,  the  great  invasions  of 
the  Medes  and  the  Persians.  Has  the  world,  then, 
reached  the  point  where  it  deserves  to  be  punished 
for  the  egotistical  epicureanism  in  which  it  has 
slumbered?'  After  this  he  became  absorbed  in  his 
own  thoughts." 

Is  Japan  a  menace  or  a  comrade?  This  is  the 
question  discussed  by  Jabez  T.  Sunderland  in  "Ris- 
ing Japan,"  which  is  announced  by  Putnams.  The 
author  spent  1895  in  India  on  a  commission  from 
the  British  Unitarian  Association  and  in  1913  was 
Billings  Lecturer  in  Japan,  China,  and  India. 

The  first  number  of  The  Miscellanea,  published 
by  the  Brothers  of  the  Book,  Chicago,  has  just  been 
issued.  It  is  designed  as  a  medium  through  which 
members  may  keep  in  touch  with  the  activities  of 
the  society.  This  issue  contains  information  about 
several  of  the  recent  publications  of  the  society  and 
several  which  are  now  out  of  print. 

In  addition  to  their  Modern  Library,  Messrs. 
Boni  and  Liveright  are  also  publishing  a  number  of 
important  volumes,  one  of  the  most  recent  of  which 
is  a  translation  of  the  Russian  masterpiece,  "A 
Family  of  Noblemen,"  by  M.  Y.  Saltykov.  This  is 
the  first  complete  English  version  to  be  published. 

Isaac  Don  Levine,  author  of  "The  Russian  Revo- 
lution" (Harper's),  says  of  Lenine,  the  supposed 
power  of  the  new  revolution,  that  to  him  "a  capi- 
talist was  worse  than  a  king.  An  industrial  mag- 
nate or  leading  banker  was  to  him  more  perilous 
than  a  Czar  or  a  Kaiser.  The  working  classes,  he 
said,  had  nothing  to  lose  whether  their  rulers  were 
German,  French,  or  British.  The  imperative  thing 
for  them  to  do  was  to  prepare  for  a  social  revolu- 
tion. Meanwhile,  preached  Lenine,  the  Russian  or 
any  other  labor  class  might  as  well  live  under  the 
rule  of  the  Hohenzollerns  as  be  governed  by  a 
capitalistic  organization." 

"Among  Us  Mortals,"  the  volume  of  cartoons  by 
W.  E.  Hill  with  text  by  Franklin  P.  Adams,  which 
is  a  feature  of  Houghton  Mifflin's  list  this  season, 
has  met  with  widespread  popularity  among  the  sol- 
diers. These  drawings  have  attracted  much  atten- 
tion in  the  New  York  Tribune,  striking  a  new  and 
very  penetrating  note  in  American  caricature. 

The  "Boy  Scouts'  Year  Book"  for  1917  contains 
messages  from  President  Wilson,  Colonel  Roose- 
velt, and  from  many  Cabinet  officers  and  mem- 
bers of  Congress.  Boy  scout  activities  in  connection 
with  the  war  are  featured.  The  book  is  published 
by  D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

The  spies!  "What  is  the  situation  in  the  United 
States?"  poses  Horst  von  der  Goltz  in  "My  Ad- 
ventures as  a  Secret  Agent"  (McBride).  "Ger- 
many has  installed  in  this  country  thousands  of 
men,  whose  nationality  and  habits  are  such  as  to 
protect  them  from  suspicion,  who  work  silently  and 
alone,  because  they  know  that  their  very  lives  de- 
pend upon  their  silence,  and  who  are  in  communi- 
cation with  no  central  spy  organization,  for  the 
very  simple  reason  that  no  such  organization  ex- 
ists. There  is  no  clearing  house  for  spy  informa- 
tion in  this  country.  There  are  no  'master  spies.' " 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


37 


LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 


[The  following   list,  containing  97  titles,  includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.'] 

POETRY. 

A  Book  of  Verse  on  the  Great  "War.  Edited  by  W. 
Reginald  Wheeler.  8vo,  184  pages.  Yale  Uni- 
versity Press.  $2. 

English  Folk  Songa  from  the  Southern  Appala- 
chian*. Collected  by  Olive  Dame  Campbell  and 
Cecil  J.  Sharp.  8vo,  341  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons.  $3.50. 

The  Everlasting  Quest.  By  Henry  L.  Webb.  12mo, 
114  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.50. 

At  Vesper  Time.  By  Ruth  Baldwin  Chenery.  12mo, 
89  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  $1.25. 

The  Kid  Has  Gone  to  the  Colors.  By  William  Her- 
schell.  Illustrated,  12mo,  137  pages.  Bobbs- 
Merrill  Co.  $1.25. 

Kitchener  and  other  poems.  By  Robert  J.  C.  Stead. 
12mo,  163  pages.  The  Musson  Book  Co.,  To- 
ronto. $1. 

Songs  of  the  Stalwart.  By  Grantland  Rice.  12mo, 
253  pages.  D.  Appleton  &  Co.  $1. 

Airy  Nothings.  By  George  Gordon.  12mo,  144 
pages.  Sturgis  &  Walton  Co.  $1.25. 

Barbed  Wire.  By  Edwin  Ford  Piper.  8vo,  125 
pages.  The  Midland  Press. 

A  Garden  of  Remembrance.  By  James  Terry  White. 
16mo,  132  pages.  James  T.  White  &  Co. 

FICTION. 

A  Woman  of  Genius.     By  Mary  Austin.     12mo,  515 

pages.     Houghton  Mifflin  Co.     $1.50. 
Christmas  Tales  of  Flanders.     Illustrated,   4 to,    145 

pages.     Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.     $3. 
The  Emerald   of  the  Incas.     By  Charles  Normand. 

Translated  from  the  French  by  S.  A.  B.  Harvey. 

Illustrated,  8vo,  215  pages.     Duffleld  &  Co.     $2. 
Temporary  Heroes.    By  Cecil  Sommers.    Illustrated, 

12mo,  244  pages.     John  Lane  Co. 
The  Shadow  on  the  Stone.     By  Marguerite  Bryant. 

12mo,  382  pages.     Duffleld  &  Co.     $1.35. 
Laughing   Bill    Hyde    and    Other    Stories.      By    Rex 

Beach.     12mo,  393  pages.     Harper  &  Bros.     $1.35. 
The    Adventuress.      By    Arthur    B.    Reeve.      With 

frontispiece,   12mo,   343   pages.     Harper  &  Bros. 

$1.35. 
Mark  Tidd  Editor.    By  Clarence  Budington  Kelland. 

Illustrated,  287  pages.     Harper  &  Bros.     $1.25. 
A  Little  Book  for  Christmas.     By  Cyrus  Townsend 

Brady.     12mo,  178  pages.     G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 

$1.25. 

BOOKS    OF   REFERENCE. 

American  Jewish  Year  Book.  5678.  Edited  by  Sam- 
son D.  Oppenheim.  With  frontispiece,  12mo,  710 
pages.  Jewish  Publication  Society. 

Translations  of  Foreign  Novels.  A  selected  list 
by  Minerva  E.  Grimm.  12mo,  84  pages.  The 
Boston  Book  Co.  $1. 

The  Rockefeller  Foundation,  Annual  Report,  1016. 
12mo,  458  pages.  The  Rockefeller  Foundation. 

Where  to  Sell  Manuscripts.  By  W.  L.  Gordon. 
12mo,  70  pages.  The  Standard  Publishing  Co.  $1. 

A  Manual  of  Style.  By  the  Staff  of  the  University 
of  Chicago  Press.  12mo,  300  pages.  The  Uni- 
versity of  Chicago  Press.  $1.50. 

Fifteen  Thousand  Useful  Phrases.  By  Grenville 
Kleiser.  12mo,  453  pages.  Funk  &  Wagnalls 
Co.  $1.60. 

RELIGION. 

Encyclopedia    of   Religion    and    Ethics.      Edited    by 

James    Hastings.      Volume    9.      4to,    911    pages. 

Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
Studies   In   the   Book   of   Daniel.      By    Robert   Dick 

Wilson.     8vo,   402  pages.     G.  P.   Putnam's  Sons. 

$3.50. 
Militant  America   and   Jesus   Christ.     By   Abraham 

Mitrie    Rihbany.      16mo,    74    pages.      Houghton 

Mifflin  Co.     65  cts. 
The  Gospel  of  Mark.    By  Charles  R.  Erdman.    12mo, 

200    pages.     Presbyterian  Board   of  Publication. 

60  cts. 
Spirit  Power.     By  May   Thirza  Churchill.     Fourth 

edition.      12mo,    64    pages.      E.    P.   Dutton   &   Co. 

60   cts. 


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was  first  published  in  1911,  these  events  have  not 
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American  City  Progress  and  the  Law 

By  HpWARD  LEE  McBAIN,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of 
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The  Hewitt  Lectures,  1917. 

Dynamic  Psychology 

By  ROBERT  SESSIONS  WOODWORTH,  Ph.D., 
Professor  of  Psychology,  Columbia  University. 
12mo,  cloth,  $1.50  net.  The  Jesup  Lectures,  1917. 

Columbia  University  Studies  in 
the  History  of  Ideas 

A  collection  of  essays  by  members  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  Philosophy,  Columbia  University.  8vo, 
cloth,  $2.00  net. 

Constitutional  Government  in 
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COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

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PRESIDENT  WILSON 

in  a,  recent  address  described  the  Bagdad  Rail- 
way  project  as   "The  Heart  of   the  Matter." 

THE  WAR  AND 
THE  BAGDAD  RAILWAY 

The  Story  of  Asia  Minor  and 
Its  Relation  to  the  Present  Conflict 

By  MORRIS   JASTROW,    Jr.,    Ph.D.,   LL.D. 
14  illustrations  and  a  map.  Cloth,  $1.50  net. 

This  is  a  Different  Kind  of  War  Book 

This  is  a  different  kind  of  war  book  but  one  of 
the  utmost  importance  by  an  authority  on  Eastern 
civilization.  Professor  Jastrow  takes  up  a  subject 
that  has  not  been  covered  in  the  war  literature  of 
today.  The  story  of  the  Bagdad  Highway  is  roman- 
tic and  fascinating.  The  possession  of  it  has  always 
determined  the  fate  of  the  East.  Europe  is  fighting 
for  its  control  today  just  as  the  Persians,  Romans, 
Greeks,  Arabs,  and  Turks  fought  for  it  in  the  past. 
To  understand  its  importance  and  the  relation  it 
bears  to  our  civilization  is  to  understand  one  of  the 
underlying  causes  of  the  war,  and  one  to  which  the 
utmost  consideration  must  be  given  at  the  Peace 
Settlement.  Professor  Jastrow's  prophetic  look  into 
the  future  will  be  of  intense  interest  to  serious  stu- 
dents of  the  problems  of  the  war.  No  less  important 
and  thrilling  is  the  story  of  Asia  Minor,  here  told 
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time.  The  history  of  the  region  illuminates  the 
world  wide  significance  of  the  railway.  The  care- 
fully selected  illustrations  are  a  feature,  as  is  also 
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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


39 


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GREAT   WAR,   BALLADS 

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40  THE     DIAL  [January  3,  1918 


TO  LIBRARIANS,  PUBLIC,  SCHOOL,  OR  HOME 


That  Rare  Thing — 

A  Good  Book  for  Girls 

H.  M.  H.  writes  to  May  Lamberton  Becker  of  "The  Readers 
Guide"  department  of  THE  NEW  YORK  EVENING  POST:  "My 
little  sister,  who  is  nine  years  old  and  has  just  joined  the  public  library, 
asked  me  for  a  list  of  books  that  I  thought  she  would  like  to  read.  .  .  . 
I  should  appreciate  your  advice." 

Mrs.  Becker  gives  a  list  of  such  books  and  then  adds : 

So  far,  I  have  kept  closely  to  books  sure  to  be  in  the  Children's 
Room  of  any  library.  There  is,  however,  a  book  that  has  just  been 
published,  and  that  may  therefore  have  not  yet  been  included — that 
it  will  not  be  is  unthinkable,  for  it  stands  a  chance,  and  a  very  good 
chance,  of  entering  that  only  permanent,  unshakable  body  of  "immor- 
tals" in  American  literature,  the  small  but  firmly  defended  group  of 
children's  favorites.  Conservative  in  this,  as  in  everything,  children  go 
on  reading  "Little  Women"  over  and  over,  one  generation  after  an- 
other, while  wave  after  wave  of  juveniles  breaks  unheeded  at  their  feet. 
But  this  book,  "UNDERSTOOD  BETSY,"  by  Dorothy  Canfield 
(Illustrated,  $1.30  net),  has  come  to  stay;  the  children  say  so.  When 
it  was  coming  out  in  St.  Nicholas,  a  mother  of  my  acquaintance  used 
to  read  it  aloud  to  a  group  of  children  of  all  ages,  and  I  have  seen  it 
charm  children  in  this  city  as  well  as  those  in  the  same  sort  of  Vermont 
town  as  that  where  it  happens.  A  little  girl  who  has  been  nearly  "un- 
derstood" to  death  by  a  devoted  relative  who  has  kept  her  feeling  her 
own  spiritual  pulse,  goes  to  Vermont  on  a  farm  and  is  gloriously  let 
alone ;  that  is  practically  all  there  is  to  it,  but  it  is  enough  to  hold  laugh- 
ter, some  excitement,  and  all  outdoors. 


Dorothy  Canfield' s  UNDERSTOOD  BETSY  (4th  printing,  $1.30  net}.     By  the  author 
of  "The  Bent  Twig. " 


HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


PRESS    OF    THE    BLAKELY-OSWALD    PRINTING    CO.,    CHICAGO. 


Notice   to   Reader. 

When  you  finish  reading  this  magazine  place 
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THE  DIAL 


Fortnightly  Journal  of 

CRITICISM  AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


Volume  LXIV. 
No.  758. 


CHICAGO,  JANUARY  17,  1918 


15  cts.  a  copy. 
fS.  a  year. 


IN  THIS  ISSUE 


War's  Heritage  to  Youth 

By  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 

The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 


By  H.  M.  K ALLEN 


IMPORTANT 

JANUARY  ANNOUNCEMENTS 

PUBLISHED 

TO  ARMS! 

SONGS  OF  THE  GREAT  WAR 

By  LAURA  E.  RICHARDS 

Author   of   "Captain   January,"   "Hildegarde-Margaret"  Series,  etc. 

The   daughter   of   Julia    Ward    Howe    has    dedicated    this    book    to    her    famous    mother. 
A  splendid  volume  for  the  boys  who  are  going  "over  there" — one  to  cheer  them  and  help  them 

"in  the  trenches."  Net,  ?BC 

READY  JANUARY 


TWO  NEW  VOLUMES  IN  THE 

FLORIDA  THE  LAND  OF 
ENCHANTMENT 

By  NEVIN  O.  WINTER 

Author  of  "Texas,  the  Marvelous,"  etc. 
A  literary  and   artistic  account  of  one  of 
our  loveliest  and  most  famous  states. 


'SEE  AMERICA  FIRST"  SERIES 

COLORADO  THE  QUEEN 
JEWEL  OFTHE  ROCKIES 

By  MAE  LACY  BAGGS 

Authentic  historically  and  intensely  read- 
able is  this  story  of  Colorado  from  the  Days 
of  the  Cliff  Dwellers. 


No  loyal  American  will  want  to  miss  reading  these  fascinating  books  about  the  his- 
tory, romance  and  progress  of  different  sections  of  our  great  country.  Each  volume,  profusely 
illustrated  in  color  and  duogravure,  Net,  $3.50.  Send  for  the  descriptive  color  circulars  of  the 
"See  America  First"  Series. 


THE  MOUNT  BLOSSOM 
GIRLS 

By  ISLA  MAY  MULLINS 

A   Sequel  to  "The  Blossom  Shop,"  etc. 

The  fourth  and  last  of  the  Blossom  Shop 
stories,  showing  May  and  Gene  as  settle- 
ment workers,  just  out  of  college. 

"The  Little  Colonel  Series  finds  an  ad- 
mirable second  in  the  Blossom  Shop  stories." 
— Louisville  Post.  Illustrated,  Net,  $1.35 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  THE 
RED  FLAME 

By  GEORGE  BARTON 

Author  of  "The  World's  Greatest  Military 

Spies  and  Secret  Service  Agents." 
A  real  detective  thriller  from  the  pen  of 
the  man  whose  hobby  is  the  detection  and 
exposure  of  crime.  The  book  lovers  of 
mystery  tales  have  been  waiting  for.  And 
the  soldiers  will  like  it.  Illus.,  Net,  $1.35 


THE  PAGE  COMPANY 


53  BEACON  STREET,  BOSTON 


42 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


LIPPINCOTT 
BOOKS 


1792 


1918 


FOR   8AXJ2  AT  AUL 

BOOKSTORES 

J  B.  LJPPINCOTT  COMPANY 

MONTBBAX.      PHILADELPHIA       LOMMOk 


Just  Published 


Leadership 
and  Military 


By  Lt.  Col. 
LINCOLN   C.   ANDREWS, 

U.  S.  A. 

Commandant    Officers    Training 
Camp,    Camp   Dix,    N.   J. 

Author  of  "Fundamentals  of 
Military  Service." 

Limp  leather  binding.    Boxed  $2 
Limp  cloth,  $1. 

The  ability  to  lead  is  indis- 
pensable to  advancement  in  the 
army.  Everyone  should  prepare 
to  be  a  leader  or  an  officer. 
This  is  the  only  American  book 
that  gives  practical  advice  on 
Leadership,  tells  how  to  handle 
men,  how  to  train  them,  how  to 
enthuse  them  with  the  dis- 
cipline and  morale  necessary. 
It  has  been  prepared  for  begin- 
ners and  civilians.  If  you  have 
a  friend  or  relative  in  the  army 
send  it  to  him.  It  will  help 
him  win  his  spurs. 

The  army  offers  promotions 
by  the  hundred  thousands.  From 
every  million  Infantrymen  there 
will  be  selected  125,000  Cor- 
porals, 32,000  Sergeants,  8,000 
Lieutenants,  4,000  Captains. 
Every  Eighth  Man  a  Leader. 
The  one  determining  considera- 
tion in  these  selections  will  be 
"Has  he  the  Best  Qualifications 
for  Leadership?" 


PRESIDENT  WILSON 


in  o  recent  address  described  the  Bagdad  Rail- 
way  project   as   "The   Heart  of   the  Matter." 


The  Story  of  Asia  Minor  and  Its  Relation  to  the  Present  Conflict 

By  MORRIS  JASTROW,  Jr.,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

Valuable  Aid  14  illustrations  and  a  map.         Cloth,  $1.50  net 

New  York  Herald:  "Many  perplexing  aspects  of  the  great  world  war 
are  to  be  found  in  what  is  known  as  the  Near  East  question.  For  an 
intelligent  grasp  of  this  far  reaching  issue  the  general  reader  as  well  as 
the  serious  student  will  find  valuable  aid  in  "The  War  and  the  Bagdad 
Railway."  In  this  comprehensive  work  Dr.  Morris  Jastrow,  Jr.,  gives  a 
clear  and  exhaustive  exposition  of  the  subject,  a  political  and  economic 
outline  of  the  present  involved  situation.  Dr.  Jastrow  gives  us  the  East 
of  the  Tower  of  Babel  and  the  new  East  of  the  wireless." 

This  is  a  Different  Kind  of  War  Book 

This  is  a  different  kind  of  war  boo_k  but  one  of  the  utmost  importance 
by  an  authority  on  Eastern  civilization.  Professor  Jastrow  takes  up  a 
subject  that  has  not  been  covered  in  the  war  literature  of  today.  The 
story  of  the  Bagdad  Highway  is  romantic  and  fascinating.  The  possession 
of  it  has  always  determined  the  fate  of  the  East.  Europe  is  fighting  for 
its  control  today  just  as  the  Persians,  Romans,  Greeks,  Arabs,  and  Turks 
fought  for  it  in  the  past.  To  understand  its  importance  and  the  relation 
it  bears  to  our  civilization  is  to  understand  one  of  the  underlying  causes 
of  the  war,  and  one  to  which  the  utmost  consideration  must  be  given  at 
the  Peace  Settlement.  Professor  Jastrow's  prophetic  look  into  the  future 
will  be  of  intense  interest  to  serious  students  of  the  problems  of  the  war. 
No  less  important  and  thrilling  is  the  story  of  Asia  Minor,  here  told 
in  the  author's  lucid  style  from  ancient  days  to  our  time.  The  history 
of  the  region  illuminates  the  world  wide  significance  of  the  railway.  The 
carefully  selected  illustrations  are  a  feature,  as  is  also  the  comprehensive 
map  of  the  Near  East,  in  which  both  the  ancient  and  modern  names  of  the 
important  places  are  indicated. 

For  January  Publication  postponed  from  December 

RELIGIONS  OF  THE  PAST 
aw*  AND  PRESENT 

Edited  by  DR.  J.  A.  MONTGOMERY 

PROFESSOR   OF    HEBREW,    UNIVERSITY    OF    PENNSYLVANIA 

Octavo.     450  pages.     $2.50  net 

Each  religion  which  has  influenced  the  world's  history  is  treated  in  this 
volume  by  a  specialist.  The  authors  are  members  of  the  Department  of 
Religious  History  at  the  University  of  Pennsylvania.  For  a  true  under- 
standing of  the  spirit  and  history  of  the  great  religions  it  would  be  diffi- 
cult to  find  a  better  book  than  this.  It  is  an  authoritative  and  stimulat- 
ing volume.  The  authors  have  aimed  at  the  truth  that  the  religion  of  a 
race  is  its  highest  cultural  expression.  The  ideals  and  the  significance 
in  modern  life  of  certain  great  religions  are  presented  with  directness 
and  accuracy.  Write  for  descriptive  circular. 

TRAINING  AND  REWARDS  OF 
THE  PHYSICIAN 

By  RICHARD  C.  CABOT,  M.D. 

8  illustrations.  AUTHOR  OF  "WHAT  MEN  LIVE  BY"  $1.25  n«t 

Dr.  Cabot  is  an  ideal  author  for  a  book  of  this  character.  He  writes 
with  enthusiasm.  What  he  has  to  say  about  the  profession  of  Medicine 
will  be  of  intense  interest  and  of  great  value  to  every  young  man  who  is 
thinking  of  studying  it.  Without  bowing  to  any  particular  ideals  of 
tradition,  the  author  gives  a  deal  of  wisdom  in  a  short  space  to  those 
considering  entering  the  medical  profession.  He  treats  the  subject  in  a 
fresh,  vigorous  fashion  so  that  it  will  appeal  to  not  only  the  students  and 
doctors  but  also  the  public.  This  volume  is  of  particular  merit  in  that 
series  of  which  all  the  volumes  are  worthy  of  being  put  into  the  hands  of 
young  Americans. 


The  Story  of  "Over  There' 


'A  Masterpiece." — N.  Y.San 


HOW  TO  LIVE  AT  THE  FRONT 


By  HECTOR  MacQUARRIE,  B.  A.  Cantab 
Lieutenant,  Royal  Field  Artillery 


12  illustrations.     $1.25  net. 


Your  Son,  Brother  or  Friend  in  Arms, — 

It  is  your  duty  to  instruct  and  advise  him  as  to 
what  is  in  store  for  him  at  the  front.  This  book 
will  give  you  the  facts, — read  it  and  counsel  your 
boy  for  his  physical  and  spiritual  good,  or  better  still 
send  him  a  copy  and  call  his  attention  to  the  chapters 
that  you  think  will  be  of  the  greatest  value  to  him. 


//  You  Are  an  American 

Read  it  for  the  true  facts  it  will  give  you  of  the 
living  and  working  and  fighting  under  actual  war 
conditions.  It  will  help  you  understand  what  diffi- 
culties face  our  army,  both  officers  and  men,  in 
France.  You  will  thereafter  read  the  war  news 
and  letters  from  the  front  with  deeper  sympathy 
and  greater  understanding. 


When  writing  to  advertisers  please  mention  THE  DIAL. 


1918]  THE    DIAL  43 


MAN'S  SUPREME  INHERITANCE 

By  F.  MATTHIAS  ALEXANDER.      Introduction  by  Professor  John  Dewey. 

The  book  deals  with  our  civilization  from  the  Christian  Era  to  the  Crisis  of  1914,  reveals  the 
fundamental  defects  of  the  social,  political,  economic,  ethical,  moral  and  educational  systems.  It  does 
more — it  offers  an  original  convincing  and  practical  solution,  and  shows  that  this  is  the  psychological 
moment  for  readjustment  towards  a  new  and  perfect  civilization. 

The  Perils  and  Beauties  of  Campaigning  in  Africa 

MARCHING  ON  TANGA 

By  CAPTAIN  FRANCIS  BRETT  YOUNG 

Already  in  its  Third  Edition  in  England  Net,  $1.50 

The  story  of  a  British  Campaign  in  German  East  Africa  bringing  out  with  equal  vividness  the  won- 
ders of  the  African  tropics  and  the  unique  character  of  the  extraordinary  military  undertaking. 

Westminster  Gazette: — "It  is  hard  to  recall  any          Everyman: — "A  magical  book." 
book  about  this  war  of  a  quality  at  once  so  imag-  The  Globe: — "It  could  not  have  been  done  bet- 

inative  and  so  real."  ter." 

The  Scotsman : — "As  engrossing  as  any  romance." 

TO   ARMS!     (La  Veillee  des  Armes) 

Translated  from  the  French  of  Marcelle  Tinayre  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey.  Intro- 
duction by  John  Finley.  In  France  it  has  reached  its  48th  edition.  Net>  $!-50 
From  Dr.  Finley's  introduction: — "As  one  passes  from  the  early  chapters  of  this  book,  with  their 
pretty  homely  incidents  to  the  later  chapters,  sees  all  France  moved  by  tenderness  and  brought  sud- 
denly into  one  great  family,  we  can  hardly  regret  that  France  was  called  to  this  Veillie  des  Armes 
in  a  cause  that  exalts  its  every  defender." 

A  CRUSADER  OF  FRANCE 

Letters  of  Captain  Ferdinand  Belmont  (Killed  in  Action  1915).    Translation  from 
the  French  of  G.  Frederic  Lees.     Introduction  by  Henry  Bordeaux. 

A  book  of  extraordinary  beauty  and  winning  personality,  well  entitled  to  be  called  "The  French  Stu- 
dent in  Arms."  No  purer  life  has  given  itself  for  France,  no  more  exalted  filial  piety  has  ever  ex- 
pressed itself  more  fully,  more  constantly  or  more  sincerely  than  the  writer  of  these  beautiful  letters. 

THE  LOST  NAVAL  PAPERS 

By  BENNETT  COPPLESTONE  NH,  $1.50 

London  Punch  says: — "Mr.  Copplestone  has  shown  unusual  boldness  in  connecting  the  activities  of  his 
super-policeman,  Dawson,  with  the  more  prominent  events  of  the  War.  We  earnestly  desire  that  he 
should  devote  another  volume — a  whole  one — to  the  inimitable  Madame  Guilbert;  but  whatever  he 
writes  about  will  be  welcome,  provided  it  be  written  in  the  vein  of  the  volume  before  us." 

WHAT  YOUR  GOVERNMENT  DOES  FOR  YOU 

By  ALISSA  FRANC 

Telling  every  man,  woman  and  child  within  its  protection  about  the  American  Government,  as  it 
operates  to-day.  How  the  government  helps  each  one,  how  each  one  can  help  the  government. 

REPRESENTATIVE  PLAYS  OF 
AMERICAN  DRAMATISTS 

Edited  With  an  Introduction  to  Each  Play  by  Montrose  J.  Moses 
Volumn  One  (1765-1819)  now  ready  3  vols.,  each,  net,  $3.00 

The  first  volume  presents  the  important  native  plays  of  the  early  years  of  the  American  stage, 
many  of  which  are  now  so  rare  that  they  are  beyond  the  possibilities  of  the  general  reader. 

THE  SOCIAL  PLAYS  OF  ARTHUR  WING  PINERO 

Edited   With  a  General   Introduction   and   a  Critical   Preface  to  Each  Play  by 
Clayton  Hamilton  Volume  one  now  ready.    5  vols.,  each,  net,  $2.00 

Contains  "The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray"  and  "The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebbsmith."  This  issue  will  in- 
augurate the  first  Authorized  Library  Edition  of  the  masterpieces  of  the  greatest  living  playwright  in 
the  English  speaking  world. 

Postage  Extra.  At  All  Bookstores 

E.  P.  DUTTON  &  CO.     681  Fifth  Avenue     New  York  City 

When  writing  to  advertisers  please  mention  THE  DIAL. 


44 


THE   DIAL 


[January  17 


Longmans,  Green  &  Co/s  Publications 


|      Correspondence  of  John  Henry 
Newman  with  John  Keble 
and  Others— 1839  to  1845 

Edited    at    the    Birmingham    Oratory.      8vo.      $4.00 

net. 

The  volume  contains  not  only  Newman's  letters, 
bat  those  of  his  correspondents,  by  kind  permission 
of  their  representatives. 

"To  read  these  letters  is  to  be  brought  into  the 
=  very  presence  of  some  of  the  most  interesting  men 
of  their  generation." — Glasgow  Herald. 

The  Commonwealth  at  War 

By  A.   F.   POLLARD,  M.A.,   Litt.D.,   Fellow  of  All 
Souls  College,  Oxford,  and  Professor  of  English  His- 
tory in  the  University  of  London.    8vo.    $2.25   net. 
"Professor  Pollard  writes  not  only  with  very  great 
knowledge,     but     with     very    great     wisdom." — Daily 
News    (London). 

"Professor  Pollard  is  combative.     There  are   chap- 
ters which  are  for  all  the  world  like  the  rattle  of  a 
machine  gun   in   action.     But   the    fighting   is   always 
fair  as  well  as  skilful,  and  is  for  impersonal  aims." 
E         — The  Times    (London). 

Life  and  Letters 

of  Thomas  Hodgkin, 

Fellow  of  University  College,  D.C.L. 
Oxford  and  Durham,  D.Litt.,  Dublin 

By   LOUISE    CREIGHTON,    Author   of   "Life   and 
Letters   of   Mandell   Creighton,   D.    D.,"    etc.     With 
Portraits   and  Other  Illustrations.     8vo.     $4.60  net. 
Thomas   Hodgkin   was   a   leading   authority   on   the 
history    of    the    early    middle    ages,    his    books    being 
indispensable    to    all    students    of    that    period.      His 
chief  works  are  "Italy  and  Her  Invaders,"  8  volumes ; 
E         "The    Dynasty    of    the    Theodosius,"    "Theodoric    the 
S         Goth,"  and  the  opening  volume  of  Longmans'   "Poli- 
tical History  of  England." 

The  Sonl  of  Lee 

By  One  of  His  Soldiers,  RANDOLPH  H.  McKIM, 
Late  1st  Lieutenant  and  A.  D.  C.  Brig.-Gen.  Geo. 
H.  Stuart's  Brigade,  Major-Gen.  Edward  Johns- 
ton's Division,  Swell's  Corps,  Army  of  Northern 
Virginia ;  Author  of  "A  Soldier's  Recollections," 
etc.  With  Photogravure  Frontispiece.  Crown  8vo. 
$1.50  net. 

This   volume  seeks  to  portray   in  brief  outline  the 
S         achievements  of  the  soldier  who  by  general  consent  of 
the   best   military  critics   is    held  one  of  the  greatest 
commanders    of    history ;    and    at    the    same    time    to 
bring  out  those  exalted   human   qualities   which   have 
won   the  unstinted   admiration  of  the  most  profound 
E         students  of  character.     It  is  meant  to  be  even  more 
E         a  psychological  than  a  biographical  study. 
a 
|      Russian  Poets  and  Poems: 

Being  Biographical  and  Critical  Essays  on  Twenty 
Master  Poets,  Together  with  a  Selection  of  Their 
Poetry  Englished  in  the  Metres  of  the  Originals, 

§and  Introductory  Notes  on  Russian  Versification. 
By  Mme.  N.  JARINTZOV,  Author  of  "The  Rus- 
sians and  Their  Language."  Vol.  I,  "Classics," 
8vo.  with  portraits,  $3.60  net. 

The   Russian   poets   hitherto   have  been   ignored  by 
English  readers,  although  in  literary  merit  they  can 
challenge  comparison  with  the  Russian  novelists   and 
playwrights.      The   book   sets   out   to   make    the    Rus- 
sian   poets    familiar   to    the    general    reading    public. 
E         The   portraits    are   carefully   chosen    and   reproduced ; 
E         the  selections  are  representative,  preserving  as  far  as 
possible  the  Russian  spirit. 

VoL  II.     "MODERNS."     In  preparation. 


Catholic  Education: 

A  Study  of  Conditions 

By   Rev.   J.   A.    BURNS,    C.S.C.,    Ph.D.,   Author  of 
"Origin   and   Establishment    of  the   Catholic   School 
System,"   "Growth   and  Development  of  the   Catho- 
lic  School  System."    Crown   8vo.    $1.50  net. 
The  purpose   of   this   work   is  to  describe  the  con- 
dition   of    Catholic    education    in    the    United    States 
at   the   present   time,    and   to    direct   attenion    to   the 
problems  that  must  be  solved  in  order   to   insure  its 
future  progress.     After  a  survey  of  the  general  con- 
dition of  Catholic  education,   its   fundamental   princi- 
ples   are   examined    from    the    standpoint   of   religion 
and    morality,    as    well    as    of     modern    psychology. 
The    relations — ideal    and    actual — of    the   several    de- 
partments   of    Catholic    educational    activity    to    each 
other   are    next    discussed.      A   special   study    is    then 
made  of  each  of  these  departments,   including  grade 
schools,  high  schools  for  boys,  high  schools  for  girls, 
colleges  and  seminaries. 

Realty  and  Truth: 

A  Critical  and  Constructive  Essay 
Concerning  Know-lodge, 
Certainty,  and  Truth 

By  JOHN  G.  VANCE,  M.A.  (Cantab),  Ph.D. 
(Lov.),  Member  of  the  British  Psychological  So- 
ciety, Professor  of  Philosophy  at  Old  Hall.  Crown 
8vo.  $2.50  net. 

CONTENTS:  The  Realism  of  Plain  Men — Scepticism 
— Dogmatism — Descartes  and  the  Critical  Method — 
Rational  Doubt  and  Its  Results — The  Existence  of  a 
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— Certitude  and  Truth — The  Kantian  Theory  of 
Knowledge — The  Kantian  Theory  of  Knowledge:  A 
Criticism  and  a  Parallel — The  Possibility  of  Science 
and  Philosophy. 

Woman's  Effort: 

A  Chronicle  of  British  Women's  Fifty 
Years'  Struggle  for  Citizenship 
(1865-1914) 

By  A.  E.  METCALFE,  B.Sc.    (Lon.),   Late  H.M.I. 

(Secondary    Schools).      With    an    Introduction    by 

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8vo.  [In  the  press.] 

Selections  from  the 
Correspondence  of  the 
First  Lord  Acton 

Edited  with  an  Introduction  by  the  Rev.  John 
Neville  Figgis,  Litt.D.,  and  Reginald  Vere  Lau- 
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"In  his  letters  we  get  many  impressive  glimpses 
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statesmanship." — Morning  Post. 


|    LONGMANS,  GREEN  &  CO. 


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CONTENTS 


WAR'S  HERITAGE  TO  YOUTH  .  . 
THE  SWALLOWS  .  .  Verse  .  . 
THE  RHYTHMS  OF  FREE  VERSE  . 
THE  STRUCTURE  OF  LASTING  PEACE 

OUR  PARIS  LETTER 

LARGESSE     .     .     .     .     Verse     .     .     .     /.  M.  Batchelor      .     . 
GREEK  MEETS  GREEK  ......     H.  B.  Alexander    .     . 

KEATS  AS  THINKER William  Chase  Greene 

MR.  CHESTERTON'S  ENGLAND    .     .     .     R.  K.  Hack  .... 

EUGENE  BRIEUX Benj.  M.  Woodbridge 

A  THWARTED  COSMOPOLITE  ....     Henry  B.  Fuller    .     . 
A  PRIMER  OF  REVOLUTIONARY  IDEALISM  Randolph  Bourne  .     . 

A  LUCKY  THIRTEEN Louis  Untermeyer  .     . 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 71 

Oregon  the  Picturesque. — British  Foreign  Policy  in  Europe. — At  the  Right  of  the 
British  Line. — A  Soldier's  Memories. — The  Early  Life  of  Robert  Southey. — His- 
tory of  the  United  States. — The  Museum. — The  Religions  of  the  World. — Town 
Planning  for  Small  Communities. — Anthology  of  Swedish  Lyrics. — The  Life  of 
Ulysses  S.  Grant. — The  Life  and  Work  of  George  Sylvester  Morris. 

NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 77 

Mr.  Gushing  and  Mile,  du  Chastel — The  Tortoise. — His  Last  Bow. — Extricating 
Obadiah — The  Unholy  Three.— Sentiment.— The  Secret  Witness.— The  Green 
Tree  Mystery. — Fishpingle. — My  Wife. — Paradise  Auction. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 79 

BRIEFER  MENTION  .     w ...     .     .     .     .  81 

NOTES  AND  NEWS    .•.'.,.„ .     .     .     ....     .83 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  .  85 


Fan  Wyck  Brooks  .  .  .47 
Padraic  Colum  .  .  .  .50 
Amy  Lowell  .1  ,  .51 
H.M.Kallen  .  .  .  .  56 

Robert  Dell 59 

62 
63 
64 
65 
67 
68 
69 
70 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


CONRAD  AIKEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 
Contributing  Editors 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

HENRY  B.  FULLER  JOHN  E.  ROBINSON 

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Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892,  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
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Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel. 
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46 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17,  1918 


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VISCOUNT  MORLEY'S 

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THE  DIAL 

Si  jFottniff&tty  Journal  of  Criticism  and  2Dtecu00ion  of  literature  ano 


War's  Heritage  to  Youth 


Pierre  de  Lanux  is  the  ambassador  of  a 
group  of  ideas  and  tendencies,  in  their 
infancy  before  the  war,  and  still  at  the 
awkward  age  where  they  have  to  be  loved 
a  little  before  they  can  be  understood  at 
all.  His  "Young  France  and  New  Amer- 
ica" (Macmillan;  $1.25)  will  for  the  first 
time  bring  to  the  attention  of  many  people 
in  this  country  a  certain  question  over 
which  our  own  writers  have  long  been 
meditating,  without  being  able  to  arrive  at 
very  definite  conclusions.  He  has  in  mind, 
if  I  am  not  mistaken,  a  sort  of  conquest  of 
the  world  carried  out  by  the  common  ac- 
tion of  the  young  people  of  all  nations. 
Conquest,  I  say ;  I  mean  rather  the  slough- 
ing off  of  the  old  skin  of  society,  the  con- 
scious and  deliberate  formulation  of  a  new 
way  of  living,  a  new  way  of  seeing  life 
and  arranging  its  conditions. 

Let  us  say  that  industrialism  has  de- 
veloped among  the  nations  a  certain 
community  of  experience,  and  that  this 
community  of  experience  has  in  turn  given 
birth  to  certain  universal  desires,  emo- 
tions, hopes,  ideas,  and  plans,  universal, 
yes,  even  in  the  face  of  the  war.  Well, 
M.  de  Lanux  constantly  touches  upon  this 
group  of  desires,  emotions,  hopes,  ideas, 
and  plans.  The  writers  from  whom  he 
quotes,  the  leaders  of  the  young  French 
intellectual  class  during  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury, have  ardently  expressed  perhaps  the 
greater  part  of  them.  Is  it  necessary  to 
mention  Verhaeren,  for  example,  a  "good 
European"  if  there  ever  was  one,  the 
spokesman  of  modern  humanity?  And 
behind  Verhaeren  there  is  Whitman, 
whose  influence  on  the  French  literature 
of  to-day,  M.  de  Lanux  says,  may  well  be 
called  decisive.  What  do  they  portend, 
these  writers,  if  it  is  not  a  heightened 
common  consciousness  in  all  who  are  still 
young  enough  in  spirit  to  harbor  generous 
hopes  for  civilization,  a  common  aim  lead- 
ing them  to  struggle  for  a  world  that  is 


able  to  keep  and  use  the  whole  of  its  cre- 
ative energy? 

I  do  not  mean  that  M.  de  Lanux  devel- 
ops this  general  idea.  But  it  is,  I  believe, 
the  matrix  of  his  argument.  And  it  im- 
plies that  if  we  are  to  develop  this  common 
aim,  if  we  are  to  unite  in  this  common  pro- 
gramme, it  is  of  the  highest  importance  for 
us  to  understand  the  unique  conditions  that 
hamper  the  creative  life  in  each  individual 
country.  What  we  want  is  the  fullest  and 
the  freest  expression  of  every  people  along 
the  lines  of  its  own  genius,  for  it  is  of  the 
nature  of  the  creative  spirit  that  its  mani- 
festations cannot  conflict  with  one  another 
and  that  the  more  various  they  are  the 
richer  and  the  more  harmonious  life 
becomes.  That  is  why  M.  de  Lanux,  in 
selecting  certain  of  our  writers  to  trans- 
late into  French,  says  that  the  more  genu- 
inely American  they  are  the  more  France 
will  be  inclined  to  welcome  them. 

Now,  there  is  something  so  disinter- 
ested and  so  beneficent  in  the  French  spirit 
and  we  feel  so  keenly  our  debt  to  it  at  the 
present  time  that  we  are  much  more  dis- 
posed to  be  virtuous  for  France's  sake 
than  for  the  beautiful  eyes  of  virtue  itself. 
If  M.  de  Lanux  tells  us  that  his  country- 
men are  certain  to  rejoice  in  the  work  of 
Vachel  Lindsay,  whose  "muse  essentially 
belongs  to  Springfield,  Illinois,  and  knows 
no  other  shores,"  adding  that  "that  is  pre- 
cisely why  we  shall  be  glad  to  welcome 
her,"  is  it  not  the  simplest  of  all  deduc- 
tions that  we  ought  to  set  to  work  imme- 
diately producing  as  many  poets  as  the 
homely  muse  of  America  can  be  induced 
to  yield?  I  say  this  lightly  because  I  want 
to  take  advantage  of  the  present  French 
alliance  that  seems  to  appeal  so  strongly 
to  the  common  sense  of  the  average 
American  of  the  dominant  class.  In  point 
of  fact,  of  course,  it  implies  a  complete 
reorientation  of  American  life.  This  of 
itself  the  average  American  of  the  domi- 


48 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


nant  class  could  never  be  brought  to  con- 
template. But  how  far  would  he  not  be 
reconciled  to  it  if  he  were  obliged  to  see 
that  it  is  merely  the  logical  outcome  of  his 
own  loyalties  in  the  war  and  that  the  more 
closely  he  draws  to  any  of  the  societies  of 
Europe  the  more  he  will  have  to  surrender 
the  baser  elements  of  his  own  American- 
ism? 

We  speak  of  the  obligations  the  war 
has  laid  upon  us.  Have  we  in  fact  begun 
to  realize  how  grave  they  are?  We  say 
that  the  time  has  come  for  us  to  play  our 
part  among  the  societies  of  the  world.  But 
we  do  not  yet  see  that  this  means  infinitely 
more  than  "men,  money,  and  ships,"  that 
it  requires  nothing  less  than  a  mobiliza- 
tion of  new,  characteristic,  and  unique 
forces  for  the  universal  contest  between 
darkness  and  light.  Let  us  say  that,  thanks 
largely  to  our  isolation,  the  spirit  of  our 
life  in  the  past  has  been  innocent  of  many 
of  those  baser  elements  in  European  life 
that  produced  the  war.  Let  us  say  this  if 
we  find  it  comforting,  for  it  is  true.  But 
what  have  we  to  put  beside  those  finer  ele- 
ments in  European  life  that  the  war  has 
not  been  able  to  destroy  and  that  are  even 
now  giving  birth  to  whatever  the  future 
seems  to  hold  of  promise  for  the  human 
spirit?  A  great  deal,  I  should  say,  but 
little  indeed  in  presentable  form.  That  is 
what  enables  our  unkinder  critics  to  assert, 
with  a  certain  air  of  plausibility,  that  we 
really  have  nothing  at  all. 

We  have  been  a  primitive  people,  faced 
with  an  all  but  impossible  task.  But  is  it 
not  abundantly  evident  now  that  we  have 
accomplished  this  task  and  that  most  of 
the  customs  we  developed  in  the  process 
of  meeting  it  have  long  since  passed  into 
the  limbo  of  "good  customs  that  corrupt 
the  world"?  The  struggle  that  has  hith- 
erto engaged  us  has  been  a  struggle  not 
between  the  more  creative  and  the  less  cre- 
ative in  man,  but  between  man  and  nature, 
and  the  impulse  that  has  determined  it  has 
come  not  from  the  pressure  of  humane 
desires  within,  but  from  the  existence,  the 
allure,  and  the  eventual  decay  of  material 
opportunities  outside.  The  resultant  char- 
acter of  our  civilization  we  know  too  well. 
Like  children  whistling  in  the  dark,  we 
reassure  one  another  that  we  like  it  and 


find  it  good.  How  simple  we  are!  How 
little  we  know  of  the  realities  that  our 
unconscious  life  reveals  to  the  least  expe- 
rienced observer!  Have  we  never  tried  to 
explain  to  ourselves  that  weary,  baffled 
expression  one  sees  in  so  many  thousand 
middle-aged  American  faces,  typical 
American  faces,  "successful"  faces,  the 
faces  of  bewildered  men  like  Mr.  Henry 
Ford?  Has  it  never  occurred  to  us  to  com- 
pare Mr.  Ford's  face  with  Mr.  Ford's 
recent  career? 

I  think,  indeed,  one  could  hardly  find  a 
more  perfect  symbol  of  American  life  in 
the  present  decade  than  Mr.  Ford  pre- 
sents— Mr.  Ford  and  his  millions  and  his 
peace  ship  and  the  total  failure  of  these 
elements  to  coalesce  in  any  effective 
purpose.  If,  therefore,  we  are  dreaming 
of  a  national  culture,  it  is  because  our 
characteristic  idealism  has  itself  forced 
the  issue.  The  gifts  we  possess  are  unique 
gifts,  but  of  what  avail  are  these  gifts 
if  we  have  no  technique  that  enables  them 
to  find  their  mark?  And  what  sort  of 
technique  will  ever  do  this  that  has  not 
arisen  out  of  a  consciousness  of  those  gifts, 
that  is  not  peculiar  as  they  are  peculiar 
and  so  adapted  as  to  make  them  yield  their 
fullest  value?  We  want  to  share  in  the 
higher  life  of  the  world,  and  we  are  inca- 
pable of  doing  so  because  we  have  no 
organized  higher  life  of  our  own.  Could 
there  be  a  more  unmistakable  demand 
for  just  that  release,  that  synthesis  of  the 
creative  energies  of  the  younger  genera- 
tion which  M.  de  Lanux  proposes  and 
which  the  younger  generation  itself  de- 
sires more  deeply  even  than  it  knows  ? 

An  organized  higher  life — that  is  to 
say,  in  the  first  place,  a  literature  fully 
aware  of  the  difficulties  of  the  American 
situation  and  able,  in  some  sense,  to  meet 
them.  For  poets  and  novelists  and  critics 
are  the  pathfinders  of  society;  to  them  be- 
longs the  vision  without  which  the  people 
perish.  Our  literature  in  the  past  has 
failed  to  produce  sufficient  minds  capable 
of  taking  that  supreme  initiative;  in  con- 
sequence, it  has  fallen  by  its  own  weight 
under  the  chaos  of  our  life.  But  for  this 
it  has  not  only  the  best  of  excuses,  it  has 
also  at  least  one  striking  precedent. 
Could  there  be  a  stranger  parallel  to  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


49 


state  of  our  literature  to-day  than  the  state 
of  German  literature  in  1795,  as  Goethe 
describes  it  in  the  following  words : 

"Germany  is  absolutely  devoid  of  any  central 
point  of  social  culture,  where  authors  might  asso- 
ciate with  one  another  and  develop  themselves  by 
following,  each  in  his  own  special  branch,  one  aim, 
one  common  purpose.  Born  in  places  far  remote 
from  each  other,  educated  in  all  manner  of  ways, 
dependent  as  a  rule  upon  themselves  alone  and 
upon  the  impressions  of  widely  different  surround- 
ings; carried  away  by  a  predilection  in  favor  of 
this  or  that  example  of  native  or  foreign  litera- 
ture, driven  to  all  kinds  of  attempts,  nay,  even 
blunders,  in  their  endeavor  to  test  their  own  pow- 
ers without  proper  guidance;  brought  to  the  con- 
viction, gradually  and  only  after  much  reflection, 
that  they  ought  to  adopt  a  certain  course,  and 
taught  by  practice  what  they  can  actually  do;  ever 
and  anon  confused  and  led  astray  by  a  large  public 
devoid  of  taste  and  ready  to  swallow  the  bad  with 
the  same  relish  with  which  it  has  previously  swal- 
lowed the  good — is  there  any  German  writer  of 
note  who  does  not  recognize  himself  in  this  picture, 
and  who  will  not  acknowledge  with  modest  regret 
the  many  times  that  he  has  sighed  for  the  oppor- 
tunity of  subordinating  at  an  earlier  stage  of  his 
career  the  peculiarities  of  his  original  genius  to  a 
general  national  culture,  which,  alas!  was  nowhere 
to  be  found?  For  the  development  of  the  higher 
classes  by  other  moral  influences  and  foreign  liter- 
ature, despite  the  great  advantage  which  we  have 
derived  therefrom,  has  nevertheless  hindered  the 
Germans,  as  Germans,  from  developing  themselves 
at  an  earlier  stage." 

How  keenly  our  conscientious  writers 
of  the  older  generation  must  have  experi- 
enced that  regret,  those,  I  mean,  who  have 
never  quite  submitted  to  the  complacent 
colonialism  that  has  marked  so  much  of 
our  culture  in  the  past!  But,  unfortu- 
nately, they  have  left  no  testimonies 
behind  them.  They  have  considered  it  so 
much  an  obligation  to  justify  American 
life  merely  as  American  life  that  they  have 
glossed  their  own  tragedies,  not  real- 
izing perhaps  that  in  this  way  they  have 
glossed  also  the  failure  of  those  higher 
aims  that  they  themselves  were  born 
to  represent.  "Not  the  fruit  of  expe- 
rience, but  experience  itself,  is  the  end." 
That  is  the  essential  European  doctrine, 
and  it  is  because  Europeans  value  life  as 
such  that  so  great  a  part  of  their  vital 
energy  goes  into  the  production  of  minds 
capable  of  heightening  that  value,  minds 
that  are  able  to  keep  the  ball  of  life  roll- 
ing in  the  sight  and  to  the  glory  of  all. 
But  that  was  not  the  doctrine  of  our  for- 
bears; quite  the  contrary,  indeed.  In  con- 


sequence, the  writers  of  the  younger 
generation  inherit  all  the  difficulties  of 
their  elders,  and  at  compound  interest. 

For  the  intellectual  life  is  sustained  by 
the  emotional  life;  in  order  to  react  vig- 
orously against  one's  environment  one 
must  in  some  degree  have  been  emotion- 
ally nurtured  by  it.  Our  gifted  minds  lack 
too  generally  a  certain  sort  of  character 
without  which  talent  is  altogether  fickle 
and  fugitive;  but  what  is  this  character  if 
it  is  not  the  accumulated  assurance,  the 
spiritual  force  that  results  from  preceding 
generations  of  effort  along  the  lines 
toward  which  talent  directs  us?  Profes- 
sor Bruckner  points  out  in  his  history  of 
Russian  literature  that  "the  direct  transi- 
tion from  uncultured  strata  to  strenuous 
mental  activity  is  wont  to  avenge  itself: 
the  individual  succumbs  sooner  or  later 
to  the  unwonted  burden."  And  as  for  us 
young  people,  how  often  do  we  not  wear 
ourselves  out  constructing  the  preliminary 
platform  without  which  it  is  impossible  to 
create  anything!  We  have  so  few  ideals 
given  us  that  the  facts  of  our  life  do  not 
instantly  belie.  Is  it  strange,  therefore, 
that  we  have,  unlike  the  peoples  of 
Europe,  no  student  class  united  in  a  com- 
mon discipline  and  forming  a  sort  of  nat- 
ural breeding  ground  for  the  leadership 
that  we  desire? 

Nevertheless,  a  class  like  this  we  must 
have,  and  there  are,  I  think,  many  signs 
that  such  a  class  is  rapidly  coming  into 
existence.  To  begin  with,  the  sudden  con- 
traction of  the  national  cultures  of  Europe 
during  the  war,  owing  to  which  many  cur- 
rents of  thought,  formerly  shared  by  all, 
have  been  withdrawn  as  it  were  from 
circulation,  has  thrown  us  unexpectedly 
back  upon  ourselves.  How  many  drafts 
we  have  issued  in  the  past  upon  European 
thought,  unbalanced  by  any  investment 
of  our  own !  The  younger  generation  have 
come  to  feel  this  obligation  acutely.  At 
the  same  time  they  have  been  taught  to 
speak  a  certain  language  in  common  by 
the  social  movements  of  the  last  twenty 
years.  Acquainted  through  study  and 
travel  with  ranges  of  human  possibility 
which  their  ancestors  were  able  to  contem- 
plate only  in  the  abstract,  they  feel  that 
the  time  has  come  to  explore  these  possi- 
bilities and  to  test  them  out  on  our  own 


50 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


soil.  They  see  that  we  Americans  have 
never  so  much  as  dreamed  of  a  radically 
more  beautiful  civilization,  our  Utopias 
having  been  so  generally  of  the  nature  of 
Edward  Bellamy's,  complex  and  ingenious 
mechanisms,  liberating  the  soul  into  a  vac- 
uum of  ennui.  They  see  that  it  is  art  and 
literature  which  give  the  soul  its  higher 
values  and  make  life  worthy  of  interces- 
sion, and  that  every  effective  social  revo- 
lution has  been  led  up  to  and  inspired  by 
visionary  leaders  who  have  shown  men 
what  they  might  become  and  what  they 
miss  in  living  as  they  do.  "Thought," 
according  to  one  of  the  greatest  of  modern 
philosophers,  "is  strong  enough  to  disturb 
the  sense  of  satisfaction  with  nature;  it 
is  too  weak  to  construct  a  new  world  in 
opposition  to  it."  Only  desire  can  do  this, 
they  feel,  these  Americans  of  the  new  age; 
that  is  what  separates  them  not  only  from 
our  traditional  leaders,  but  also  from  our 
awakeners,  the  pragmatists,  who  are  so 
busily  unfolding  the  social  order  of  which 
they  form  an  integral  part. 

They  feel  this,  I  say;  they  feel  it  very 
deeply.  How  deeply  they  desire  another 
America,  not  like  the  America  of  to-day, 
grande  et  riche,  mals  desordonnee,  as  Tur- 
geniev  said  of  Russia,  but  harmonious  and 
beneficent,  a  great  America  that  knows 
how  to  use  the  finest  of  its  gifts !  Is  there 
in  this  fact  any  promise  for  the  future  ?  .  .  . 
Who  can  say?  So  many  of  the  best  minds 


of  our  own  younger  generation  have  al- 
ready, owing  to  the  aridity  of  our  cultural 
soil,  fallen  victims  to  the  creeping  paralysis 
of  the  mechanistic  view  of  life !  So  many, 
more  poetically  endowed,  have  lost  them- 
selves in  a  confused  and  feeble  anarchism ! 
So  few  Americans  are  able  even  to  imag- 
ine what  it  means  to  be  employed  by  civil- 
ization! 

Certainly  no  true  social  revolution  will 
ever  be  possible  in  this  country  till  a  race 
of  artists,  profound  and  sincere,  have 
brought  us  face  to  face  with  our  own 
experience  and  set  working  in  that  expe- 
rience the  leaven  of  the  highest  culture. 
For  it  is  exalted  desires  that  give  their 
validity  to  revolutions,  and  exalted  desires 
take  form  only  in  exalted  souls.  But  has 
there  ever  been  a  time  when  masses  of 
men  have  conceived  these  desires  without 
leaders'  appearing  to  formulate  them  and 
press  them  home?  We  are  lax  now,  too 
lax,  because  we  do  not  realize  the  respon- 
sibility that  lies  upon  us,  each  in  the  meas- 
ure of  his  own  gift.  Is  it  imaginable, 
however,  that  as  time  goes  on  and  side  by 
side  with  other  nations  we  come  to  see  the 
inadequacy  of  our  own,  we  shall  fail  to 
rise  to  the  gravity  of  our  situation  and 
recreate,  out  of  the  sublime  heritage  of 
human  ideals,  a  new  synthesis  adaptable 
to  the  unique  conditions  of  our  life? 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS. 


The  Swallows 


(The  Swallows  sang) — 
Alien  our  hearts  are 

From  your  springs  and  your  cotes  and  your 

glebes ; 
Secret  our  nests  are, 

Although  they  are  built  in  your  eaves; 
Uneaten  by  us  are 

The  grains  that  grow  on  your  fields ! 


(The  Weathercock  on  the  barn  said) — 
Not  alien  to  ye  are 

The  powers  of  un-earth-bound  beings: 
Their  curse  ye  would  bring 

On  our  springs  and  our  cotes  and  our  glebes, 
If  aught  should  befall 

Your  brood  that  is  bred  in  our  eaves! 


(And  the  Swallows  answered) — 
If  aught  should  befall 

Our  brood  that  's  not  travelled  the  seas, 
Your  temples  would  fall, 

And  blood  ye  should  milk  from  your  beaves : 
Against  them  the  curse  we  would  bring 

Of  un-earth-bound  beings! 

PADRAIC  COLUM. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


51 


The  Rhythms  of  Free  Verse 


An  artist  works  intuitively ;  a  scientist  deliber- 
ately. Yet  there  seems  no  reason  why  each 
should  not  recognize  the  value  of  the  other's 
method.  The  long  quarrel  between  artist  and 
scientist  is  based  upon  a  misconception.  Neither 
opponent  understands  the  peculiar  language  of 
the  other  well  enough  to  see  when  they  are  say- 
ing the  same  thing.  The  more  ignorant  artists 
exclaim  at  the  desecration  of  analysis;  the  more 
unimaginative  scientists  recoil  from  what  appears 
to  them  the  illogical  and  vague  mind:processes 
by  which  the  artist  gains  his  end.  But  let  us 
forget  the  quarrel;  let  us  see  what  can  be  done 
when  sympathy  takes  the  place  of  hostility,  and 
let  us  bear  in  mind  a  simple  and  incontrovertible 
fact ;  namely,  that  science  is  merely  proven  truth. 

I  have  been  a  good  deal  amused  lately  to 
read  in  many  of  the  reviews  of  Dr.  Patterson's 
book,  "The  Rhythm  of  Prose"  (Columbia  Uni- 
versity Press;  $1.50),  that  the  author  has  finally 
disposed  of  the  claims  of  vers  libre  to  be  con- 
sidered as  poetry,  and  that  my  theories  in  particu- 
lar have  hereby  suffered  a  total  eclipse.  This 
would  undoubtedly  be  an  unfortunate  thing  for 
me  if  it  were  true.  The  facts,  however,  are 
quite  otherwise.  Dr.  Patterson  and  I  are  not 
at  variance,  but  perfectly  in  accord;  and  for  a 
year  we  have  been  working  together  to  prove, 
not  my  theories  or  his,  but  the  facts.  It  is  true 
that  the  sun  has  not  yet  risen  in  this  first  book, 
"The  Rhythm  of  Prose,"  but  the  clouds  are 
beginning  to  disperse !  and  in  his  next  book,  which 
I  believe  he  is  to  call  "The  Making  of  Verse," 
there  is  a  good  chance  that  they  may  be  swept 
away  altogether.  Dr.  Patterson  has  given  me 
leave  to  state  his  new  theories  in  this  paper.  But, 
before  doing  so,  I  must  first  state  his  fundamen- 
tal bases  and  mine,  in  order  that  our  final 
agreement  may  be  fully  understood. 

In  the  first  place,  it  should  be  clearly  recog- 
nized that  Dr.  Patterson  does  not  use  the  words 
"verse"  and  "poetry"  as  interchangeable  terms. 
I  speak  advisedly,  for  I  charged  him  with  a  too 
narrow  conception  of  "poetry"  and  asked  him  if 
he  considered  metrical  verse  to  be  its  proper 
vehicle.  To  my  relief,  he  disclaimed  any  such 
idea,  and  explained  that  he  had  carefully  used  the 
word  "verse"  throughout  his  book,  never 
"poetry"  in  that  connection.  This  proved  at  the 
outset  the  refreshing  accuracy  of  the  scientific 
mind.  We  are  so  likely  to  consider  the  two 


words  as  interchangeable  that  the  distinction  has 
become  blurred  to  the  average  person.  The 
man  who  could  write  "by  listening  for  rhythm  in 
irregular  sequences,  in  the  criss-cross  lapping  of 
many  waves  upon  the  shore,  in  the  syncopating 
cries  of  a  flock  of  birds,  in  the  accelerating  and 
retarding  quivers  of  a  wind-blown  tree,  we  have 
found  a  new  form  of  pleasure,"  knows  very  well 
what  poetry  is. 

Dr.  Patterson's  theory  of  prose  and  verse 
rhythm  as  set  forth  in  this  first  book  is  very 
simple  to  state,  but  immensely  difficult  to  have 
conceived.  It  is,  briefly,  that  in  "verse"  the 
rhythm  is  what  he  calls  "coincident" ;  in  "prose" 
it  is  "syncopated."  This  result  is  achieved 
through  a  system  of  tapping.  For  instance, 
repeat  "Mary  had  a  Little  Lamb,"  and  at  the 
same  time  tap  the  rhythm  of  the  stressed  syllables 
with  your  finger  on  a  table.  It  will  be  found  that 
the  tappings  and  the  stressed  syllables  exactly 
coincide.  Now  tap  again  and  read  any  prose 
passage  you  like  while  you  are  doing  it.  You 
will  find  that  the  syllables  and  stresses  come 
every  which  way,  sometimes  on  the  beat,  it  is 
true,  but  more  often  before  or  after  it,  either 
directly  between  two  taps  or  at  varying  distances 
from  one  or  the  other. 

Dr.  Patterson  has  made  a  great  number  of 
experiments  with  a  number  of  subjects,  and  his 
main  theory  would  seem  to  be  absolutely  proved. 
His  object — to  show  that  verse  (really  metrical 
verse)  and  prose  have  a  different  mechanical 
base,  but  that  prose  also  has  its  rhythm  or  rhythms 
— he  has  certainly  achieved.  So  far  so  good,  but 
it  is  not  the  whole  of  the  story. 

At  the  conclusion  of  the  chapter  on  vers  libre 
in  the  first  edition  of  "The  Rhythm  of  Prose," 
is  this  sentence:  "On  the  whole,  however,  the 
message  will  always  be  blunted  for  those  'timers' 
who  feel,  in  reading  or  hearing  these  productions, 
the  disquieting  experience  of  attempting  to  dance 
up  the  side  of  a  mountain.  For  those  who  find 
this  task  exhilarating,  vers  libre,  as  a  form,  is 
without  a  rival."  It  is  significant  that  this  pas- 
sage was  omitted  from  the  second  edition. 

Dr.  Patterson  calls  "timers"  those  people  who 
have  "an  aggressive  time  sense";  people  who 
have  no  difficulty  in  performing  complicated 
tasks  of  syncopation,  and  who  are  capable  of 
holding  in  their  minds  a  psychologic  beat  from 
which  they  may  depart  at  moments  by  accelera- 


52 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


tion  or  retardation,  or  by  sublimating  such  beat 
into  images,  etc.,  and  yet  of  holding  constantly 
to  the  unexpressed  rhythm.  Dr.  Patterson  has 
named  this  psychological  beat  the  "unitary  pulse." 

Where  the  suppressed  passage  ran  thoroughly 
wrong  was  just  in  the  premise  that  an  "aggres- 
sive timer"  would  feel  discomfort  in  tracking 
the  rhythms  of  vers  libre,  the  fact  being  that 
only  an  "aggressive  timer"  can  properly  interpret 
these  subtle  and  various  rhythms.  The  mistake 
came  in  overvaluing  syllabic  import.  Metrical 
verse,  being  based  upon  accent,  has  everything  to 
do  with  the  counting  of  syllables.  Prose,  con- 
taining as  it  does  so  many  rhythms  in  a  single 
page,  even  in  a  single  paragraph,  may  very  well 
be  termed  "syncopated"  as  far  as  syllables  are 
concerned,  but  it,  too,  is  based  upon  "cadence," 
or  rather  "cadences,"  for  it  is  just  here  that  it 
differs  from  vers  libre.  The  returning  cadence 
unit  of  vers  libre  has  slight  counterpart  with  the 
changing  cadences  of  even  the  most  rhythmic 
prose.  Where  the  vers  libre  poem  as  a  whole 
keeps  to  a  single  recurring  psychological  beat, 
the  prose  page  or  chapter  conforms  to  no  unit. 
A  passage  of  prose  divorced  from  its  content  may 
sound  like  a  section  of  a  vers  libre  poem;  but, 
if  it  be  taken  with  what  goes  before  and  after, 
the  uniformity  is  lost. 

So  long  ago  as  March  1914  I  wrote  an  article 
on  "Vers  Libre  and  Metrical  Prose,"  in  which  I 
endeavored  to  prove  the  difference  of  "curve" 
in  vers  libre  and  even  the  most  rhythmical  prose. 
Having  neither  the  psychological  training  nor  the 
apparatus,  I  was  obliged  to  rely  entirely  upon  my 
intuition.  I  felt  cadence  as  a  line  rising  to  a 
certain  height  and  then  dropping  away  to  mount 
again,  farther  on.  I  called  this  rising  and  falling 
line  a  "curve."  In  a  letter  to  me,  written  last 
winter  after  one  of  our  experiments,  Dr.  Patter- 
son says: 

"It  is  interesting,  first  of  all,  to  find  that  the 
measurements  made  from  the  film  on  which  are 
recorded  your  readings  of  vers  libre  cadences  prove 
that  you  possess  an  unusually  accurate  time-sense." 

Then,   after  a   reference  to  another  poem   and 
an  explanation  that  the  figures  refer  to  the  inter- 
vals between  the  chief  accents,  he  continues: 
"Cadence  from  'Thompson's  Lunch  Room': 
14-15-21-18 

The  cadence  from  'Thompson's  Lunch  Room'  is  also 
suggestive  of  syncopating  experience,  but  it  is  dis- 
tinctly more  subtle.  The  interval  14  rises  gently  to 
15,  then  violently  to  21,  after  which  it  rebounds  to 


a  moderate   18.     The  curve  of  progression  might  be 
drawn   as  follows 


A  series  of  such  progressions  could  possibly  be 
taken  as  the  basis  for  your  feelings  of  vers  libre 
cadence." 

We  see  therefore  that  intuition  may  some- 
times hit  upon  a  fact,  without  realizing  exactly 
how  such  a  conclusion  is  reached. 

I  did  not  meet  Dr.  Patterson  until  after  the 
publication  of  his  first  edition.  We  were  brought 
together  -by  a  common  friend  who  felt  that  we 
were  working  toward  the  same  end,  but  with 
apparent  hostility.  I  confess  that  I  went  to  this 
meeting  with  misgiving.  I  feared  to  find  Dr. 
Patterson  so  wedded  to  a  theory  that  nothing 
would  induce  him  to  forgo  a  tittle  of  his  attitude. 
I  was  wrong.  I  found  an  open-minded  man  who 
cared  more  for  truth  than  for  anything  else,  who 
had  not  an  ounce  of  vanity,  and  who  was  chock 
full  of  artistic  feeling.  A  man  who  reacted 
keenly  to  music  and  poetry,  and  whose  sympathy 
and  perception  made  the  whole  discussion  a  de- 
light instead  of  a  labor. 

I  told  Dr.  Patterson  that  with  his  main  con- 
tention in  the  chapter  on  vers  libre — that  there 
is  no  tertium  quid  between  prose  and  regular 
verse — I  was  in  perfect  accord.  I  insisted  that 
none  of  the  better  instructed  vers  libristes  had 
ever  held  such  an  opinion,  but  that  we  took  our 
stand  from  Paul  Fort's  dictum,  "Prose  and  verse 
are  but  one  instrument  graduated."  Of  course, 
Dr.  Patterson  could  hardly  concur  with  this 
view,  and — noting  that  he  has  carefully  defined 
"verse"  as  "regular  verse" — his  point  undoubtedly 
holds.  Of  course,  one  might  be  said  to  gradu- 
ate from  "syncopation"  to  "coincidence,"  but 
that  is  merely  to  confuse  the  issue.  From  the 
exact  scientific  analysis  of  Dr.  Patterson,  we  find 
"regular  verse"  to  be  based  upon  a  rhythmic 
conception  quite  other  than  that  of  prose. 

Still  Paul  Fort's  phrase  held  good  for  a  form 
of  poetry  founded  upon  a  different  scheme  from 
that  of  metrical  verse.  Upon  a  verse  built  upon 
cadence,  in  short.  What  was  cadence?  How 
did  the  cadences  of  vers  libre  differ  from  those  of 
prose?  I  did  not  know.  I  could  feel  it,  could 
illustrate  by  examples,  but  of  course  this  was  too 
personal  to  warrant  a  scientific  deduction's  being 
drawn  from  it.  But  Dr.  Patterson  was 
immensely  interested.  He  arranged  to  set  up 
his  sound-photographing  machine,  which  had 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


53 


been  taken  down,  in  order  that  we  might  make 
some  experiments.  I  found  out  that  he  had 
never  heard  vers  libre  read  by  an  expert,  and  I 
well  know  how  it  can  be  garbled  by  a  poor  ren- 
dering. 

That  first  day  we  experimented  with  two 
examples  only,  the  passage  from  one  of  my  own 
poems  given  above  and  "H.D."  's  "Oread."  I 
read  both  poems  into  the  machine  several  times, 
and  then,  at  Dr.  Patterson's  desire,  I  repeated 
the  poems  to  myself,  pronouncing  the  syllable 
"tah"  aloud  on  the  chief  accents.  Dr.  Patterson 
then  gave  me  certain  tests  which  proved  me  to 
be  "aggressively  rhythmic,"  and  permitted  me  a 
certain  right  to  say  "I  feel."  This  was  satis- 
factory as  far  as  it  went,  but  the  result  was  all 
to  be  found.  The  films  would  have  to  be 
developed  and  the  intervals  measured. 

I  returned  to  Boston  and  shortly  afterwards 
received  the  letter  from  Dr.  Patterson  of 
which  I  have  already  spoken.  The  result  of  his 
measurements  of  the  passage  from  my  own  poem, 
I  have  given.  The  measurements  of  "H.D."  's 
"Oread"  were  as  follows: 

"'The    Oread':     (intervals    between    chief    accents 
given  in  tenths  of  a  second,  roughly  estimated). 
13-22-15-24-13-13-19-13-15-13 

The  recurrence  or  'return'  of  13/10  sec.  as  the 
interval  length  in  five  cases  in  the  'Oread'  is  quite 
remarkable,  and  seems  to  indicate  that  you  had  in 
your  mind  an  exact  interval  which  you  increased  or 
retarded  twice  by  1/5  sec.  (giving  intervals  15/10 
sec.  in  length),  and  three  times  by  from  3/5  to  11/10 
sec.  (giving  one  interval  as  long  as  24/10  sec.) 

You  must  tell  me  exactly  what  you  think  about 
the  significance  of  the  figures.  This  much,  at  least, 
seems  clear.  The  opening  sequence  of  four  inter- 
vals: 

13-22-15-24 

involves  acceleration  and  retarding  of  an  obviously 
irregular  nature.  As  soon,  however,  as  we  strike 
the  5th  intervals,  'return'  is  evident  in  the  presence 
of  '13,'  which  interval-size  dominates  conspicuously 
the  rest  of  the  passage,  and  so  suggests  at  once 
coincident  and  therefore  typical  'verse  experience.' 
The  opening  sequence,  on  the  other  hand,  could 
hardly  suggest  anything  else  but  syncopating  and 
therefore  'prose  experience.'" 

That  the  reader  may  understand  what  this 
means,  I  will  print  here  "Oread"  broken  up  into 
time  units.  It  will  be  seen  at  once  that  the 
form  is  non-syllabic,  in  that  the  chief  accents 
come  after  a  greater  or  lesser  number  of  sylla- 
bles. The  units  conform  in  time — allowing  for 
the  slight  acceleration  and  retardation  of  the 
unitary  pulse,  guided  by  an  artistic  instinct — but 
not  in  syllabic  quantity. 


Whirl  up/  sea — / 

Whirl/  your  pointed  pines/ 

Splash/  your  great  pines/  on  our  rocks/ 

Hurl/  your  green  over  us/ 

Cover  us/  with  your  pools/  of  fir./ 

It  was  immediately  after  this  that  Dr.  Pat- 
terson published  the  second  edition  of  his 
"Rhythm  of  Prose." 

In  the  preface  to  this  new  edition,  Dr.  Pat- 
terson referred  to  our  experiments,  and  added 
the  conclusions  to  be  drawn  from  them.  As  his 
diction,  however,  is  a  little  difficult  of  compre- 
hension, I  will  quote  the  concluding  paragraph 
of  the  letter  already  referred  to  so  often.  It 
contains  the  gist  of  the  preface,  and  is  expressed 
in  simpler  language. 

"My  own  decision  at  this  date,  February  12,  1917, 
a  decision  which  depends  partly  upon  my  having 
heard  you  read  with  such  tremendous  effect  bits  of 
your  own  free  verse,  is  that  the  spell  of  vers  libre 
is  at  its  best  when  syncopating  experience  pre- 
dominates— when  the  'cadences'  follow  each  other  in 
the  magical  manner  and  with  the  occult  balance  of 
good  prose.  Is  there  then  no  difference  between  such 
'unrhymed  cadence'  as  you  have  written  and  good 
prose?  Yes,  I  am  ready  to  admit  what  I  have  not 
admitted  before.  There  is  at  times,  not  always,  a 
difference;  but  it  is  a  difference  not  of  kind,  but  of 
degree.  The  separate  spacing  of  the  phrases,  whether 
printed  or  orally  delivered,  puts  emphasis  upon  the 
rhythmic  balancing  as  such.  It  keeps  us  from  for- 
getting it  when  we  see  the  phrases,  first  of  all.  On 
the  other  hand,  when  we  hear  them  spoken  by 
another,  we  detect  this  suggested  emphasis  on  the 
speaker's  part  upon  a  sequence  of  balances  which 
might  readily  be  blurred,  both  for  him  and  for  us, 
were  the  text  from  which  he  reads  printed  in  the 
solid  blocks  of  ordinary  prose." 

I  quite  agree  with  Dr.  Patterson  that  "vers 
libre  is  at  its  best  when  syncopating  experience 
predominates."  In  my  "Tendencies  in  Modern 
American  Poetry,"  I  spoke  of  Richard  Alding- 
ton's and  "H.D."  's  practice  of  vers  libre  as 
always  following  the  syncopating  experience. 
These  poets  arrived  at  their  conclusions  quite 
independently,  and  I  remember  an  animated  dis- 
cussion of  the  subject  which  I  had  with  them  in 
the  summer  of  1914.  This  is  again  a  proof  of 
the  intuitive  working  of  the  artist's  mind,  fol- 
lowed more  slowly  by  the  accurate  foot  by  foot 
advance  of  the  scientist. 

Dr.  Patterson's  preface  goes  on  to  say: 

"Miss  Lowell  delivers  her  vers  libre  with  much 
more  swing  and  vim  than  one  commonly  hears  in 
prose;  but  surely  all  particularly  vigorous  prose,  if 
it  is  to  be  valued  as  a  fit  medium  for  vigorous  thought 
and  feeling,  must  also  be  thus  delivered." 

This  has  seemed  to  the  reviewers  a  negation 
of  my  attitude.  It  is  no  such  thing.  I  have 
always  maintained  that  oratory,  being  impas- 
sioned speech,  is  therefore  exceedingly  rhythmi- 
cal, for  it  is  well  known  that  all  emotion  tends 


54 


THE    DIAL 


[January   17 


to  become  rhythmic.  The  rhythms  of  oratory 
differ  from  those  of  vers  libre  principally  in  being 
so  diverse.  That  is,  in  having  no  definite  time 
unit  for  the  whole  speech.  It  is  a  fact  that  vers 
libre  may  change  its  time  units  several  times  in  a 
long  poem,  but  these  changes  fall  into  sections, 
a  device  long  practiced  in  metrical  verse  where 
the  metre  often  varies.  For  instance,  Matthew 
Arnold's  "Church  of  Brou"  has  three  sections 
and  in  each  section  is  a  change  of  metre.  In 
other  metrical  poems,  changes  of  metre  occur  in 
alternate  stanzas,  or  even  at  irregular  intervals. 
So  many  examples  may  be  given  that  I  will  leave 
my  readers  to  think  of  them  for  themselves. 

It  is  undoubtedly  Dr.  Patterson's  calling  vers 
libre  "spaced  prose,"  which  has  led  reviewers  to 
prophesy  my  immediate  demise.  And  yet  Dr. 
Patterson  has  carefully,  if  astringently,  explained 
his  use  of  the  term,  not  only  in  the  preface,  but 
in  a  paragraph  which  he  has  added  to  the  chapter 
on  vers  libre.  He  says: 

"A  word,  finally,  must  be  added  as  to  terminology. 
When  regular  prose  becomes  consistently  emotional, 
whether  through  richness  of  tone-color,  abundance  of 
images,  or  conspicuous  'return'  of  certain  prose  re- 
frains, such  as  we  find  in  Matthew  Arnold's  repeti- 
tion of  'sweetness  and  light'  or  De  Quincey's  'Fanny 
and  the  rose  in  June,'  all  we  need  is  to  space  the 
phrases  on  separate  lines  in  order  to  obtain  some- 
thing which  is  not  to  be  distinguished  from  the  best 
'free  verse.'  This  resulting  experience  is  different 
from  that  obtained  from  ordinary  prose  in  that  the 
spacing  serves  to  focus  our  attention  upon  the  rhythm 
as  rhythm;  but,  in  spite  of  this  self-consciousness  and 
its  emotional  consequences,  our  'glorified'  prose  still 
remains  a  kind  of  prose.  What  shall  we  call  it? 
Since  all  prose  has  its  rhythmic  possibilities,  'rhyth- 
mic prose'  is  as  misleading  a  name  as  vers  libre. 
Rhythmically  self-conscious  'spaced  prose'  is  an  un- 
inviting but  fairly  accurate  description  of  it  in  its 
more  inspired  manifestations,  such  as  abound  in  the 
work  of  Miss  Amy  Lowell." 

This  last  sentence  should  have  proved  to  the 
critics  that  Dr.  Patterson  was  in  no  way  hostile 
to  the  results  obtained  by  the  freer  forms;  and 
it  must  never  be  forgotten  that  he  is  concerned 
in  this  book  with  rhythm  only,  and  that  he 
is  juxtaposing,  by  means  of  his  tapping  experi- 
ments, prose  and  "regular  verse,"  that  is  metrical 
verse.  The  word  "prose,"  in  his  "spaced  prose," 
has  no  more  significance  as  far  as  poetry  is  con- 
cerned than  the  "prose"  in  my  own  "polyphonic 
prose."  He  uses  "prose"  because  of  the  syncopa- 
tion involved  in  vers  libre;  I  used  "prose"  because 
of  the  typical  form  in  which  "polyphonic  prose" 
is  printed.  In  neither  case  does  it  imply  an 
absence  of  "poetry"  in  the  forms  concerned,  for 
once  more  let  me  call  the  reader's  attention  to 
Dr.  Patterson's  strict  denial  of  the  identification 


of  "verse"  and  "poetry,"  in  his  use  of  these 
terms. 

The  preface  to  the  second  edition  is  dated 
March  31,  1917.  So  we  may  take  the  above  as 
Dr.  Patterson's  theories  up  to  that  date.  But 
nine  months  have  passed  since  then,  and  much 
progress  has  been  made  beyond  the  standpoint 
taken  in  that  edition. 

Independently  of  Dr.  Patterson,  I  continued 
to  study  the  rhythms  of  vers  libre  as  well  as  I 
could  with  no  testing  apparatus.  My  endeav- 
ors to  beat  time  to  vers  libre  poems  led  to  the 
discovery  that  every  poem  had  a  more  or  less 
consistent  beat.  That  the  accents  were,  of 
course,  determined  by  the  sense;  but  that  in 
accepting  or  rejecting  words,  the  poet  was  guided 
by  the  necessity  of  having  his  beat  fall  con- 
sistently with  this  sense.  It  could  not  come 
upon  connecting  words,  for  instance,  like  "and" 
or  "the."  Of  course,  I  had  always  known  this 
subconsciously,  but  now  I  began  to  analyze  it 
consciously.  I  also  found  that  some  poems, 
although  apparently  read  as  slowly  as  others,  had 
a  much  faster  beat.  What  determined  this  beat  ? 
It  must  be  some  psychological  time  unit  in  the 
poet's  mind.  For  years  I  had  been  searching  the 
unit  of  vers  libre,  the  ultimate  particle  to  which 
the  rhythm  of  this  form  could  be  reduced.  As 
the  "foot"  is  the  unit  of  "regular  verse,"  so  there 
must  be  a  unit  in  vers  libre.  I  thought  I  had 
found  it.  The  unit  was  a  measurement  of  time. 
The  syllables  were  unimportant,  in  the  sense  that 
there  might  be  many  or  few  to  the  time  interval. 
The  form  being  therefore  non-syllabic,  Dr.  Pat- 
terson's system  of  tapping  seemed  not  to  apply. 
But  in  setting  aside  his  system,  I  was  wrong,  as 
we  shall  see. 

In  May,  I  again  saw  Dr.  Patterson,  and  again 
read  into  his  sound-photographing  machine.  I 
also  told  him  my  time  unit  discovery,  and  read 
several  poems  to  a  metronome.  The  reading  did 
not,  in  every  case,  exactly  follow  the  metronomic 
swing,  but  the  variance  was  so  slight  as  to  be 
accounted  for  by  the  natural  acceleration  and 
retardation  of  the  artistic  impulse.  Dr.  Pat- 
terson has  dealt  with  this  variation  from  a  strict 
time  unit  in  his  chapter  on  "The  Sense  of 
Swing,"  where  he  says: 

"But  surely  the  sense  of  swing  means  nothing  unless 
it  be  a  sense  of  progressive  movement.  When  a 
melody  is  played  in  strict,  unvarying  metronome  time, 
swing  is  at  its  lowest,  and  the  'psychological  moment' 
for  an  accent  is  merely  a  matter  of  remembering 
that  two  and  two  make  four.  What  is  usually  meant 
by  swing  is  really  'elastic'  swing,  where  the  simple 
mathematical  relations  are  complicated  for  purposes 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


55 


of  expression.  Compensation  figures  conspicuously. 
Time  stolen  in  one  place,  is  repaid  in  another.  What 
Reimann  calls  'agogic  accent'  (the  deliberate  addition 
of  length  to  a  note,  instead  of  stress  in  order  to  give 
it  prominence)  and,  of  course,  tempo  rubato  (stolen 
time),  belong  to  this  category;  so,  though  it  does  not 
seem  to  be  generally  remembered,  all  effects  due  to 
accelerating  and  retarding  the  standard  tempo.  .  . 
Varying  rates  of  speed,  in  a  broad  and  general  sense, 
need  now  to  be  distinguished  from  the  specific  form 
in  which  they  can  appear  as  'Progressive  motion,' 
which  means  nothing  more  than  varying  rates  of 
speed  in  which  the  variation  is  roughly  spoken  of  as 
'gradual,'  and  more  accurately  as  occurring  accord- 
ing to  some  law  of  progressive  increase  or  decrease. 
An  interval,  for  instance,  of  at  first  one  second,  is 
shortened  by  one  tenth  of  a  second,  successively,  until 
it  becomes  three  tenths  of  a  second,  after  which  it  is 
lengthened  by  similar  steps  until  it  reaches  its  former 
size.  This  would  be  a  case  of  rapidly  progressing 
acceleration  and  retarding.  The  rate  of  decrease  in 
the  interval  could  be  expressed  by  a  mathematical 
equation.  Another  equation  could  express  the  retard- 
ing movement.  The  number  of  ways  in  which  an 
interval  could  become  progressively  shorter  is,  of 
course,  infinite.  The  point  to  keep  clear  is  that  every 
'gradual'  (i.e.,  not  jerky)  progression,  such  as  is 
plainly  implied  in  what  we  mean  by  swing,  must 
be  subject  to  some  law,  instinctively  felt,  no  matter 
how  difficult  to  phrase.  The  'sense  of  swing,'  then, 
would  mean  the  ability  to  move  according  to  pro- 
gressive laws,  however  occult." 

I  again  saw  Dr.  Patterson  in  September,  and 
the  results  he  had  then  reached  commanded  my 
instant  admiration  and  acceptance.  Working 
on  the  possibility  of  a  time  unit,  he  had  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  there  were  really  several 
forms  of  vers  libre.  These  he  determined  by  a 
combination  of  time  tests  and  tapping  experi- 
ments. One  was  the  "spaced  prose"  which  he 
had  cited  in  the  second  edition  of  "The  Rhythm 
of  Prose";  another,  a  more  obviously  rhythmic 
form,  which  he  has  named  "unitary  verse"  be- 
cause it  conforms  to  a  satisfying  time  unit; 
while  still  a  third  is  marked  by  an  alternation 
of  prose  and  verse  experience.  Dr.  Patterson 
defines  seven  distinct  groups,  starting  from  metri- 
cal verse,  in  a  paper  prepared  for  the  meeting 
of  the  Modern  Language  Association  held 
at  New  Haven  in  December.  In  the  bulletin 
of  the  Association  his  paper  is  listed  as  follows: 

"An  attempt  at  a  sharper  analysis  of  verse  and 
prose.  Seven  types:  (1)  'metrical  verse,'  in  which 
the  effect  of  a  repeated  stress-pattern  is  in  evidence; 
(2)  'unitary  verse,'  in  which  equal  time-intervals 
(marked  by  chief  accents  and  filled  in  with  a  quite 
variable  number  of  less  accented  syllables)  form  a 
satisfying  succession  of  units;  (3)  'polyphonic  prose,' 
in  which  tone-color  patterns  are  more  in  evidence 
than  in  ordinary  prose ;  (4)  'spaced  prose,'  in  which 
the  balancing  of  broader  groupings  in  prose  rhythm 
is  accentuated  by  printing  the  phrases  on  separate 
lines;  (5)  'fluid  prose,'  in  which  the  rhythm  as  rhythm 
is  less  obvious  than  in  'spaced  prose';  (6)  'mosaics,' 
in  which  verse  and  prose,  or  several  kinds  of  verse 
and  prose,  alternate  successively;  and,  finally,  (7) 


'blends,'    in    which    effects    not    commonly    found    to- 
gether are  superimposed." 

Of  these  divisions,  it  is  not  necessary  here  to 
explain  Dr.  Patterson's  use  of  "metrical  verse," 
"unitary  verse,"  "polyphonic  prose,"  or  "spaced 
prose."  Everyone  knows  what  the  first  is.  The 
second  and  the  fourth  have  been  sufficiently 
noticed  already  in  this  article;  it  is  enough  to 
say  that  in  "unitary  verse"  the  sense  of  swing  is 
more  marked  than  in  "spaced  prose."  The  third 
has  been  so  often  analyzed  as  to  need  no  farther 
explanation.  By  "fluid  prose,"  Dr.  Patterson 
means  a  highly  stylistic  and  rhythmic  prose,  such 
as  is  found  constantly  in  Walter  Pater's  works, 
in  which,  however,  the  rhythm  is  not  sufficiently 
conscious  to  warrant  separate  spacing  for  its 
phrases.  "Mosaics"  are  those  vers  libre  poems 
which  are  sometimes  "syncopated"  and  some- 
times "coincident."  "Blends"  are  rare  in  Eng- 
lish practice.  He  regards  "polyphonic  prose"  as 
practically  the  only  English  "blend,"  but  he  has 
found  other  such  forms  in  Sanskrit  literature. 
As  "polyphonic  prose"  employs  all  the  rhythms 
of  metrical  verse,  vers  libre,  "fluid  prose,"  and 
prose  proper,  so  combined  as  to  produce  the  im- 
pression of  a  constant  weaving,  and  also  affects 
its  own  movement  by  the  use  of  rich  timbre  and 
"return"  of  thought  and  images,  we  see  why  it 
is  a  "blend"  rather  than  a  "mosaic,"  in  which 
verse  experience  and  prose  experience  follow 
each  other  in  sharply  edged  blocks. 

It  should  be  observed  that  Dr.  Patterson's 
groups  differentiate  carefully  every  possible  form 
of  rhythmic  poetic  experience,  but  that,  if  we 
employ  the  term  as  a  defining  artistic  form,  only 
three  of  them  properly  come  under  vers  libre, 
These  are  "unitary  verse,"  under  which  head 
he  places  "H.D." 's  "Oread";  "spaced  prose," 
which  is  illustrated  by  my  own  "Reaping"; 
and  "mosaics,"  where  he  takes  Mr.  Masters's 
"Father  Malloy"  as  an  example.  Metrical 
verse  on  the  one  hand,  "polyphonic  prose"  on  the 
other,  stand  out  as  individual  forms,  while  vers 
libre  is  another,  subdivided  again  into  three  dis- 
tinguishable sections. 

"Fluid  prose"  is  really  a  prose  form  (the 
others  are  really  verse  forms) ;  but  owing  to  its 
suitability  for  poetic  content,  Dr.  Patterson  has 
included  it  in  his  grouping. 

It  is  not  very  difficult  to  prove  that  the 
cadences  of  even  the  most  highly  developed  "fluid 
prose"  differ  from  those  of  true  vers  libre.  I 
have  already  shown  that  "fluid  prose"  is  built, 
not  upon  one  unitary  pulse,  but  upon  many.  To 


56 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


go  a  step  farther,  it  can  easily  be  demonstrated 
that  although  certain  single  cadences  of  "fluid 
prose"  may  coincide  with  the  cadences  of  vers 
libre,  others,  satisfying  in  their  position  in  a 
"fluid  prose"  piece,  would  completely  fail  to 
satisfy  in  a  vers  libre  poem.  To  illustrate,  I 
will  take  this  sentence  from  Walter  Pater  which 
Dr.  Patterson  has  used  in  so  many  of  his  tests: 
"It  is  the  landscape,  not  of  dreams  or  of  fancy, 
but  of  places  far  withdrawn,  and  hours  selected 
from  a  thousand  with  a  miracle  of  finesse." 

Leaving  out  the  question  of  wording  as  not 
pertinent  to  the  present  discussion,  we  can  hear, 
if  we  read  the  passage  aloud,  a  strange  jar  be- 
tween its  two  halves.  The  first  cadence  ends 
with  "withdrawn."  If  the  passage  stopped  here 
we  should  have  a  perfect  vers  libre  cadence.  But 
it  does  not  stop;  it  goes  on,  and  how?  No  new 
cadence,  conforming  to  the  original  unitary  pulse, 
is  announced  by  "and  hours  selected  from  a 
thousand."  This  reads,  not  like  a  second  self- 
sustaining  cadence,  but  like  a  continuation  of  one 
already  partly  completed,  and  yet  the  rhythm  of 
the  passage  ending  on  "withdrawn"  is  so  rounded 
and  final  that,  read  it  as  we  will,  we  cannot 
consider  it  incomplete.  Dr.  Patterson  has  tapped 
"hours"  as  two  syllables,  but  whether  it  be  taken 
as  one  or  two,  the  objection  remains.  To  make 
the  passage  fall  into  a  perfect  vers  libre  cadence, 
we  should  have  to  add  some  words  to  the  second 
part;  for  instance,  we  might  say,  "and  of  hours 
carefully  selected,"  etc.  .  .  I  admit  that  this  spoils 
Pater's  sentence,  but  it  adds  the  second  cadence 
necessary  to  the  beating  of  the  unitary  pulse. 


I  fail  to  see  how  any  thoughtful  person  can 
discard  these  divisions  which  Dr.  Patterson  has 
been  at  such  pains  to  discover.  To  me,  they 
clear  up  much  which  had  hitherto  remained  dark. 
For  even  in  France,  where  more  attention  has 
been  paid  to  the  technique  of  the  freer  forms 
than  in  any  other  country,  no  experiments  have 
been  conducted  with  any  such  thoroughness,  and 
no  such  far-reaching  results  have  been  achieved. 
Other  books  upon  the  subject  appear  as  merely 
a  brushing  of  the  surface. 

For  the  ordinary  reader,  it  is  undoubtedly  a 
pity  that  Dr.  Patterson's  style  is  so  technical  and 
so  devoid  of  explanatory  additions.  He  takes 
no  account  of  misunderstandings  arising  from 
the  incorrect,  but  popular,  use  of  words.  He 
says  exactly  what  he  means,  and  expects  his 
readers  to  approach  his  work  with  the  same 
exactness.  He  announces  that  he  is  dealing  with 
rhythm,  and  with  rhythm  only,  and  he  does  not 
allow  for  those  persons  who  read  into  his  study 
of  rhythms  a  study  of  the  whole  content  of 
poetry.  Taken  for  what  it  is,  a  technical  inquiry 
into  the  mechanism  of  rhythm,  his  book  is  a 
volume  rich  in  knowledge  and  suggestion,  and 
it  must  perforce  augment,  and  in  many  ways 
supersede,  all  other  textbooks  on  versification. 

The  Modern  Language  Association  paper 
stands  as  the  nucleus  of  his  next  book,  "The 
Making  of  Verse."  Together,  the  two  treatises 
form  a  theory  of  rhythm  more  advanced  than 
any  heretofore  suggested,  and  it  is  probable  that 
they  will  come  to  be  considered  as  definitive. 

AMY  LOWELL. 


The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 

VII. 

SOME    PROBLEMS   OF   READJUSTMENT:      CONTRIBUTIONS    AND    INDEMNITIES 


That  the  formula,  "no  contributions, 
no  indemnities,"  is  sound  economics  any- 
body is  bound  to  acknowledge  who  has 
read  Mr.  Norman  Angell's  trenchant  and 
convincing  dissipation  of  the  "great  illu- 
sion." But  that  it  is  sound  psychology  is 
itself  an  illusion.  If  it  were  sound  psy- 
chology, wars  would  never  be  waged  by 
nations,  nor  murders  and  thefts  commit- 
ted by  men.  In  the  long  run  both  are  fore- 
doomed to  economic  failure  and  social 
scorn.  Both  recur,  nevertheless,  with  such 
constancy  and  so  typically  as  to  be  institu- 
tional to  civilization.  When  defining  the 
place  of  contributions  and  indemnities  in 


the  foundation  of  lasting  peace,  there- 
fore, it  becomes  more  needful  to  regard 
their  indirect  influence  on  the  mental  states 
of  the  nations  between  whom  they  are  to 
pass,  than  their  direct  influence  upon 
national  economies.  Now  it  is  significant 
that  the  formula  against  indemnities  and 
contributions  is  a  democratic  and  socialis- 
tic formula.  It  is  heard  in  Russia  and 
the  United  States  and  England,  not  in 
Germany.  And  it  comes  from  the  mouths 
of  those  who  are  preoccupied  with  eco- 
nomic, not  psychological,  relationships. 
In  terms  of  the  latter,  contributions  and 
indemnities  are  of  the  same  type  of  thing 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


57 


as  the  pinch  and  blow  of  the  childish  bully. 
They  constitute  jointly  and  severally  an 
immediate  gratification  of  the  sense  of 
superiority,  of  the  lust  for  power,  regard- 
less of  future  consequences.  They  belong 
to  the  intoxicants,  and  although  specious 
ratiocination  may  give  the  demand  for 
them  the  appearance  of  a  policy,  they  are, 
if  history  is  to  be  trusted,  the  most  impoli- 
tic thing  a  conqueror  can  undertake  who 
wishes  to  hold  his  conquests  with  ease  and 
permanence.  "Frightfulness"  is  merely  a 
nearer  and  directer  view  of  the  gratifica- 
tion of  the  same  lusts. 

The  problem  of  contributions  and 
indemnities  is  at  bottom  the  problem  of 
the  control  and  extirpation  of  these  lusts. 
No  doubt  the  democracies  allied  against 
Germany  have  them,  but  precisely  because 
they  are  democracies,  the  lusts  have  their 
own  counterpoise  in  the  national  mental 
states:  the  creation  of  the  formula  about 
contributions,  indemnities,  and  annexations 
is  sufficient  proof.  The  lusts  are  most 
constitutional  to  Germany.  The  German 
rule  in  Belgium  and  northern  France,  for 
example,  has  consisted  of  resurrecting  and 
applying  the  imperial  malpractice  of  the 
piratical  empires  of  antiquity.  This  usage 
has  established,  in  the  attitude  of  the 
inhabitants  of  these  lands,  in  their  emo- 
tional set,  a  hatred  toward  Germany  that 
is  deep-rooted  and  permanent.  Nothing 
short  of  complete  extermination  can  miti- 
gate the  blood-feud  which  has  been  cre- 
ated by  the  use  of  the  levy  and  the  corvee, 
the  wanton  and  malicious  destruction  of 
property  and  of  the  self-respect  of  women 
and  men.  Any  plan  looking  toward  the 
permanent  holding  of  these  territories  by 
Germany,  or  in  case  of  their  evacuation, 
any  friendly  relations  between  their  gov- 
ernments and  that  of  Germany  after  the 
war,  would — had  it  been  guided  by  con- 
siderations of  advantage  and  the  lessons 
of  history  instead  of  sadistic  vainglory — 
have  required  a  policy  precisely  the  oppo- 
site of  that  adopted,  particularly  in  the 
very  beginnings  of  the  occupation.  The 
conspicuous  absence  of  such  a  policy  is 
symptomatic,  and  the  terms  of  peace  must 
be  such  as  to  remove  the  causes  of  the 
symptom.  These  causes  are  the  German 
ruling  class  and  the  system  of  education 
they  imposed  upon  the  German  masses. 


There  are,  hence,  two  sets  of  consider- 
ations for  the  peace  conference  to  heed  in 
the  financial  adjustments  between  the  Ger- 
man government  and  people  and  the 
democratic  powers.  The  first  of  these  is 
of  reparation  for  goods  stolen  and  dam- 
age done.  All  levies  should  be  returned, 
with  interest  at  an  appropriate  rate.  All 
forced  labor  should  be  paid  for,  at  twice 
the  market  rate,  because  it  was  forced, 
with  interest  at  an  appropriate  rate.  For 
the  murder  of  helpless  civilians  there  can 
be  no  adequate  compensation,  but  their 
dependents  should  receive  a  pension  at  the 
hands  of  the  German  nation.  All  prop- 
erty wantonly  destroyed  should  be  paid 
for,  with  an  additional  contribution  for 
the  absolute  loss  involved. 

The  foregoing  stipulations  apply  to 
matters  individual  and  private,  and  the 
obligation  of  the  Germans  on  both  fronts 
is  not  without  its  analogue  in  the  obliga- 
tions of  the  Russians  in  the  East.  The 
Germans,  it  is  to  be  remembered  how- 
ever, are  the  aggressors.  Damage  done  is 
the  direct  consequence  of  their  initial  and 
malicious  act.  There  is  a  type  of  funda- 
mental damage  to  which  the  technique  of 
modern  warfare  compels  the  defenders 
also  to  contribute.  Such  is  the  damage  suf- 
fered by  the  terrain  of  Champagne.  The 
soil  of  that  once  beautiful  and  prosperous 
region  has  been  literally  shot  away.  Its 
subsoil  is  chalk,  of  the  same  formation  as 
the  unbearing  chalk-cliffs  of  England.  The 
latter  have  been  barren  from  time  imme- 
morial, and  the  Champagne  region  is  likely 
to  be  so  henceforth.  Should  this  prove  to 
be  the  case,  France  has  suffered  a  funda- 
mental damage,  one  that  means  for  her  an 
altered  economy  after  the  war.  For  this 
damage  full  payment  is  impossible,  but  that 
payment  should  be  required,  sufficient  at 
least  to  ensure  life  and  health  and  security 
to  the  natives  of  the  region  while  their 
government  helps  their  lives  into  newr 
channels,  seems  not  only  just,  but  indis- 
pensable. What  that  payment  should  be 
could  of  course  be  told  only  by  a  body  of 
geological  and  economic  experts. 

Payment  for  such  and  the  other  dam- 
ages reviewed  above  would  be  in  the 
nature  of  reparation.  And  for  reparation 
the  German  people  as  well  as  the  German 
government  is  responsible.  The  people  is 


58 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


responsible  because  the  whole  nation 
assented  to  the  government's  aggression, 
because  its  representatives  in  the  Reichs- 
tag raised  at  no  time  and  under  no  cir- 
cumstance any  significant  voice  against 
the  policy  of  "frightfulness"  of  the  polit- 
ical and  military  leaders.  That  not  even 
the  Socialists  uttered  such  a  protest  is  tes- 
timony to  the  extraordinary  grip  of  the 
government  upon  the  fears  and  hopes  of 
its  subjects.  Its  grip  on  their  fears  is 
obvious  enough.  Its  grip  on  their  hopes 
would  have  been  impossible  without  its 
thoroughgoing  and  programmatic  use  of 
the  nation's  educational  system  for  its  own 
especial  purposes.  By  its  almost  absolute 
control  over  education,  a  control  the  only 
parallel  for  which  is  that  exercised  by  the 
priesthood  over  the  Catholic's  education, 
the  government  succeeded  in  keeping  the 
people  of  Germany  subjects  of  a  dynasty 
when  they  should  have  been  citizens  of  a 
state.  By  virtue  of  its  control  of  education 
the  German  government  is  a  cause  of  the 
iniquity  of  the  German  people,  instead  of 
one  among  other  constituents  in  that 
iniquity.  According  to  some  thinkers,  its 
control  of  education  makes  it  the  chief,  if 
not  the  only,  cause.  Now  the  elimination 
of  this  causal  power  from  the  government 
of  Germany  is  the  second  of  the  two  sets 
of  considerations  in  the  financial  readjust- 
ments between  that  goverment  and  the 
democracies  of  the  Entente.  This  set  of 
considerations  demands  the  annihilation — 
in  fact,  only  a  little  more  in  Germany  than 
elsewhere — of  governmental  control  of 
education.  Annihilation  may  be  accom- 
plished in  two  ways.  First,  educational 
institutions  can  be  rendered  completely 
autonomous  (a  consummation  devoutly  to 
be  desired  everywhere)  at  home.  Sec- 
ondly, as  many  as  possible  of  the  German 
youth  can  be  educated  abroad. 

For  the  second  method  the  democratic 
use  of  indemnities  offers  precedent.  The 
precedent  derives  from  the  relations 
between  the  Western  powers  and  China, 
and  its  application — in  the  form  estab- 
lished by  the  United  States — to  their  rela- 
tions with  Germany  cannot  but  be  liberal 
and  liberating.  When  the  Western  pow- 
ers exacted  from  the  quite  helpless  Chi- 
nese government  and  people  indemnities 
for  the  damage  done  by  the  Boxer  rebel- 


lion of  which  it  was  a  victim  even  more 
than  they,  the  United  States  alone,  of  all 
the  powers,  directed  the  application  of  its 
share  to  defraying  the  expenses  of  edu- 
cating young  Chinese  in  America.  Let  the 
democratic  powers  follow  this  precedent 
with  regard  to  the  government  of  Ger- 
many. Let  the  terms  of  peace  require 
that  one  young  German  out  of  every  thou- 
sand, both  men  and  women,  shall  from  his 
or  her  twelfth  year  on  be  educated  abroad 
— in  the  United  States,  in  England,  in 
France,  in  Italy,  or  in  Russia.  An  indem- 
nity should  be  required  to  defray  the  cost 
of  so  educating  the  new  generation.  The 
money  of  this  indemnity  ought  not,  how- 
ever, to  be  raised  by  taxes  from  the  Ger- 
man people.  It  ought  to  consist  of  a 
trust-fund,  created  by  confiscating  all  the 
properties  of  the  royal  families  of  Ger- 
many, and  of  the  great  German  landlord 
class,  the  Junkers.  This  trust  might  be 
held  and  administered  by  an  international 
commission  for  the  good  of  mankind. 

There  are  certain  desirable  extensions 
of  this  procedure  to  other  governments 
that  I  shall  discuss  in  connection  with  the 
organization  of  peace.  At  present  I  am 
concerned  only  with  its  influence  on  the 
mental  set  of  the  government  and  people 
of  Germany.  An  indemnity  so  specified 
as  the  foregoing  should  be  satisfactory  to 
liberals  as  well  as  conservatives  in  the 
matter  of  war-settlements.  It  obviously 
can  work  no  injustice  upon  the  people  of 
Germany.  Rather  is  it  a  service  to  them, 
deriving  as  it  does,  not  from  taxation,  but 
from  the  appropriation  to  public  use  of  the 
property  of  their  exploiters  and  masters. 
It  is  bound  to  set  them  free  from  one  of 
the  most  potent  instrumentalities  of  this 
mastership.  Upon  the  minds  of  the  mas- 
ters, on  the  other  hand,  it  is  bound  to  im- 
press the  fact  that  they  have  been  whipped 
in  the  only  language  that  they,  like 
all  bullies,  are  capable  of  understanding. 
It  is  bound  to  go  a  long  way  toward 
converting  the  bully  into  a  peaceful  citizen, 
for  the  expropriation  of  the  propertied 
classes  cuts  the  ground  from  under  their 
arrogance,  while  participation,  through 
educated  men,  in  the  life  and  labor  of  other 
peoples,  leads  the  citizenry  of  a  land  to 
respect  and  understanding  for  these  others. 

H.  M.  KALLEN. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


59 


Our  Paris  Letter 


(Special  Correspondence  of  THE  DIAL.) 
M.  Paul  Louis  is  one  of  the  best-informed 
and  shrewdest  observers  in  France  of  interna- 
tional affairs.  A  Socialist  in  politics  and  an 
active  member  of  the  executive  committee  of 
his  party,  he  has  the  faculty,  too  rare  among 
publicists,  of  taking  an  objective  view  of  the 
facts  and  not  allowing  his  judgment  of  them  to 
be  warped  by  his  own  sympathies,  desires,  or 
prejudices.  Thus  he  is  able  without  any  com- 
promise of  his  principles  to  be  the  expert  on 
foreign  affairs  of  the  "Petit  Parisien,"  to  which 
he  contributes  daily  a  commentary  on  events,  as 
frank  and  objective  as  the  censors  will  allow. 
Since  the  war  the  number  of  people  able  to 
take  an  objective  point  of  view  has  become 
smaller  than  ever.  Indeed,  most  people  seem 
to  regard  such  a  point  of  view  as  unpatriotic 
and  to  think  it  their  duty  always  to  believe  and 
anticipate  what  they  desire.  They  seem  in- 
capable of  understanding  that,  if  one  considers 
at  a  given  moment  that  things  are  not  going 
well  for  the  Allies,  it  is  not  necessarily  because 
one  desires  them  to  go  badly;  and  they  are  dis- 
posed to  dismiss  any  expression  of  what,  in 
ignorance  of  the  real  meaning  of  that  term, 
they  are  pleased  to  call  "pessimism,"  as  an  indi- 
cation of  "pro-boche"  sympathies.  This  ten- 
dency has  been  encouraged  by  the  governments 
in  all  belligerent  countries  and  by  the  press,  which 
they  control  by  means  of  the  censorship.  Some 
of  its  results  were  exposed  by  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
in  his  now  famous  "Paris"  speech.  Nobody  can 
doubt  that  one  of  the  causes  of  the  numerous 
military  and  diplomatic  blunders  mentioned  by 
Mr.  Lloyd  George,  which  have  prevented  the 
Allies  from  profiting  by  the  superiority  of  their 
resources  over  those  of  their  enemies,  has  been 
the  lack  of  informed  and  balanced  criticism,  due 
to  the  press  censorship.  Moreover,  this  so- 
called  "optimism,"  which  is  not  optimism  but 
merely  a  refusal  to  see  things  as  they  are,  inevit- 
ably leads  sooner  or  later  to  dangerous  reactions 
of  real  pessimism.  A  whole  people,  as  you  were 
told  long  ago  in  America,  cannot  be  fooled  all 
the  time;  sooner  or  later  illusions  are  dispelled 
by  obstinate  facts  and  those  that  have  cherished 
them  fall  from  their  fool's  paradise  into  the 
abyss. 

The  few  men  that  have  kept  their  heads  and 
tried  to  see  things  as  they  are,  not  as  they  would 
like  them  to  be,  are,  therefore,  more  than  ever 
valuable  at  the  present  time.  M.  Paul  Louis 


is  one  of  such  men,  as  is  shown  by  the  little 
volume  just  published  with  the  title:  "Trois 
Peripeties  dans  la  Crise  Mondiale"  (Paris: 
Alcan;  1  fr.  25).  It  is  a  collection — the  fourth 
of  its  series — of  eight  articles  originally  published 
by  M.  Louis  in  the  "Revue  Bleue";  they  date 
from  October  1915  to  April  1917.  Two  of  the 
articles  are  concerned  with  the  Austrian  Em- 
pire, three  with  Russia,  and  the  remaining  three 
with  the  policy  of  President  Wilson.  A  writer 
that  republishes  long  afterwards,  and  without  the 
alteration  of  a  word,  articles  written  on  the  spur 
of  the  moment  exposes  himself  to  a  severe  test, 
for  all  his  readers  have  now  the  wisdom  that 
comes  after  the  event;  but  M.  Louis  stands  the 
test  well.  As  he  reminds  us  in  his  short  preface, 
he  had  to  write  under  the  eye  of  the  censor,  so 
that  he  could  not  say  all  that  he  thought,  but  he 
managed  to  say  enough  to  prove  his  possession 
of  that  prescience  that  comes  from  knowledge. 
The  articles  on  the  death  of  the  Emperor  Fran- 
cis-Joseph and  on  the  "new  era"  for  Austria- 
Hungary  that  many  people  anticipated  as  a  re- 
sult of  the  new  reign  have  been  in  many  respects 
confirmed  by  the  events.  M.  Paul  Louis  thought 
last  February,  when  the  second  article  was  first 
published,  that  this  anticipation  of  a  "new  era" 
would  prove  to  be  an  illusion,  "for  so  old  a 
construction  cannot  easily  be  repaired,"  and 
events  seem  to  justify  his  skepticism.  He  fore- 
saw that  Austria  must  remain  under  Prussian 
domination. 

M.  Louis's  historical  sketch  of  the  four  Rus- 
sian Dumas,  the  first  in  date  of  the  articles,  is 
still  a  valuable  aid  to  the  understanding  of  de- 
velopments in  Russia.  The  article,  "Veille  de 
Crise,"  written  a  month  before  the  outbreak  of 
the  Russian  revolution,  foretold  that  revolution 
as  plainly  as  the  censors  would  allow;  and  that 
on  the  downfall  of  the  Tsarism,  originally  pub- 
lished last  April,  is  a  shrewd  appreciation  of  the 
consequences  of  the  revolution  to  the  Allies  and 
the  Central  Empires.  If  those  consequences  have 
not  been  quite  what  M.  Louis  anticipated,  that 
is  because  the  Allies  have  not  known  how  to 
deal  with  the  forces  of  democratic  Russia;  their 
delay  in  revising  the  secret  treaties,  the  imperial- 
ist and  aggressive  nature  of  which  has  now  been 
revealed  to  the  world,  their  omission  to  re-state 
their  war  aims,  the  violent  and  indiscriminating 
attacks  of  a  large  part  of  the  French  and  English 
press  on  the  revolution  and  its  leaders:  all  these 
factors  have  contributed  to  the  present  state  of 
affairs  in  Russia.  But  M.  Paul  Louis  is  prob- 
ably still  right  in  his  belief,  first  expressed  eight 
months  ago.  that  in  the  end  the  Russian  revolu- 


60 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


tion  will  injure  the  German  and  Austrian  autoc- 
racies, not  the  allied  democracies,  if  the  latter 
will  not  forget  to  be  democratic. 

Of  the  three  articles  on  President  Wilson's 
policy,  the  first  was  originally  published  imme- 
diately after  his  election,  the  second  last  March, 
and  the  third,  on  American  intervention  and  the 
society  of  democracies,  on  April  21.  All  three 
show  an  understanding  of  Mr.  Wilson's  policy 
and  its  guiding  principles  which  contrasts  with 
the  superficial  comments  of  most  of  the  French 
papers,  which,  at  the  time  of  Mr.  Wilson's  elec- 
tion, criticized  him  very  unjustly.  Last  March 
M.  Louis  was  able  to  say  that  his  very  different 
judgment  had  been  completely  justified,  and  to 
show  that  the  development  of  Mr.  Wilson's 
policy  had  been  perfectly  logical.  He  would  not 
admit  that  Mr.  Wilson's  breach  with  Germany 
was  sudden ;  on  the  contrary,  he  maintained  that 
Mr.  Wilson's  policy  had  been  settled  nine 
months  before,  that  "he  had  foreseen  all  the 
hypotheses,  particularly  that  which  has  been  veri- 
fied, and  decided  on  a  line  of  conduct  appro- 
priate to  each  of  them."  In  the  last  article  M. 
Louis  deals  with  that  "society  of  democracies" 
which  he  believes  to  be  Mr.  Wilson's  chief 
aim;  he  says  with  truth  that  even  the  allied 
countries  are  not  yet  real  democracies,  but  only 
"democracies  in  course  of  formation,"  and  he 
does  not  except  America. 

If  I  have  given  so  much  space  to  a  book 
which  costs  only  a  quarter  of  a  dollar  and  little 
exceeds  a  pamphlet  in  size,  it  is  because  the 
size  and  price  of  a  book  are  no  indication  of 
its  value  and  M.  Paul  Louis  is  representative  of 
an  important  section  of  contemporary  French 
thought,  which  is  likely  to  be  paramount  in  the 
near  future.  For  the  future  in  France  is  in  the 
hands  of  the  Socialists  and  M.  Louis  is  an  in- 
fluence among  the  Socialists,  although  he  is  not 
in  Parliament  and  has  not,  so  far  as  I  know, 
any  intention  of  entering  it.  During  this  war 
each  belligerent  country  has  known  very  little 
of  what  is  being  thought  and  done  in  the  others ; 
all  the  Americans  newly  arrived  in  France  that 
I  have  met  agree  that  there  is  an  astonishing 
difference  between  the  real  state  of  things  here 
and  what  it  is  supposed  to  be  in  America.  I 
gather  that  even  the  American  military  chiefs 
have  had  some  surprises.  This  is  inevitable  with 
a  censorship  that  suppresses  facts  and  doctors 
opinion.  It  is  therefore  desirable  that  the  Amer- 
ican public  should  not  take  its  notions  of  French 
opinion  from  the  newspapers,  which  cannot  pos- 
sibly be  well  informed  in  the  circumstances,  and 


should  make  the  acquaintance  of  such  representa- 
tive writers  as  M.  Paul  Louis. 

One  by  one  the  great  artistic  figures  that  have 
survived  the  nineteenth  century  are  passing  away ; 
the  death  of  Rodin  has  followed  closely  on  that 
of  Degas,  who  was  his  senior  by  six  years.  Renoir 
and  Claude  Monet,  who  were  both  born,  if  I  am 
not  mistaken,  in  the  same  year  as  Rodin  (1840), 
still  remain,  and  so  does  Bartolome,  who,  al- 
though he  cannot  be  put  on  anything  like  the 
same  level  as  Rodin,  will  still  be  immortalized 
by  his  Monument  of  the  Dead  in  Pere  Lachaise, 
so  immeasurably  superior  to  all  the  rest  of  his 
work.  Rodin  was  buried  in  his  own  garden  at 
Meudon,  in  the  tomb  surmounted  by  his  famous 
"Penseur,"  where  lay  already  the  faithful  com- 
panion of  his  life,  whom  he  had  married  just 
before  her  death.  To  have  buried  him  in  the 
Pantheon  would  have  been  to  fly  in  the  face 
of  his  own  formal  injunctions,  but  the  Govern- 
ment thought  at  first  of  bringing  his  body  to 
Paris  for  a  State  funeral  before  its  interment 
at  Meudon;  the  idea  was  abandoned,  however, 
in  consequence  of  the  present  critical  military 
conditions  and  there  was  only  a  simple  lay  cere- 
mony at  Meudon,  at  which  a  member  of  the 
Government  spoke.  It  was  a  touching  scene, 
that  last  farewell  to  the  great  artist  in  the  hill- 
side garden  under  whose  trees  he  had  so  often 
walked  with  many  of  those  present. 

Rodin,  who  had  once  been  so  violently  at- 
tacked by  all  the  artistic  pontiffs  and  regarded 
by  the  public  as  a  crank,  lived  to  become  one  of 
the  chief  glories  of  France.  The  State  gladly 
accepted  from  him  the  generous  gift  of  his  works, 
and  the  Hotel  de  Biron,  that  beautiful  old 
house  with  its  huge  garden  at  the  corner  of 
the  rue  de  Varenne  and  the  boulevard  des  In- 
valides,  will  in  future  be  the  Musee  Rodin.  By 
an  irony  of  fate  Rodin  died  just  at  the  moment 
when  the  Academic  des  Beaux  Arts  had  at  last 
discovered  that  his  absence  from  its  ranks  was 
not  to  its  credit  and  was  thinking  of  asking  him 
to  allow  himself  to  be  proposed  as  a  member. 
Would  he  have  accepted?  I  hardly  think  so, 
for  the  proposal  came  too  late  to  confer  any 
honor  on  him  and  there  was  no  particular  rea- 
son why  he  should  have  honored  the  last  ram- 
part of  artistic  obscurantism.  You  have,  I  believe, 
no  official  academies  in  America  and  you  may  be 
thankful  for  it.  They  are  the  bane  of  litera- 
ture and  art,  and  the  enemies  of  individuality. 
A  pupil  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux  Arts,  which  is 
controlled  by  the  Academic,  has  either  to  sink 
his  individuality  and  ruin  himself  for  life  as  an 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


61 


artist,  or  else  to  live  in  a  state  of  constant  con- 
flict with  his  teachers,  unless,  like  Degas,  he 
leaves  it  in  disgust  after  a  few  months.  It  is 
melancholy  to  read  the  list  of  former  "Prix  de 
Rome"  and  notice  how  very  few  of  them  count 
at  all  as  artists ;  there  is  not  among  them  a  single 
painter  or  sculptor  of  the  first  rank.  Nor  have 
the  great  artists  of  modern  France  belonged  to 
the  Academic  des  Beaux  Arts,  not  Rodin,  nor 
Degas,  nor  Renoir,  nor  Claude  Monet,  nor  Bar- 
tolome,  for  instance.  Yet,  because  the  Acade- 
mic is  an  official  institution,  it  is  to  the 
academicians  that  the  State  has  almost  always 
given  its  commissions;  that  is  the  reason  why 
public  monuments  and  paintings  ordered  by  the 
State  are  usually  so  bad.  As  Degas  used  to  say, 
art  should  not  be  "encouraged." 

Even  the  unofficial  Academic  Goncourt, 
founded  by  the  brothers  Goncourt  in  order  to 
encourage  the  sort  of  literary  work  that  the 
Academic  Franchise  discourages,  is  falling  into 
the  conservatism  of  its  official  prototypes.  It 
has  just  preferred  to  M.  Georges  Courteline  a 
gentleman  called  Aj  albert,  who  is  generally  liked 
and  is  the  director  of  the  State  tapestry  factory 
at  Beauvais,  but  whose  literary  production  is 
unimportant  both  in  quantity  and  quality.  The 
election  had  been  postponed  several  times  because 
no  candidate  could  obtain  a  clear  majority.  Yet 
the  claims  of  M.  Courteline  were  infinitely  su- 
perior to  those  of  all  the  other  candidates.  The 
author  of  "Le  Train  de  8h.  47,"  of  "Messieurs 
les  Ronds-de-cuir,"  of  "Boubouroche,"  of  all  the 
marvelous  studies  of  military  service,  is  a  genius, 
with  limitations,  it  is  true,  but  with  a  power  of 
observation  hardly  ever  surpassed.  Moreover, 
his  work,  so  intensely  realist,  is  exactly  of  the 
kind  that  the  Goncourts  wished  to  encourage. 
It  is  understood  that  the  objection  to  him  was 
that  he  is  a  "humorous  author" ;  I  hope  that  this 
is  not  true,  for  it  would  imply  a  failure  on  the 
part  of  the  majority  of  the  Academic  Goncourt 
to  recognize  the  pathos  that  underlies  M.  Cour- 
teline's  humor,  like  that  of  Bret  Harte.  He 
might  say  with  Beaumarchais's  Figaro:  "Je  me 
presse  de  rire  de  tout  .  .  .  de  peur  d'etre 
oblige  d'en  pleurer." 

During  the  last  month  we  have  had  Lord 
Lansdowne's  letter  and  President  Wilson's  speech 
to  Congress,  which  agreed  on  several  important 
points.  Both  have  had  a  great  effect  on  public 
opinion,  but  perhaps  that  of  Lord  Lansdowne's 
letter  was  the  greater,  for  the  simple  reason  that 
it  was  shorter  and  set  forth  clearly  five  definite 
propositions.  The  speech  to  Congress,  being  of 


an  entirely  different  character,  could  not  take 
the  same  form  and,  as  it  was  rather  long,  too 
many  people  have  not  taken  the  trouble  to  read 
it  through  and  have  been  content  with  cross 
head-lines  and  newspaper  comments.  The  French 
translation  of  the  speech,  by  the  way,  was  much 
better  than  that  of  Mr.  Wilson's  reply  to  the 
Pope.  Some  of  the  papers,  for  their  own  pur- 
poses, selected  for  comment  only  such  passages 
of  Mr.  Wilson's  speech  as  seemed,  when  sep- 
arated from  their  context,  to  support  the  theory 
that  the  war  must  be  continued  until  the  Allies 
have  a  victory  in  the  field,  or  that  of  an  eternal 
boycott  of  Germany.  M.  Maurice  Barres,  for 
instance,  in  an  article  in  the  "Echo  de  Paris," 
actually  represented  Mr.  Wilson  as  having 
declared  that  we  must  never  again  have  any  rela- 
tions of  any  kind  with  Germany  in  any  circum- 
stances, basing  the  assertion  on  the  passage  in  the 
speech  about  "this  intolerable  thing  of  which 
the  masters  of  Germany  have  shown  us  the  ugly 
face,"  which  says  nothing  of  the  kind.  "Nothing 
that  is  German,"  said  M.  Barres,  "must  ever 
again  come  out  of  Germany  or  remain  in  our 
midst."  Previous  articles  of  his  show  that  this 
means  a  permanent  boycott  even  of  Goethe  and 
Wagner.  The  result  of  all  this  is  that  there  is 
considerable  confusion  in  the  public  mind  here  as 
to  President  Wilson's  real  meaning.  It  would 
seem  desirable  that  the  American  administration 
should  have  some  means  of  correcting  misunder- 
standings and  misrepresentations. 

There  were  at  first  few  press  comments  on 
Lord  Lansdowne's  letter,  for  the  papers  that 
would  have  liked  to  criticize  it  hesitated  to  at- 
tack the  statesman  who  is  universally  respected 
in  France  as  the  founder  of  the  Entente  Cor- 
diale.  The  "Figaro"  and  the  "Echo  de  Paris" 
even  deprived  their  readers  of  any  extracts  from 
the  letter.  But,  although  no  paper  published  a 
complete  translation,  the  extracts  given  in  the 
press  excited  immense  interest.  Lord  Lansdowne, 
in  fact,  said  what  the  majority  of  the  French 
people  already  thought;  that  is  the  explanation 
of  the  profound  effect  of  his  letter.  The  force 
of  public  opinion  is  shown  by  a  leader  in  the 
"Intransigeant"  warmly  supporting  Lord  Lans- 
downe's views.  For  the  "Intransigeant,"  which 
has  the  largest  circulation  of  the  Parisian 
evening  papers,  is  extremely  Nationalist  and 
jingo.  Another  sign  of  the  influence  of  public 
opinion  is  the  declaration  made  by  M.  Clemen- 
ceau  to  the  Foreign  Affairs  Committee  of  the 
Chamber  that  if  the  Central  Empires  made 
serious  peace  proposals,  he  would  consider  them. 


62 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


There  is  a  great  deal  of  talk  about  "pacifists" 
and  "defaitistes"  (a  barbarous  word  recently 
coined),  but  in  reality  the  difference  is  between 
those  who  say,  with  President  Wilson,  that  the 
war  will  be  won  when  we  have  attained  our  aims 
by  any  means  and,  therefore,  also  say  that  our 
aims  must  be  clearly  defined,  and  those  who 
hold  that  our  sole  aim  is  a  military  victory  and 
that  it  will  be  time  enough  to  decide  what  use 
to  make  of  it  when  we  have  won  it.  M.  Clem- 
enceau  has  hitherto  belonged  to  the  latter  cate- 
gory; he  seems  now  to  have  joined  the  former. 

To  the  numerous  scandals  has  now  been  added 
a  far  greater  one,  the  proposal  of  the  Govern- 
ment to  prosecute  M.  Caillaux  for  treason.  It 
is  already  plain  that  France  will  be  divided  into 
two  hostile  camps  and  we  shall  have  another 
Dreyfus  affair.  Ever  since  he  prevented  war  in 
1911,  M.  Caillaux  has  been  pursued  by,  the  bit- 
ter hostility  of  a  certain  party  both  in  France 
and  England.  The  London  "Times"  in  1911 
opposed  an  arrangement  between  France  and 
Germany  and  has  never  forgiven  M.  Caillaux  for 
making  one.  Lord  Northcliffe  was  the  first  to 
begin  the  campaign  against  M.  Caillaux  in  re- 
gard to  his  visit  to  Italy  a  year  ago,  which  is 
the  chief  basis  of  the  present  accusation.  Yet 
M.  Caillaux  went  to  Italy  with  the  consent  of  the 
Foreign  Ministry,  which  gave  him  a  diplomatic 
passport,  and  M.  Briand  and  M.  Ribot,  who 
were  respectively  Prime  Minister  and  Minister  of 
Foreign  Affairs  at  the  time  of  the  visit,  took  no 
action  on  the  reports  now  made  the  ground  of 
a  charge  of  treason,  nor  did  their  successors  until 
M.  Clemenceau  came  into  power,  after  a  violent 
controversy  with  M.  Caillaux.  Another  reason 
of  the  hostility  against  M.  Caillaux  is  the  fact 
that  he  was  the  author  of  the  income  tax,  which 
is  deeply  resented  by  the  French  rentiers. 

As  to  M.  Caillaux's  policy  in  1911,  there  can 
be  no  doubt  that  he  made  an  excellent  bargain 
for  his  country  when  he  obtained  complete  con- 
trol of  Morocco  in  return  for  a  small  piece  of 
the  Congo  and  that,  by  preventing  war,  he  saved 
France  from  disaster.  Russia  had  definitely  de- 
clared that  France  must  not  count  on  her  sup- 
port in  the  event  of  war  with  Germany  about 
Morocco.  Since  the  present  war,  he  has  un- 
doubtedly been  one  of  those  that  desired  to  make 
peace  whenever  it  should  be  possible  to  obtain 
our  conditions,  and  he  has  always  advocated  a 
clear  statement  of  war  aims  on  democratic  lines, 
and  opposed  imperialist  designs.  But  none  of 
his  friends  has  ever  heard  him  suggest  that 
France  and  Italy  should  make  a  separate  peace 


behind  the  back  of  England,  which  is  the  crime 
now  alleged  against  him.  There  has  been  so 
much  personal  and  party  animosity  against  M. 
Caillaux  that  suspicion  of  the  motives  of  the 
present  affair  is  inevitable;  it  has  all  the  appear- 
ance of  a  political  move  and  its  preliminary 
stages  have  had  a  disquieting  resemblance  to  those 
of  the  Dreyfus  affair.  I  am  convinced  that  M. 
Caillaux's  innocence  will  be  established,  if  he  has 
a  fair  trial  (a  secret  court  martial  would  not 
be  one) ;  the  whole  affair  might  in  certain  cir- 
cumstances turn  out  to  his  advantage  and  lead 
to  the  discomfiture  of  his  enemies.  But  the  pos- 
sible consequences,  to  both  France  and  the  Allies, 
of  the  terrible  political  conflict  that  is  inevitable 
cannot  be  contemplated  with  equanimity.  M. 
Caillaux  has  against  him  the  forces  of  militarism, 
which  are  powerful  in  war  time,  but  he  has  for 
him  the  Socialists  and  Trade  Unionists.  The 
internal  situation  is  critical  and  M.  Clemenceau 
is  running  a  grave  risk.  RQBERT 

Paris,  December  13, 


Largesse 

The  moon,  new-minted,  an  untarnished  treasure, 

O  mendicant,  behold! 
How  will  you  hoard  or  hazard  for  your  pleasure 

That  coin  of  gold? 

Pauper  no  more,  no  longer  shall  you  wander 

A  beggar  in  the  land ; 

Kingdoms  are  yours,  and  royal  wealth  to  squan- 
der 

Lies  in  your  hand. 

Streams  of  surprise,   swift  cataracts  of  wonder 

Flow  in  your  realm  to  buy; 
Mountains  of  miracle,  that  glimmer  under 

A  magic  sky. 

Think  you  to  purchase  with  the  polished  guerdon 

Laughter  to  wear — or  tears? 
No  ransom  can  redeem  your  beggar's  burden 

Of  outworn  years. 

The  chest  of  days,  for  all  that  you  may  offer 

Is  ever  bolted  fast; 
You  cannot  buy  from  Time's  eternal  coffer 

One  moment  past. 

Miser  or  prodigal,  whate'er  your  spending, 

Illiberal  or  free, 
As  they  began,  so  must  your  days  have  ending 

In  poverty. 

J.  M.  BATCHELOR. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


63 


Greek  Meets  Greek 


THE  GREEK  GENIUS  AND  ITS  INFLUENCE.  SELECT 
ESSAYS  AND  EXTRACTS.  Edited,  with  an  Introduc- 
tion, by  Lane  Cooper,  Ph.D.  (Yale  University 
Press;  $3.50.) 

Lane  Cooper  has  performed  another  of  those 
creditable  tasks  that  fall  in  the  twilight  zone 
between  pedagogy  and  scholarship.  It  is  neither 
a  handbook  nor  a  set  of  texts  that  he  has  pre- 
pared, but  a  sort  of  anthology,  in  the  main  culled 
from  the  broad  meadows  of  prose  criticism,  but 
ribboned  by  a  few  passages  from  the  poets — 
Shelley,  Milton,  Browning.  The  immediate 
purpose  of  the  book,  so  the  preface  tells,  is  to 
supply  the  need  of  background  to  a  class  study- 
ing Greek  and  Latin  masterpieces  in  standard 
translations;  yet  it  looks,  with  an  ulterior  eye, 
also  to  the  classical  specialist,  and  again  to  the 
incorrigible  possessed  of  "the  provincial  notion 
that  we  have  nothing  to  learn  from  the  past." 

This  comprehensive  order  is  met  by  a  score 
of  selections  chosen  with  that  studied  wilfulness 
which  is  in  the  anthologist's  charter.  To  say  that 
they  are  of  various  value  were  platitudinous; 
besides,  it  might  not  be  true,  for  the  selections 
are  obviously  chosen  for  various  ends — not  all 
of  them  self-evident.  Certainly,  the  levy  is 
made  only  upon  the  irreproachable,  and  it  is 
stoutly  international  and  without  taint  of  the 
tempestive — Newman,  Jebb,  Gildersleeve,  Gil- 
bert Murray,  or  again,  Croiset  and  Renan, 
August  Boeckh  and  von  Wilamowitz-Moellen- 
dorff,  all  honorable  men.  Certainly,  too,  the 
reading  is  good  reading,  for  the  whole  two 
hundred  odd  pages.  Only — and  one  must  ask 
it — why  isn't  it  edited?  If  the  book  were 
merely  for  the  scholar,  other  editing  than  the 
arranger's  meticulous  bibliography  would  be 
unnecessary;  but  then,  the  book  is  hardly  neces- 
sary for  scholars.  If  it  is  primarily  for  the 
collegian  and  the  more  studious  of  the  public 
called  general,  it  is  absurd  to  let  such  a 
characterization  of  Attic  education  as  Newman's 
go  with  an  unexplained  apology  for  anachronism, 
to  pass  without  exposition  a  polemical  con- 
demnation of  neo-classicism  such  as  is  represented 
by  S.  L.  Wolff's  review  of  one  of  Mahaffy's 
books,  or,  more  than  all,  to  present  without 
something  of  the  correction  which  stores  of  more 
modern  learning  afford,  such  a  myopic  view  of 
ancient  paganism  as  Kenan's.  The  "keystone  of 
my  arch,"  says  Professor  Cooper  (referring  to 
the  structural  self-sufficiency  of  his  collection)  is 
the  translation  from  Boeckh's  "Encyclopadie  und 


Methodologie  der  Philologischen  Wissenschaf- 
ten"  (pp.  263-300),  devoted  to  a  general  ap- 
praisement of  the  nature  of  antiquity.  Many  of 
Boeckh's  specific  studies  are,  of  course,  of  unsu- 
perseded  value,  and  in  this  particular  extract 
there  are  numerous  sagacious  observations;  but 
not  only  as  a  whole  does  it  move  in  that  omni- 
conscious  Weltanschauung  and  Geschichtsphi- 
losophie  which  make  the  stream  of  German 
speculation  such  muddy  swimming,  for  there  are 
few  of  the  thirty  pages  that  do  not  contain 
judgments  challenged  or  condemned  by  the 
course  of  time.  An  instance  is  Boeckh's  state- 
ment that  "it  was  a  fundamental  notion  of 
antiquity  that  fate  necessarily  determined  every- 
thing, even  the  will  of  the  gods."  The  essay 
by  Abby  Leach,  which  follows  Boeckh  in  the 
sequence,  is  devoted  to  refutation  of  this  judg- 
ment— though  it  must  be  confessed  that  the 
brand  of  fatalism  which  Miss  Leach  is  inter- 
ested in  showing  to  be  non-Greek  probably 
never  had  any  existence  except  as  a  fiction- 
writer's  explanation  of  his  hero's  foolhardiness 
or  of  his  heroine's  inability  to  control  her 
passions.  Boeckh,  indeed,  gives  the  proper  cor- 
rective of  his  own  statement  when  he  adds  that, 
after  all,  the  old  idea  of  necessity  and  the  mod- 
ern idea  of  freedom  are  the  same,  "since  in  God 
freedom  and  necessity  are  identical."  What  the 
Greeks  were  concerned  about,  as  are  most  Chris- 
tians, was  not  the  absence  of  Providence  but  its 
inscrutability — which  is  the  devil  of  it  for  us 
poor  mortals.  In  any  case,  a  note  on  the  sub- 
ject should  have  added  philosophical  quality  to 
the  implied  controversy. 

But  it  must  not  be  inferred  that  the  editor 
is  blind  to  what  might  be  termed  the  indiscre- 
tions of  contributors.  Their  differences  of  opin- 
ion, he  hopes,  will  be  so  neutralized  by  their 
agreements  that  in  the  composite  presentment 
which  results  the  accidental  will  dissolve  away 
and  the  pure  Hellene  be  shown  in  true  perspec- 
tive. And  something  like  this  actually  takes 
place  as  a  result  of  the  collocation ;  for  the  reader 
can  hardly  turn  from  the  book  without  a  vivid 
image  of  Lane  Cooper's  true  Greek.  Needless 
to  say,  this  Greek  is  stylistically  correct,  and  not 
at  all  unfamiliar.  He  is  verily  humanistic  and 
rationalistic  and  is  endowed  with  all  the  aca- 
demic virtues — nice  as  to  his  pomades,  with 
manner  so  subdued  as  to  convert  his  thorough 
conceit  into  a  proper  charm,  as  to  his  tongue 
with  just  enough  of  the  risque  to  give  him  spice, 
and  what  with  his  garlands  and  his  architec- 


64 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


tural  backgrounds  (a  sort  of  archetypal  college 
campus)  converting  the  whole  of  life  into  a  series 
of  pleasantly  plastic  tableaux.  Any  teachers' 
bureau  would  guarantee  to  place  him  from  the 
mere  description!  To  add,  as  it  were,  the  grace 
of  a  final  modesty  to  this  image,  our  Greek  is 
already  deprecatingly  rearing  his  altar  to  the 
"Unknown  God,"  in  solicitous  anticipation  of 
St.  Paul — (my  reference  here  is  to  the  last 
of  the  essays,  in  which  Gilbert  Chesterton 
defends  Christianity  as  against  Lowes  Dickin- 
son's honeyed  paganism). 

Now  I,  too,  have  a  Greek,  but  of  quite 
another  build — a  most  fascinating  savage  (for, 
culpa  meal  I  move  with  the  anthropologists), 
with  whom  I  should  dearly  love  to  do  "field 
work."  He  has  all  the  unblushing  vices  and 
shameless  imaginings  that  beset  the  natural  man, 
and  he  roars  with  vainglory  and  panics 
with  peril  like  the  other  barbarians — whom, 
incidentally,  he  despises  in  proportion  to  his 
ignorance  of  them.  Yet,  for  all  this,  his  utter- 
ance is  endowed  with  so  wicked  a  sagacity  as 
shall  never  cease  to  ruin  human  complacency,  and 
such  mordancy  of  double  intention  as  shall 
eternally  tantalize  human  ingenuity.  Like  his 
books,  so  his  art:  all  is  two-faced — for,  by  all 
the  singing  heavens!  my  Greek  knew  that  the 
power  of  his  handiwork  was  in  no  smooothness 
to  the  sense,  that  his  marbles  are  but  horrible 
blanks  of  life  if  they  be  not  transfigured  by 
unearthly  glories,  that  than  sensuous  beauty  no 
thing  is  less  possible,  and  that  the  very  essence 
of  the  beautiful  is  something  never  serene,  but 
always  troubled. 

Very  likely  an  historical  Hellene,  could  he 
sojourn  among  us,  would  regard  both  these,  and 
the  multitude  of  other  portraits  by  which  his 
memory  has  been  perpetuated,  with  small  recog- 
nition; certainly  he  would  feel  some  wonder  at 
the  attention  paid  him.  To  be  sure,  as  he  became 
habituated,  this  attention  would  gradually  grow 
intelligible  to  him,  and  eventually  he,  too,  would 
be  looking  back  to  his  native  age  with  a  sigh  for 
an  hour  happy  in  that,  for  once,  the  life  of 
the  mind  was  lived  unweighted  by  apparatus. 
Which  is  a  noble  argument  for  the  most  direct 
possible  acquaintance  with  the  classical  books. 
The  roads  of  indirection  lead  by  facile  grades; 
they  are  pleasant,  and  not  profitless.  But  what 
would  one  not  give  to  take  Plato  or  Euripides 
aside  for  a  quiet  quiz,  or  to  treat  Aeschylus  or 
Sophocles  to  an  honest  pipe  after  the  play  ? 

H.  B.  ALEXANDER. 


Keats  as  Thinker 


JOHN  KEATS:  His  LIFE  AND  POETRY,  His  FRIENDS, 
CRITICS,  AND  AFTER-FAME.  By  Sir  Sidney  Colvin. 
(Scribner's;  $4.50.) 

Thirty  years  ago  Sir  (then  Mr.)  Sidney  Col- 
vin published  his  life  of  Keats  in  the  English 
Men  of  Letters  series;  it  has  held  the  field  ever 
since  as  the  best  treatment  of  the  subject  for  the 
general  reader.  Even  now,  when  the  author  re- 
turns to  the  subject  in  his  admirable  new  work, 
he  seems  to  find  little  cause  to  revise  or  to  re- 
tract any  of  his  former  judgments;  his  task  is 
chiefly  one  of  amplification.  Books  will  still  be 
written  about  the  poetry  of  Keats;  but  it  may 
be  doubted  whether  the  present  biography  will 
ever  be  superseded,  either  in  completeness  or  in 
charm.  It  is  a  book  to  read  with  delight ;  better 
still,  it  is  a  book  that  compels  one  to  turn  back 
and  reread  the  poet  himself.  Its  form  is  at- 
tractive; the  illustrations  are  well  chosen  and 
well  executed;  even  the  very  exhaustive  index 
is  inviting. 

Sir  Sidney  is  fortunate  in  his  subject,  for  the 
material  is  abundant — he  is  able  occasionally  to 
add  to  our  knowledge  by  tapping  sources  hitherto 
not  available — and  much  of  this  material  con- 
sists of  writings  by  men  of  talent,  if  not  of 
genius.  He  does  well  to  paint  carefully  for  us 
the  society  in  which  the  young  poet  found  his 
wings,  quoting  freely  from  the  letters  of  Keats 
and  of  his  friends;  for  Keats  was  nothing  if  not 
impressionable,  and  even  when  he  reacted  most 
decidedly  against  his  environment,  it  is  only  by 
understanding  that  environment  that  we  can 
hope  to  understand  him.  So  we  welcome  the  por- 
traits of  his  friends  and  acquaintances:  Leigh 
Hunt,  elegant  and  always  sipping  the  delicious- 
ness  of  life,  tea-cup  fashion;  Wordsworth,  vain 
and  rather  heavy,  but  indubitably  a  great  poet; 
the  irrepressible  Lamb;  Shelley,  during  the  life 
of  Keats,  never  in  spirit  more  than  a  neighbor; 
the  faithful  Cowden  Clarke;  Haydon,  the  sure 
critic  and  pompously  mediocre  painter;  and  Sev- 
ern, to  Keats  a  fidus  Achates.  We  are  glad  to 
learn,  through  liberal  quotation,  such  homely  de- 
tails about  the  poet's  life  as  these,  by  himself 
half-humorously  recorded :  "the  candles  are  burnt 
down  and  I  am  using  the  wax  taper — which  has 
a  long  snuff  on  it — the  fire  is  at  its  last  click — 
I  am  sitting  with  my  back  to  it  with  one  foot 
rather  askew  upon  the  rug  and  the  other  with 
the  heel  a  little  elevated  from  the  carpet.  .  . 
To  know  such  trifles,"  observes  Keats,  "of  any 
great  Man  long  since  dead  it  would  be  a  great 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


65 


delight:  As  to  know  in  what  position  Shakes- 
peare sat  when  he  began  'To  be  or  not  to  be' — 
such  things  become  interesting  from  distance  of 
time  or  place." 

More  important  is  the  biographer's  record  of 
Keats's  mental  life.  Here  again  we  trace  the 
workings  of  a  personality  quick  to  appropriate 
vicarious  experience,  whether  it  is  old  English 
poetry,  in  which  Keats  was  at  times  entirely 
steeped,  or  an  engraving  of  a  painting  by  Claude 
or  a  print  of  an  ancient  vase.  Not  that  Keats 
ever  slavishly  imitated  anything  or  anybody.  In 
such  a  matter  as  the  handling  of  the  heroic  coup- 
let, as  Sir  Sidney's  masterly  sketch  makes  clear, 
he  was  bound  by  no  worship  of  precedent; 
meanwhile  he  was  learning  to  take  what  he 
needed  for  his  purposes  from  the  graphic  arts 
and  from  myth  and  from  romance  and  to  jumble 
them  without  much  consideration  of  context. 
When  is  the  story  recounted  in  "St.  Agnes' 
Eve"  supposed  to  have  taken  place,  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  or  last  night?  And  how  much  does  it 
matter  what  the  setting  is  supposed  to  be? 

So  even  a  life  of  Keats  proves  to  be  necessa- 
rily much  more  than  a  calculation  of  influences 
and  counter-influences.  The  central  fact  is  not 
that  Keats  enjoyed  this  or  disliked  that;  it  is 
that  various  experiences,  almost  always  felt  as 
concrete  images,  were  by  him  fixed  in  the  most 
musical  of  verse.  More  than  that,  Keats  was 
thoroughly  cured  of  his  early  tendency,  bred  by 
his  association  with  Hunt,  merely  to  voice  the  de- 
liciousness  of  things.  We  have  learned  to  real- 
ize how  large  a  part  of  him  was  "flint  and  iron," 
to  use  Matthew  Arnold's  phrase.  Mere  re- 
action to  the  stimulus  of  the  beauties  of  nature 
was  not  for  him;  "scenery  is  fine,"  he  wrote  as 
early  as  the  spring  of  1818,  "but  human  nature 
is  finer."  Hence  his  devotion  to  "the  continual 
drinking  of  knowledge."  Let  any  one  who 
thinks  of  Keats  as  the  mere  dreamer,  preoccupied 
with  sentiment  and  romance,  listen  to  the  poet's 
own  words:  "I  find  there  is  no  worthy  pur- 
suit but  the  idea  of  doing  some  good  to  the 
world.  .  .  There  is  but  one  way  for  me. 
The  road  lies  through  application,  study,  and 
thought.  I  will  pursue  it.  .  .  An  extensive 
knowledge  is  needful  to  thinking  people.  .  . 
The  difference  of  high  Sensations  with  and 
without  knowledge  appears  to  me  this;  in  the 
latter  case  we  are  falling  continually  ten  thou- 
sand fathoms  deep  and  being  blown  up  again, 
without  wings,  and  with  all  [the]  horror  of  a 
bare-shouldered  creature — in  the  former  case,  our 
shoulders  are  fledged,  and  we  go  through  the 


same  air  and  space  without  fear."  The  man 
who  could  write  thus  was  not  the  man  to  be 
killed  by  adverse  reviews,  and  one  is  glad  to 
see  with  what  emphasis  Sir  Sidney  has  disposed 
of  the  foolish  legend  to  the  contrary.  Whether 
Keats  was  altogether  wise  in  trying  to  pack  so 
much  significance  into  such  a  poem  as,  for  ex- 
ample, "Endymion,"  a  poem  that  was  from  the 
first  bound  to  be  read,  if  at  all,  chiefly  for  its 
purple  patches,  is  another  question.  The  gift 
of  "invention"  and  of  making  images  was  his  in 
a  supreme  degree,  as  well  as  the  gift  of  music; 
yet  a  great  part  of  his  glory  lies  in  his  ability  to 
enter  into  the  spirit  of  an  old  myth  or  an  old 
work  of  art,  and  to  seize  with  unerring  instinct 
that  element  of  it  which  is  as  much  alive  for  us 
as  it  was  for  its  first  creator.  Such  interpreta- 
tion and  transmission  of  the  life  of  things  is  in 
itself  a  claim  to  originality  of  the  first  order. 
Rediscovery  is,  after  all,  discovery. 

WILLIAM  CHASE  GREENE. 


Mr.  Chesterton's  England 

A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  ENGLAND.    By  G.  K.  Ches- 
terton.    (Lane;  $1.50.) 

G.  K.  Chesterton  has  committed  a  great  sin; 
he  has  written  a  didactic  poem,  a  work  of  art, 
and  has  called  it  history.  It  is  no  easy  thing  to 
give  a  list  of  all  the  complex  sanctities  that  he 
has  violated  by  this  one  act ;  as  a  mere  incident  in 
the  accomplishment  of  his  main  purpose  he  has 
arrayed  against  himself  anti-Catholics,  material- 
ists, aristocrats,  plutocrats,  and  the  whole  tribe  of 
scientific  historians.  But  it  is  true  of  Chesterton's 
"History  of  England,"  as  it  is  true  of  any  work 
of  art,  that  the  sanctities  which  it  violates  are 
not  so  important  as  the  vision  which  inspires  it 
The  hero  of  this  poem  is  the  people  of  England ; 
and  it  is  Chesterton's  central  thesis  that  the 
people  of  England  spent  the  Middle  Ages  in 
fighting  and  earning  its  way  towards  liberty  and 
independence,  that  in  the  fourteenth  century  the 
people  made  an  unsuccessful  revolution  in  the 
attempt  to  consecrate  and  complete  its  partial 
independence,  that  Parliament,  an  aristocratic 
and  plutocratic  council,  frustrated  that  revolu- 
tion, and  that  the  sixteenth  century  was  marked 
by  a  successful  counter-revolution  of  the  rich. 
From  that  time  on  the  condition  of  the  populace 
grew  worse;  the  social  reforms  of  the  nineteenth 
century  all  tended  in  the  direction  of  the  Servile 
State.  The  sign  of  the  Servile  State  is  the  per- 
mission granted  to  employees  "to  claim  certain 


66 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


advantages  as  employees,  and  as  something  per- 
manently different  from  employers." 

The  relapse  into  slavery  was  interrupted  by  the 
war.  "The  English  poor,  broken  in  every  revolt, 
bullied  by  every  fashion,  long  despoiled  of 
property,  and  now  being  despoiled  of  liberty, 
entered  history  with  a  noise  of  trumpets,  and 
turned  themselves  in  two  years  into  one  of  the 
iron  armies  of  the  world.  And  when  the  critic 
of  politics  and  literature,  feeling  that  this  war  is 
after  all  heroic,  looks  around  him  to  find  the 
hero,  he  can  point  to  nothing  but  the  mob." 

Now  this  is  poetry;  and  the  fact  that  it  is 
didactic  does  not  destroy  or  even  seriously  impair 
its  essential  value.  Chesterton  intends  to  wake 
men  up,  and  to  urge  them  to  see  the  past  for 
themselves.  He  addresses  himself  to  his  task  with 
all  the.  vigor  of  a  man  trying  to  rescue  a  friend 
from  the  deadly  effects  of  an  over-dose  of  opiate. 
Hence  comes  his  use  of  paradox  and  emphasis. 
They  are  far  from  being  the  idle  devices  of  a 
man  who  "stands  upon  his  head  and  cries  that 
the  world  is  upside  down" ;  on  the  contrary,  they 
are  desperately  earnest  attempts  to  awaken  the 
public  out  of  its  torpor.  It  is  no  more  relevant 
to  criticize  Chesterton  for  his  extravagance  than 
to  praise  him  for  his  brilliance;  we  do  not  criti- 
cize a  doctor,  under  similar  circumstances,  for 
shaking  the  patient  roughly,  any  more  than  we 
praise  him  for  rare  intelligence  when  he 
announces  that  the  patient  has  been  drugged. 
The  real  and  relevant  question  is  the  question 
of  fact.  Has  the  patient  been  drugged?  If  not, 
Chesterton's  poetry  is  superfluous,  to  say  the 
least.  But  if  the  public  has  been  drugged,  then 
we  must  also  ask  who  the  criminals  were  that 
put  the  people  to  sleep,  and  what  was  the  nature 
of  the  opiate. 

To  each  of  these  questions,  Chesterton  has  an 
answer  ready;  but  the  philosophy  on  which  they 
are  based  is  so  unfamiliar  to  most  men  that  it 
runs  a  risk  of  being  denounced  without  being 
understood.  Chesterton  believes  that  the  torpor 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  which  still  afflicts  much 
of  our  thinking,  was  due  to  a  radically  false  con- 
ception of  the  past,  to  a  misinterpretation  of 
history,  administered  by  popular  scientists  and 
popular  historians.  "The  complaints  of  the  poor 
were  stilled  and  their  status  justified"  by  a  fairy 
story  told  in  the  name  of  evolution  and  of  prog- 
ress. The  only  remedy,  therefore,  is  to  inform 
the  public  that  progress  is  not  automatic,  and 
that  the  sufferings  of  men  in  the  present  are  not 
due  to  the  impersonal  action  of  rigid  social  and 


economic  "laws,"  but  to  entirely  human  and  per- 
sonal causes  which  are  quite  within  the  power  of 
the  public  to  control. 

Thus  Chesterton  issues  a  direct  challenge  to 
the  historians,  and  thus  at  the  same  time  he  pub- 
lishes his  recipe  for  the  improvement  of  society. 
For  decades  past,  historians  have  proclaimed  that 
"the  aim  of  history  is  not  to  please,  nor  to  give 
practical  maxims  of  conduct,  nor  to  arouse  the 
emotions,  but  knowledge  pure  and  simple."  They 
have  thought  that  it  was  sacrilegious,  a  sin  against 
science,  to  write  a  history  which  suggested  any 
particular  course  of  political  or  moral  action. 
And  now,  ironically  enough,  Chesterton  accuses 
them  of  having  done  the  very  thing  they  were 
most  anxious  to  avoid ;  inasmuch  as  all  their  his- 
tories did  suggest  a  course  of  action,  or  rather  of 
inaction,  to  the  disinherited  English  people.  But 
if  this  is  true,  it  is  obvious  that  history  can  never 
be  "knowledge  pure  and  simple,"  since  whatever 
men  believe  about  their  past  is  bound  to  affect 
their  action  in  the  present.  Therefore  the 
"scientific"  historian  may  struggle  as  he  will; 
he  cannot  prevent  his  history  from  being  in  some 
degree  a  pamphlet  and  a  creed.  Chesterton's 
"History  of  England"  is  both  a  pamphlet  and  a 
creed;  but  he  has  one  great  advantage  over  his 
"scientific"  rivals.  He  really  knows  what  he  is 
writing  and  why;  whereas  the  science  of  the 
ordinary  historian  has  not  even  taught  him  what 
history  is.  Chesterton  is  a  poet,  and  therefore 
he  is  still  capable  of  the  emotion  of  wonder  which 
is  the  beginning  of  all  philosophy;  while  the 
historians  who  try  to  treat  the  past  as  if  it  were 
knowledge  pure  and  simple,  prove  perhaps 
their  simplicity  and  their  purity,  but  not  their 
knowledge. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  Chesterton's  book  will 
assist  in  destroying  this  old  and  popular  but 
false  conception  of  the  relation  between  past  and 
present.  Otherwise  intelligent  men  are  always 
telling  us  to  forget  the  past  and  set  our  faces 
resolutely  towards  the  future,  which  is  like  urging 
us  to  be  really  progressive  marble  statues.  Noth- 
ing forgets  the  past  more  readily  than  inanimate 
matter;  nothing  has  its  face  set  more  resolutely 
towards  the  future.  The  very  definition  of 
living  beings  is  that  they  do  not  wholly  forget 
the  past ;  and  it  is  worth  noting  that  their  control 
over  the  future  is  precisely  proportionate  to  their 
control  over  the  past.  One  does  not  render  a 
baby  more  gloriously  and  gladly  free  by  telling  it 
each  day  to  forget  all  that  it  learned  the  day 
before.  On  the  contrary,  memory  is  essential 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


67 


to  freedom.  But  it  is  equally  essential  that  the 
memory  should  be  correct.  We  maintain  asylums 
for  men  who  remember  that  they  were  Napoleons 
and  Caesars.  But  if  the  delusion  of  past  grand- 
eur is  mad,  so  also  is  the  delusion  of  past  slavery. 
Neither  the  growth  nor  the  loss  of  human  free- 
dom is  automatic;  and  as  men  can  be  enslaved 
by  being  taught  that  they  were  never  free,  so  can 
they  be  liberated  by  being  taught  that  they  were 
never  wholly  slaves.  ^  j£  HACK 


Eugene  Brieux 


BRIEUX    AND    CONTEMPORARY    FRENCH    SOCIETY. 

By  William  B.  Scheifley.    (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons; 

$2.) 

"Such  are  the  victims  of  fathers  who  have 
married  in  ignorance  of  things  which  you  now 
know,  things  which  I  should  like  to  shout  in  the 
market-place ! — I  have  told  you  everything,  with- 
out dramatising  anything."  Thus  the  doctor, 
mouthpiece  of  the  author,  in  "Damaged  Goods," 
and  the  declaration  may  stand  for  the  epigraph 
of  Brieux's  theatre.  There  are  many  things  he 
would  shout  from  the  house-tops  and  he  finds  the 
stage  the  most  effective  medium.  He  uses  it  as 
a  rostrum  to  bring  before  a  wide  audience  the 
great  social  questions  of  the  day.  For  him  the 
theatre  has  no  nobler  goal,  and  he  would  doubt- 
less say  with  Voltaire:  "J'ai  fait  un  peu  de  bien; 
c'est  mon  meilleur  ouvrage."  Many  of  us  may 
disapprove  this  mingling  of  stage  and  pulpit,  but 
Brieux  is  a  master  of  his  craft  and  the  thesis 
seldom  proves  fatal  to  the  artist.  One  of  his 
most  successful  and  admired  plays,  "Le  Berceau," 
seems  almost  a  challenge  to  the  critic.  The  text 
— there  shall  be  no  divorce  where  there  are  chil- 
dren— is  never  for  a  moment  forgotten,  and  we 
are  reminded  of  a  geometric  demonstration.  The 
theorem  is  rather  ostentatiously  enunciated  in  the 
first  scene,  and  each  one  following  adds  a  line  to 
the  construction  figure;  at  the  end  we  have  the 
Q.  E.  D.,  where  the  thesis  assumes  the  dignity  of 
the  ancient  fate.  "I  see  dimly  something  which 
is  soaring  above  you,  above  me,  above  us  all,  above 
human  laws,  and  of  which  we  may  well  be  only 
the  victims." 

Unfortunately  the  work  by  which  Brieux  is 
best  known  in  America  is  "Damaged  Goods," 
perhaps  the  unique  example  in  his  theatre  of  a 
thesis  without  a  play.  It  is  in  the  effort  to  right 
this  injustice  that  Mr.  Scheifley  has  published  his 
book.  He  makes  no  attempt  to  discuss  the  legiti- 
macy of  thesis  drama,  but  it  is  obvious  that  he 


has  no  quarrel  with  the  genre.  His  one  obiter 
dictum  on  the  subject,  in  a  footnote,  will  scarcely 
satisfy  hostile  critics.  "If  the  thesis  is  good,  why 
should  the  play  not  be  good  also?"  Of  course 
the  thesis  must  not  only  be  "good"  in  itself,  but 
adapted  to  treatment  on  the  stage.  And  even  so, 
there  is  always  the  lurking  danger  that  the  thesis 
may  warp  the  characters  or  lead  to  special  and 
undramatic  pleading.  Brieux  is  by  no  means 
beyond  censure  here.  But  Mr.  Scheifley  is  chiefly 
concerned  with  his  author  as  a  realist,  dealing 
with  certain  social  conditions  in  France.  He 
analyzes  in  detail  sixteen  plays,  gives  a  rapid 
historical  sketch  of  the  question  treated,  and  ex- 
amines the  same  problems  as  presented  by 
contemporary  dramatists,  novelists,  and  social 
and  literary  critics.  Thus  the  reader  is  given  a 
large  perspective  and  is  made  to  realize  the  vital- 
ity of  Brieux's  themes.  One  of  his  constant  pre- 
occupations is  the  lot  of  children  of  divorced 
parents.  No  fewer  than  eight  of  his  plays  turn  on 
this  subject  and  there  is  hardly  one  in  which  the 
welfare  of  the  children  has  not  a  prominent 
place.  Mr.  Scheifley's  chapter  on  the  place  of 
the  child  in  French  life  at  the  present  time  and 
in  the  past  is  among  the  best  in  the  book. 

Probably  no  two  critics  will  agree  on  the  lit- 
erary merit  of  the  different  plays.  Mr.  Scheifley 
is  so  intensely  interested  in  their  value  as  social 
documents  that  he  is  too  often  lenient  toward  the 
havoc  wrought  in  character-portrayal  by  the 
requirements  of  the  thesis.  There  are  too  many 
examples  in  Brieux  of  a  sudden  shift  from  cling- 
ing-vine  weakness  to  Cornelian  heroism,  or  the 
contrary.  A  dash  of  skepticism  concerning  the 
legitimacy  of  thesis  drama  might  have  led  with 
profit  to  a  study  of  the  greater  or  less  intrusive- 
ness  of  the  thesis  in  Brieux.  As  it  is  Mr.  Scheifley 
finds  thesis  everywhere  and  fails  to  mark  its  rela- 
tive importance  in  the  plays.  Thus  he  remarks 
in  passing  of  "Les  Hannetons"  that  it  "explodes 
the  claim  that  free  love  is  less  enslaving  than 
marriage."  Possibly,  but  Brieux  is  wont  to  use 
explosives  of  higher  power,  which  leave  no  doubt 
of  his  intentions,  and  it  is  probable  that  ninety- 
nine  out  of  a  hundred  spectators  will  see  in  "Les 
Hannetons"  only  a  delicious  bit  of  realistic  farce. 

In  general,  Mr.  Scheifley  deplores  the  comic  or 
farcical  scenes,  although  these  are  always  in  char- 
acter, as  lessening  the  serious  effect  of  the  play. 
He  fails  to  see  that,  in  addition  to  the  needed 
relief  from  angry  denunciation  of  social  injustice, 
these  little  scenes,  which  are  intensely  realistic, 
prove  close  observation  and  incline  the  spectator 
to  accept  the  whole  play  as  true  to  life.  The 


68 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


thesis  drama,  if  it  is  to  make  for  reform,  must  at 
least  give  the  impression  of  realism.  We  must 
be  convinced  that  the  giant  is  genuine  and  not  a 
windmill  before  we  charge.  Doubtless  this  is 
the  explanation  of  the  introduction  of  statistics 
into  certain  of  Brieux's  plays. 

Mr.  Scheifley's  two  introductory  chapters  are 
excellent.  The  first  contains  a  brief  biography 
showing  Brieux's  humble  origin  and  early  strug- 
gles for  recognition,  to  which  he  owes  his  sym- 
pathy for  the  working  classes.  His  six  years' 
sojourn  as  journalist  at  Rouen  perhaps  gave  him 
his  insight  into  the  provincial  character.  His 
peasants  are  among  the  best  that  French  literature 
has  produced.  The  second  chapter  gives  a  rapid 
survey  of  the  author's  early  plays  through  which 
he  was  led  to  find  his  proper  field. 

The  American  public  owes  a  large  debt  of 
gratitude  to  Mr.  Scheifley  for  his  scholarly  and 
sympathetic  treatment  of  Brieux.  He  has  shown 
admirably  Brieux's  sincerity  and  versatility,  and 
amply  justified,  for  American  eyes,  the  place 
accorded  to  the  author  in  his  native  land. 

BENJ.  M.  WOODBRIDGE. 


A  Thwarted  Cosmopolite 

LIFE  AND  LITERATURE.  By  Lafcadio  Hearn.  With 
an  Introduction  by  John  Erskine.  (Dodd,  Mead 
&  Co.;  $3.50.) 

This  is  the  third  volume  of  selections  from 
the  lectures  delivered  by  Hearn  at  the  Univer- 
sity of  Tokio  prior  to  1902.  The  other  vol- 
umes appeared  in  1915  and  1916.  All  three 
have  been  constructed  in  great  part  from  the 
notes  of  his  Japanese  students.  Hearn,  as  Mr. 
Erskine  instructs  us,  spoke  slowly  and  distinctly, 
using  simple  words  and  constructions;  and  in 
some  instances  the  students  were  able  to  take 
down  his  lectures  word  for  word. 

These  volumes  are  different  indeed  in  text 
and  tone  from  those  which  he  addressed  directly 
to  the  English  and  American  public.  Here  we  sip 
from  a  cup  of  clear  cold  water  a  succession  of 
draughts  quite  uncolored  and  unseasoned.  But 
it  all  serves  admirably  for  the  high-school  or 
university  student  in  our  own  country,  as  well 
as  for  the  older  reader  who  enjoys  being  fresh- 
ened up  by  a  series  of  capable  resumes. 

The  range  of  subjects  seems  quite  hit-or-miss. 
Doubtless  the  young  Orientals  need  to  know 
about  the  French  romantics  and  about  George 
Meredith's  poetry  (which  is  presented  both  in 


the  original  text  and  in  a  series  of  careful  para- 
phrases) ;  but  who  would  quite  have  expected 
to  find  them  learning  about  the  verse  of  Lord 
De  Tabley  or  about  the  fairy  literature  of  the 
North?  For  matured  Anglo-Saxons  the  most 
interesting  of  Hearn's  chapters  are  the  first  three, 
which  deal  with  general  opinions  and  which  state 
his  views  on  the  reading  and  writing  of  litera- 
ture— particularly  the  one  in  which  he  gives  his 
ideas  on  Composition. 

He  considers  the  architecture  of  composition: 
How  shall  one  overcome  the  difficulties  of  be- 
ginning? he  asks.  By  not  beginning  at  all,  he 
answers.  When  you  draw  a  horse,  do  as  the 
Japanese  artist  does:  he  is  no  more  likely  to 
start  with  the  head  than  with  the  tail  or  the 
hoof.  Hearn,  in  fact,  seems  to  see  a  work  of 
literature  evolving  and  shaping  just  as  nebula? 
spin  and  whirl  into  concrete  solidity.  Once 
more  we  are  conscious  of  him  as  the  devotee  of 
color  rather  than  as  the  devotee  of  form.  "The 
literary  law  is,  let  the  poem  or  the  story  shape 
itself.  Do  not  try  to  shape  it  before  it  is  nearly 
done.  The  most  wonderful  work  is  not  the 
work  that  the  author  shapes  and  plans;  it  is  the 
work  that  shapes  itself.  .  ."  In  other  words, 
one  may  best  put  his  intellectual  pride  in  his 
pocket,  and  plunge  himself,  at  hazard,  into  an 
irresponsible  emotional  welter. 

Hearn's  observations  on  style  may  meet  with 
more  acceptance.  What  we  once  called  "style," 
he  says,  no  longer  exists.  What  is  called  "style" 
ought  to  be  called  "character."  He  might  have 
paused  to  mark  the  distinction  between  style  and 
diction.  Style,  of  course,  is  "of  the  man";  it 
will  attend  to  itself — must  do  so  inevitably, 
since  anything  a  man  writes  is  necessarily  a  dis- 
closure, a  give-away.  Yet  diction,  that  lesser 
concern,  is  by  no  means  to  be  neglected.  What 
the  books  on  rhetoric  and  composition  have  to 
say  about  "clearness,"  "correctness,"  "unity,"  and 
the  like  still  holds  valid.  No  due  heed  to  sen- 
tence-structure or  to  paragraph-building  is 
going  to  screen  the  essential  man  from  his  per- 
ceptive readers — though  Lafcadio  Hearn,  address- 
ing the  Japanese  student-body  according  to  its 
peculiarities  and  needs,  does  offer,  to  those  fa- 
miliar with  his  usual  manner,  an  aspect  which  is 
almost  a  disguise. 

His  general  table  of  contents  rather  tends  to 
lead  the  reader  into  literary  bypaths.  Hearn 
himself,  as  a  reader,  seems  to  have  had  a  wide 
scope — and  to  have  felt  that  anything  which  in- 
terested him  could  be  absorbed  and  assimilated 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


69 


by  others,  regardless  of  race  or  tradition.  Perhaps 
not  every  Western  student,  even,  would  follow 
him  through  all  the  ins  and  outs  of  "Rossetti's 
Prose"  or  would  share  his  interest  in  "French 
Poems  on  Insects."  But  youth  is  teachable  and 
tends  to  absorb,  and  Eastern  youth  can  doubt- 
less respond  when  Duty  seems  to  whisper,  "Thou 
must."  And  who,  after  all,  shall  decide  as  to 
what,  among  the  accumulations  of  the  mind's 
vast  lumber-room,  may  or  may  not  be  turned, 
later,  to  account?  After  all,  a  university  is  not 
a  bargain  counter,  at  which  one  satisfies  merely 
one's  immediate  and  clearly  perceived  needs. 

Mr.  Erskine's  introduction  is  graceful  and 
sympathetic.  If  he  inclines  to  stress  a  little  un- 
duly the  importance  of  his  material,  that  is  a 
fault  which  leans — properly  enough  in  the  cir- 
cumstances— to  generosity.  At  all  events,  the 
book  helps  build  up  the  inner  life-story  of  a 
thwarted  cosmopolite.  HENRY  B.  FULLER. 


A  Primer  of  Revolutionary 
Idealism 


POLITICAL  IDEALS.     By  Bertrand  Russell.     (Cen- 
tury; $1.) 

"In  dark  days,  men  need  a  clear  faith  and  a 
well-grounded  hope,  and  as  the  outcome  of  these 
the  calm  courage  which  takes  no  account  of  hard- 
ships by  the  way.  The  times  through  which  we 
are  passing  have  afforded  to  many  of  us 
a  confirmation  of  our  faith.  We  see  that  the 
things  we  had  thought  evil  are  really  evil,  and 
we  know  more  definitely  than  we  ever  did  before 
the  direction  in  which  men  must  move  if  a  better 
world  is  to  arise  on  the  ruins  of  the  one  which 
is  now  hurling  itself  to  destruction." 

The  emotion  with  which  one  reads  these  open- 
ing sentences  of  Bertrand  Russell's  must  be  like 
nothing  so  much  as  the  thrill  which  went  through 
the  men  who  opened  "Le  Contrat  Social"  and 
saw  on  the  first  page :  "L'homme  est  ne  libre,  et 
partout  il  est  dans  les  fers."  Just  as  they  must 
have  felt  that  in  Rousseau  were  the  liberating 
ideals  of  the  immediate  future,  we  feel  that  it 
is  around  the  ideas  expressed  in  this  book  that  the 
younger  generation  will  rally  for  a  clear  faith 
and  a  well-grounded  hope.  Mr.  Russell  has 
expressed  these  ideas  in  his  other  books.  But 
here  they  are  organized  into  what  is  virtually  a 
primer  of  revolutionary  idealism,  written  with  a 


passionate  soberness  that  stirs  the  mind  as  deeply 
as  it  moves  the  heart.    In  him  intellectual  power 
and  concern  for  human  values  have  fused  at  a 
more  intense  point  than  in  almost  any  other  mind 
of  our  time.    He  has  welded  together  ideas  from 
the  newer  psychology,  from  syndicalist  socialism, 
from   the   philosophy   of  internationalist   aspira- 
tion, into  a  coherent  and  creative  philosophy,  at 
once  the  basis  for  a  personal  as  well  as  a  social 
idealism.     The   need  of  liberating  the  creative 
rather  than  the  possessive  impulses,  the  principle 
of    growth,    the    value    of    reverence    towards 
individuality,  the  obsolescence  of  a  society  based 
on  property  and  power,  the  inadequacy  of  security 
and  liberty  as  sole  political  ideals,  the  need  of 
autonomy  within  the  state  for  subordinate  groups, 
the  hope  for  gild  socialism,  and  the  organization 
of  an  international  order  that  shall  harmonize 
with  the  true  community  of  sentiments  among 
mankind — these  are  the  ideas  which  have  been 
made  familiar  in  "Justice  in  Wartime"  and  in 
"Why  Men  Fight."     In  this  summary,  one  finds 
the  same  style,  the  calm,  clear,  pragmatic  flavor 
of  science   and   not  of   religion.     Without   any 
mystical  taint,  and  with  none  of  the  traditional 
vague  symbols  that  have  become  charged  with 
emotion,  Bertrand  Russell's  fusion  of  intelligence 
with  what  we  can  only  call  "love  for  humanity" 
gives  these  ideas  an  emotional  drive  that  we  are 
accustomed  to  associate  only  with  the  mystical. 
This  is  the  novel  power  of  his  writing. 

"Political  ideals  must  be  based  upon  ideals  for 
the  individual  life.  The  aim  of  politics  should 
be  to  make  the  lives  of  individuals  as  good  as 
possible.  There  is  nothing  for  the  politician  to 
consider  outside  or  above  the  various  men,  women, 
and  children  who  compose  the  world.  The 
problem  of  politics  is  to  adjust  the  relations  of 
human  beings  in  such  a  way  that  each  severally 
may  have  as  much  good  in  his  existence  as 
possible." 

Is  there  not  a  peculiar  appeal  in  these  clear 
old  truths,  so  almost  trite  in  their  expression? 
Russell  keeps  something  of  the  noble  intellectual- 
ity of  Huxley  and  Mill,  but  with  an  added  de- 
classed revolutionary  spirit  that  they  did  not  feel. 
We  have  no  thinker  in  this  country  to  do  this 
forward-pointing  work.  What  irony  that  it  is 
Bertrand  Russell  who  comes  from  the  chill  and 
remote  regions  of  mathematics  with  this  liberat- 
ing idealism !  RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


70 


[January  17 


A  Lucky  Thirteen 

THE  GRIM  THIRTEEN.  Short  Stories  by  Thirteen 
Authors.  Edited  by  Frederick  Stuart  Greene, 
with  an  Introduction  by  Edward  J.  O'Brien. 
(Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.;  $1.40.) 

From  time  to  time,  and  often  with  surprising 
mildness,  we  hear  complaints  of  the  low  quality 
of  magazine  fiction  and  the  even  lower  opinions 
that  the  editors  of  most  of  our  "leading  jour- 
nals" have  of  the  public  that  reads  and  runs. 
"The  New  Republic"  has  attained  its  position  of 
authority  in  so  short  a  time,  since  it  realized  from 
the  first  the  force  of  F.  P.  A.'s  epigram  that  the 
average  reader  was  a  good  deal  above  the  aver- 
age. And  it  is  because  most  of  the  magazines 
still  fail  to  recognize  the  essential  truth  of  this 
simple  paradox  that  they  remain  (at  least  as  far 
as  their  fiction  is  concerned)  the  flabby,  cheaply 
sensual,  or  falsely  sentimental  monthlies  that  fail 
to  interest  even  the  proverbial  mid-western  bar- 
ber's wife  for  whom  they  were  designed.  Espe- 
cially shortsighted  has  been  the  "happy  ending" 
fallacy.  The  theory  behind  tragic  tales  and 
dramas  holds  as  good  today  as  it  did  in  the  time 
of  Sophocles  and  Shakespeare.  All  art  is  an  un- 
conscious catharsis;  and  it  takes  a  violent  purge  to 
rid  us  of  violent  emotions.  This  old  philosophic 
platitude  is  given  new  life  daily  in  every  extreme, 
from  a  consideration  of  the  most  horrible  of  wars 
in  the  most  peaceful  of  ages  to  a  scrubwoman 
weeping  at  the  movies.  The  need  of  violence 
and  tragedy  is  something  that  many  of  our 
editors  do  not  dare  or  do  not  desire  to  believe  in. 
They  forget  that  the  great  mass  of  people  is  no 
less  interested  in  the  dark  hazards  of  life  than 
were  the  Greeks  or  the  Elizabethans ;  they  refuse 
to  believe  that  the  tamer  we  become,  the  wilder 
grows  our  only  half-repressed  imagination.  They 
offer  an  adventure-hungry  public  a  series  of 
pink  and  white  heroines  with  perfume  in  their 
veins,  endless  variations  of  the  Cinderella-Zenda 
romances,  wax  dummies  with  virile  pretentions 
on  their  lips  and  riding  breeches  on  their  souls — 
and  wonder  why  they  cannot  compete  with  the 
eloquent,  richly  detailed,  and — elementary  though 
its  psychology  still  is — the  more  searching  spool 
of  film.  Mr.  O'Brien  hints  at  the  reason  in  the 
preface  to  this  interesting  volume,  which  started 
as  a  discussion  around  the  fire.  After  a  few 
speculations  by  the  six  who  had  gathered  there, 
it  became  clear  that,  in  spite  of  many  differences, 
there  was  a  taboo  against  the  gruesome  stories 
and  "that  American  editors  believed  the  public 
demanded  the  happy  ending." 


"We  began  to  call  a  roll  of  American  story-tellers, 
and  as  name  after  name  was  mentioned,  the  question 
arose  in  our  minds  as  to  whether  or  not  every  story- 
teller might  not  have  one  story  in  his  private  drawer 
which  no  magazine  would  agree  to  publish  because 
of  its  gruesome  character.  ,  The  conviction  grew 
among  us  that  a  grim  story,  no  matter  whether  it 
was  a  little  masterpiece  or  not,  was  hoodooed. 

And  then  the  inspiration  came.  Why  not  try  to 
find  thirteen  hoodooed  masterpieces  by  thirteen  un- 
lucky masters,  and  throw  them  upon  the  mercies  of 
the  public  for  a  vote?  No  sooner  suggested  than 
done.  Story-tellers,  critics,  and  publisher  for  once 
agreed.  If  there  were  thirteen  unlucky  stories  in 
America  good  enough  to  print  in  a  book,  we  would 
find  them  and  publish  them  with  our  appeal  for 
judgment." 

This  book  is  the  result — an  excellent  record 
for  the  now  fortunate  thirteen  and  a  definite 
indictment  of  the  editors  that  made  it  necessary. 
The  consistent  rejection  of  some  of  these  stories 
is  nothing  short  of  amazing.  And  the  puzzle 
deepens  as  one  examines  them  in  detail.  Vance 
Thompson's  "The  Day  of  Daheimus"  is  sev- 
eral shades  less  "grim"  than  some  of  Irvin 
Cobb's  tales  published  a  few  years  ago  in  so  rep- 
resentative a  publication  of  the  middle-class  as 
"The  Saturday  Evening  Post."  Dana  Burnet's 
"Rain,"  Richard  Matthew  Hallett's  "Razor  of 
Pedro  Dutel,"  and  Wadsworth  Camp's  "The 
Draw-Keeper"  might  have  appeared  in  "Col- 
lier's" or  "Every  Week."  And  Robert  Alexander 
Wason's  "Knute  Ericson's  Celebration,"  far  from 
having  the  prohibited  "unhappy  ending,"  comes 
to  a  major  and  decidedly  buoyant  climax.  Truly 
the  American  editor's  mind  moves  in  a  myste- 
rious way  its  wonders  to  perform !  There  is  not 
one  story  in  the  volume  that  is  mechanical,  medi- 
ocre, or  of  the  merely  competent  order  that  suf- 
fices for  our  monthly  fiction.  And  what  is 
similarly  surprising  is  the  distinguished  style, 
the  poetic  perception,  the  high  literary  quality 
revealed  in  most  of  the  rejected  thirteen.  Exam- 
ine Vincent  O'Sullivan's  story,  "The  Abigail 
Sheriff  Memorial,"  and  observe  how  delicately 
yet  deeply  the  characters,  the  landscape,  and  the 
psychology  are  etched  with  a  masterly  hand.  I 
snatch  one  illuminating  fragment — a  description 
of  a  house  in  New  England — from  its  context 
to  indicate  his  power: 

"Something  unfriendly  and  depressing  emanated 
from  the  house  as  soon  as  you  crossed  the  threshold. 
If  I  were  a  practiced  writer,  I  suppose  I  could  bring 
the  sensation  home  to  you ;  but  as  it  is,  it  baffles  me 
to  realize  it  on  paper.  It  was  not  so  much  a  sensa- 
tion of  mystery  as  of  secrecy.  Those  who  had  died 
in  that  house,  in  the  seventy  years  or  more  it  had 
been  standing,  had  not  quite  gone  away;  something 
of  them  remained  in  the  still  rooms.  At  mealtimes 
there  always  seemed  to  be  some  other  presence,  or 
presences,  at  the  table  besides  the  master  and  mistress 
of  the  house. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


71 


The  word  for  them  is  subdued.  They  are  subdued 
to  the  atmosphere  of  their  house,  to  their  traditions, 
to  the  na'ive  furniture  they  sat  among.  This  unpro- 
testing  acquiescence  in  the  unlovely  was,  of  course, 
to  be  expected,  given  the  locality.  The  tradition 
was  the  same  as  that  of  the  British  small  tradesman, 
nonconformist  in  religion  and  politics — the  stock  ^they 
originated  from.  Dreary  and  unpicturesque  religion 
had  no  doubt  in  the  first  place  inspired  the  dreary 
and  unpicturesque  surroundings.  In  a  community 
which  had  never  opened  its  eyes  to  any  of  the  arts 
except  literature,  and  to  that  only  on  its  inartistic 
side,  the  absence  of  any  testimony  to  aesthetic  needs 
was  not  surprising." 

It  is  too  bad  that  these  highly  differentiated 
stories  end  on  so  obvious  and  overemphasized  a 
note,  a  note  that  is  in  many  ways  the  weakest. 
Frederick  Stuart  Greene's  tale,  "The  Black 
Pool,"  has,  in  common  with  one  or  two  of  the 
others,  a  specious  and  melodramatic  horror  that 
tries  to  take  the  place  of  raw  strength.  In  its  very 
desire  to  adhere  to  a  realistic  programme,  it  ceases 
to  be  real  at  all  and  depends  on  a  fictitious  and 
forced  romanticism;  a  plot  whose  villain  is  as 
overdrawn,  whose  terrors  are  as  stereotyped,  and 
whose  atmosphere  is  as  artificial  in  its  way  as  the 
pallid  and  precise  society-fiction  from  which  it 
revolted.  Otherwise  the  collection  is  an  unusual 
and  noteworthy  one,  and  its  publication  is  not 
only  a  sort  of  trial  of  the  public  but  a  test  of  our 
editors.  It  is  something  more  than  an  interest- 
ing assemblage;  it  is  an  experiment  that  is  also 
a  challenge. 

Louis  UNTERMEYER. 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


OREGON  THE  PICTURESQUE.     By  Thomas 

D.  Murphy.     Page;  $3.50. 

Oregon  is  one  of  the  few  states  west  of  the 
Rockies  that  have  not  been  advertised  to  the  point 
of  familiarity.  References  to  it  in  history  centre 
chiefly  around  the  Columbia  River,  which  it 
shares  with  Washington  for  the  last  few  hundred 
miles  of  its  course,  but  the  bibliography  is  limited 
in  comparison  with  that  of  almost  any  other 
state.  Tourists  are  only  beginning  to  know  it 
for  its  more  spectacular  sights,  such  as  Crater 
Lake,  the  Columbia  River  Highway,  and  the 
Pendleton  Round-up.  Mr.  Murphy  endeavors 
to  show  that  these  are  but  a  few  of  Oregon's 
claims  to  the  attention  of  the  world  in  general 
and  motorists  in  particular.  The  subject  is  pre- 
sented in  an  informal  and  somewhat  personal 
manner,  as  one  might  write  a  detailed  record 
of  a  trip  by  automobile,  including  comment  on 
hotels,  garages,  the  price  of  gasoline,  and  the 
color  of  sunsets. 

Although    Oregon    furnishes    the    inspiration 


for  most  of  the  book,  the  trip  chronicled  begins 
at  Sacramento,  California,  and  includes  Lake 
Tahoe  and  other  points  east  of  the  Sierras  on 
the  way  north.  There  is  a  short  account  of  a 
stopover  at  Reno,  Nevada,  a  town  which,  it  will 
occur  to  the  reader,  is  one  of  the  least  familiar 
of  places,  though  its  name  is  celebrated  in  song 
(of  a  kind)  and  story.  The  chapter  on  Crater 
Lake  embraces  most  of  the  data  included  in  the 
Government  bulletins,  and  its  originality  consists 
principally  of  notes  that  may  assist  future  motor- 
ists. Its  value  to  motor  tourists  is,  in  fact,  the 
book's  best  justification,  for  as  a  piece  of  descrip- 
tive literature  it  does  not  take  high  rank.  The 
author  fails  to  invest  the  open  road  with  the 
charm  that  it  has  in  this  region,  while  his  por- 
trayal of  the  major  scenic  marvels  lacks  the 
power  of  conveying  even  a  modicum  of  the  re- 
actions produced  by  the  originals.  "Into  the 
Yosemite  by  Motor"  and  "A  Run  to  the  Roose- 
velt Dam  and  to  the  Petrified  Forest"  are  articles 
supplementing  the  main  narrative.  There  are 
automobile  maps  showing  the  routes  covered, 
and  many  excellent  illustrations  in  color  and 
halftone. 

BRITISH  FOREIGN  POLICY  IN  EUROPE.    By 

Hugh  E.  Egerton.     Macmillan;  $2. 

It  has  often  been  charged  "by  German  publi- 
cists and  historians  that  the  past  history  of  British 
foreign  policy  has  been  conspicuous  for  its  display 
of  perfidy  and  unscrupulousness."  So  impressed 
was  a  recent  German  writer  with  the  vicious 
character  of  English  diplomacy  that,  while  heart- 
ily supporting  the  movement  to  rid  his  native 
language  of  foreign  words,  he  felt  that  an  excep- 
tion should  be  made  of  the  word  "perfidious"  in 
its  German  form,  as  otherwise  it  would  be  impos- 
sible to  characterize  properly  the  policies  of 
Westminster.  Apparently  Englishmen  have  come 
to  feel  that  the  charge  ought  to  be  refuted ;  and 
Professor  Egerton,  of  Oxford,  has  undertaken  to 
provide  the  refutation. 

Professor  Egerton  is  widely  known  for  his 
studies  in  colonial  history;  and  since  the  growth 
of  the  British  Empire  is  in  large  measure  the 
result  of  diplomatic  activities,  a  student  of  colo- 
nial problems  is  peculiarly  fitted  for  the  task  in 
question.  The  author  has  produced  a  readable, 
interesting,  and  useful  work,  but  it  is  not  likely 
to  add  to  his  fame  as  a  historian.  The  book  is 
to  a  large  extent  a  compilation  and  gives  evidence 
of  somewhat  hurried  preparation,  as  is  true  of 
so  many  of  the  "timely"  books  that  have  been 
published  since  1914.  Professor  Egerton  is  less 
concerned  with  the  details  of  diplomatic  history 
than  with  the  opinions  and  purposes  of  the  states- 
men who  have  controlled  the  policies  of  the  Brit- 
ish foreign  office;  his  work  is  consequently  a 
discussion  rather  than  a  narrative.  After  having 


72 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


presented  and  examined  all  the  important  facts 
relating  to  English  foreign  policy  since  the  days 
of  Elizabeth,  he  concludes  that,  while  English 
diplomats  have  always  watched  carefully  over 
what  were  supposedly  British  interests,  the  treat- 
ment accorded  to  neighbors  and  allies  by  the 
English  government  has  nearly  always  been  in 
agreement  with  the  highest  political  morality  of 
the  time.  He  denies  that  the  Emperor  was 
betrayed  in  1713  and  that  Frederick  II  was 
deserted  by  the  English  in  1763;  in  both 
instances  the  original  issues  of  the  conflict  had 
been  settled  and  there  was  no  longer  any  good 
reason  for  continuing  the  war.  During  the  wars 
with  the  French  Republic  and  the  Napoleonic 
Empire  England  alone  of  all  the  countries  allied 
against  the  French  was  steadfast  in  maintaining 
the  cause  of  European  freedom.  Time  and  again 
Prussia  and  Austria  came  to  terms  with  the 
enemy  and  left  England  in  the  lurch;  and  the 
record  of  Russia  during  that  trying  period  is 
scarcely  more  creditable  than  that  of  her  Teu- 
tonic neighbors. 

The  author  discusses  in  some  detail  the  many 
difficult  problems  of  the  nineteenth-century  diplo- 
macy, and  he  finds  that  with  few  exceptions  the 
positions  assumed  and  the  methods  employed  by 
the  English  government  have  been  not  only 
defensible  but  in  accord  with  rational  principles. 
As  one  might  expect,  the  problem  of  Belgium  in 
its  various  phases  is  given  a  prominent  place  in 
the  history.  Professor  Egerton  concludes  his  sur- 
vey with  a  chapter  on  British  sea  power:  he  holds 
that  the  vulnerability  of  the  British  Isles  makes 
a  large  navy  necessary;  that  in  the  treatment  of 
enemies  and  neutrals  the  English  admiralty  has 
shown  less  arbitrariness  and  ruthlessness  than  any 
other  naval  establishment;  and  that  in  times  of 
peace  the  British  navy  has  rendered  important 
service  to  humanity,  the  suppression  of  the  slave 
trade  being  cited  as  a  conspicuous  instance. 

AT  THE  RIGHT  OF  THE  BRITISH  LINE.    By 

Captain  Gilbert  Nobbs.     Scribner;  $1.25. 

A  war  book  likely  to  be  widely  read  is  Gilbert 
Nobbs's  "At  the  Right  of  the  British  Line."  A 
civilian  officer  of  the  new  English  army,  Captain 
Nobbs  was  only  five  weeks  in  the  fighting  line. 
His  small  command  was  given  what  proved  to  be 
an  impossible  task  in  the  fighting  on  the  Somme, 
and  after  losing  most  of  his  men,  Captain  Nobbs 
was  struck  blind  by  an  unlucky  bullet  and  lay 
many  hours  in  a  shell  hole  until  found  and  made 
prisoner  by  the  Germans.  After  a  short  term 
of  captivity,  which  enabled  him  to  write  an  inter- 
esting description  of  two  German  prisons,  he  was 
sent  back  to  England  where  he  is  today,  "hap- 
pier," as  he  says  with  pathetic  cheerfulness,  "than 
he  has  ever  been  before  in  his  life." 

This  is  not  a  great  book.     It  is  so  unpreten- 


tious, indeed,  that  one  wonders  why  one  has 
finished  it  at  a  single  sitting.  But  as  a  graphic, 
moving  picture  it  will  hold  any  reader.  The 
story  is  rapidly  told,  the  scenes  are  unforgetable, 
the  human  touches  vivid,  and  underneath  all 
runs  the  tone  of  cheerfulness  and  quiet  courage 
of  the  man  who  has  forgotten  that  he  is  brave. 
Such  a  book  is  a  tonic  and  its  popularity  will  be 
richly  deserved. 

A  SOLDIER'S  MEMORIES.  By  Major-Gen- 
eral Sir  George  Younghusband.  Dutton ;  $5. 
It  is  not  the  fortune  of  everyone,  General 
Younghusband  says,  "after  traveling  six  thousand 
miles  and  arriving  in  time  for  lunch,  to  discover 
incidentally  in  the  course  of  conversation  that 
he  is  expected  to  take  part  in  a  bloody  battle 
shortly  after  the  completion  of  the  meal."  But 
it  was  repeatedly  his  own  experience.  Conse- 
quently he  has  in  greater  degree,  perhaps,  than 
any  other  writer  about  modern  warfare  the 
spirit  of  the  soldier-adventurer.  His  .remi- 
niscences reflect  an  unshackled  joy  in  adventure, 
and  an  evidently  keen  delight  in  sharing  his  mem- 
ories to  the  full  with  his  readers. 

"One  learns  much,  and  sees  much,"  is  his 
own  conclusion  after  his  years  on  the  Indian 
frontier  and  his  campaigns  during  the  Boer 
War,  the  Burmese  War,  and  the  Egyptian  Cam- 
paign. The  reader  sees  much,  too,  through  his 
eyes,  and  possibly  because  the  author  is  not  con- 
sciously pedagogical,  the  reader  also  learns  much 
of  the  feelings  and  the  character  of  the  men 
of  every  sort  and  degree  that  he  has  known. 
Of  Tommy  Atkins  and  his  evolution  there  are 
some  interesting  revelations.  "I  myself,"  he 
writes,  "had  for  many  years  served  with  sol- 
diers, but  had  never  once  heard  the  words  or 
expressions  that  Rudyard  Kipling's  soldiers  used. 
Many  a  time  did  I  ask  my  brother  officers 
whether  they  had  ever  heard  them.  No,  never. 
But  sure  enough,  a  few  years  after,  the  soldiers 
thought,  and  talked,  and  expressed  themselves 
exactly  like  Rudyard  Kipling  had  taught  them 
in  his  stories!  He  would  get  a  stray  word 
here,  or  a  stray  expression  there,  and  weave  them 
into  general  soldier  talk,  in  his  priceless  stories. 
Rudyard  Kipling  made  the  modern  soldier." 

Whether  General  Younghusband  writes  of 
Kitchener  and  Lord  Roberts,  of  his  dogs,  his 
Indian  servants,  the  too  frequent  sallies  of  other 
native  gentlemen  "who  were  out  for  a  short  road 
to  Paradise  by  killing  a  British  officer,"  of  the 
long  marches  over  dusty  Indian  roads,  or  of  life 
in  the  officer's  mess,  he  writes  with  appreciation 
of  that  individual  difference  in  men  that  makes 
part  of  the  infinite  humor  of  life,  with  vigor 
and  good  humor,  and  care  that  every  point  in 
his  narrative  shall  be  well  made.  "Memories," 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


73 


from  the  point  of  view  of  interest  and  of  work- 
manship, is  one  of  the  best  collections  of  remi- 
niscences that  have  recently  been  brought  out. 
One  is  envious  of  the  life  that  has  made  them 
possible. 

THE  EARLY  LIFE  OF  ROBERT  SOUTH EY, 

1774-1803.    By  William  Haller.    Columbia 

University  Press;  $1.50. 

Southey  played  so  prominent  a  part  in  the 
intellectual  and  literary  generation  that  sprang 
from  the  French  Revolution  that  a  competent 
study  of  him  has  long  been  needed.  That  need 
is  now  being  supplied.  Dr.  Haller's  biography, 
as  published  thus  far,  brings  the  story  down  to 
the  poet's  settlement  at  Keswick  in  1803.  If  the 
second  volume  is  marked  by  the  same  qualities 
of  care,  accuracy,  and  poise,  the  biography  will 
be  indispensable  to  students  of  the  period. 

Materials  for  a  study  have  not  been  lacking, 
for  Southey  was  a  prolific  author.  The  mere 
bulk  of  his  writings  has  frightened  scholars,  how- 
ever, and  the  vanity  of  the  man  has  to  some 
extent  repelled  them.  Nobody  has  been  willing 
to  grapple  with  an  author  who  wrote  endless  let- 
ters, reviews,  biographies,  lyrics,  and  epics,  and 
complacently  deemed  them  all  masterpieces.  Yet 
the  story  of  this  man  is  not  only  worth  the  tell- 
ing; it  is  rich  in  interest  besides.  In  this  interest 
the  chief  elements  are  his  association  with  Cole- 
ridge in  the  pantisocracy  scheme,  the  condemna- 
tion along  with  Wordsworth  as  a  Lake  poet,  and 
the  savage  mockery  he  underwent  at  the  hands  of 
Byron.  But  these  elements  are  by  no  means  all. 

Before  he  settled  at  Keswick,  Southey  was  an 
outspoken  rebel  against  the  existing  order.  He 
was  expelled  from  Westminster  School;  he  was 
driven  from  his  aunt's  house  on  a  rainy  night; 
he  was  distrusted  as  an  enemy  of  the  country 
and  religion.  Yet  this  man,  like  Wordsworth, 
only  in  greater  degree,  became  in  his  old  age  a 
hidebound  conservative.  Burke  had  not  loved 
change,  but  had  been  willing  that  the  rotten 
bough  should  be  lopped  off  that  the  tree  might 
be  saved.  Southey  grew  unwilling  that  a  single 
bough  should  be  touched.  From  his  beloved 
library  by  the  lake  he  hurled  anathema  after 
anathema  at  the  champions  of  political,  economic, 
or  religious  innovation.  In  the  course  of  this 
metamorphosis  from  iconoclast  to  conventional- 
ized laureate,  Southey  was  absolutely  honest  and 
outspoken.  That  is  why  he  is  so  interesting.  He 
always  wished  that  everybody  should  know 
exactly  where  Robert  Southey  stood.  In  the 
days  of  his  respectability,  to  be  sure,  he  was  vexed 
that  his  enemies  should  make  known  where  he 
had  stood  when  he  wrote  "Wat  Tyler."  But 
this  was  only  a  token  of  his  hatred  for  what  he 
himself  had  once  been.  The  two  halves  of  his 
life  show  the  extremes  to  which  men  rushed  dur- 


ing the  French  Revolution  and  the  reaction  to 
institutionalism  afterwards. 

On  Southey  the  writer,  time  has  already  given 
its  verdict.  He  was  better  in  prose  than  in  verse, 
he  always  had  merit,  and  yet  he  was  always  sec- 
ond-rate. Still,  he  played  for  high  stakes  and  it 
often  seemed  he  was  destined  to  win.  Those 
ambitious  epics  of  his  have  nearly  every  analyz- 
able  quality  of  great  poetry.  Southey  put  into 
them  practically  everything  that  counts  except 
the  ultimate  thing — genius. 

HISTORY   OF   THE    UNITED    STATES.     By 

Henry  William  Elson.     Macmillan;  $1.80. 

This  "revised  edition"  is  merely  a  reprint  of 
the  original  edition  of  1904,  with  the  addition 
of  two  new  chapters.  The  first,  on  "The  Twen- 
tieth Century,"  carries  the  story  from  1904  down 
to  the  election  of  1916;  another  on  "Latest  In- 
dustrial Progress  and  Inventions"  purports  to 
give  in  some  eight  pages  a  survey  of  American 
industrial  development  since  1850.  Any  ex- 
tended discussion  of  the  older  parts  of  this  book 
is  out  of  place  here.  The  reader  is  referred  to 
contemporary  reviews.  But  time  is  a  sore  trier 
of  books  and  especially  books  of  history.  In  this 
case  the  author's  habit  of  illuminating  text  and 
footnotes  with  forward-looking  passages  and  his 
finality  of  statement  render  the  book  especially 
vulnerable.  The  fact  that  similar  generaliza- 
tions in  the  new  chapters  attempt  to  set  matters 
right  but  calls  attention  to  the  need  of  real  re- 
vision. 

Perfunctoriness  might  be  expected  in  the  new 
chapters  published  under  such  conditions,  and  in 
this  the  reader  will  not  be  disappointed.  Espe- 
cially is  this  true  in  the  chapter  on  industrial 
progress,  which  is  not  at  all  illuminating,  is  dis- 
tressingly inadequate,  and  contains  many  irrele- 
vant things  that  belong  in  earlier  chapters.  It 
gives  the  impression  of  being  dragged  in  to  meet 
the  growing  demand  for  more  industrial  history, 
and  serves  only  to  furnish  the  book  with  an  anti- 
climax. The  chapter  on  the  twentieth  century 
is  better.  But  even  here  there  is  almost  an  entire 
failure  to  correlate  events  into  movements  or  to 
show  their  significance.  Legislative  acts  are  listed 
with  apparently  little  regard  for  their  connec- 
tion with  each  other  and  less  for  their  bearing 
on  the  industrial  development  hinted  at  in  the 
succeeding  chapter.  The  author  is  left  with  a 
group  of  miscellanies,  which  he  must  crowd  into 
the  closing  paragraphs  for  want  of  some  better 
place.  The  result  of  the  whole  is  to  come  short 
of  a  real  explanation  of  recent  United  States 
history,  an  achievement  which  was  quite  within 
reach. 

Since  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  a 
great  change  has  taken  place  in  American  life. 


74 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


In  unnumbered  ways  it  has  been  apparent  that 
America  has  been  growing  up.  Rank  individu- 
alism, born  of  our  frontier  and  of  our  rapid  ex- 
pansion, has  been  giving  way  to  socialization 
and  group  action.  At  times  scholars  have  singled 
out  special  phases  of  this  change  and  given  us 
accurate  and  permanent  appreciations  of  their 
meaning,  even  while  the  change  was  going  on. 
It  has  remained  for  the  present  decade  to  bring 
to  American  scholarship  generally  a  realization 
of  the  national  development  as  a  whole  which 
had  expressed  itself  in  these  various  ways  to  va- 
rious observers.  In  1904  Dr.  Elson  purposely 
foreshortened  and  condensed  that  part  of  his  his- 
tory treating  the  period  subsequent  to  1884,  on 
the  ground  that  the  events  were  too  close  to  ad- 
mit of  proper  perspective.  Since  then  events 
have  moved  so  rapidly  and  so  much  light  has 
been  thrown  upon  them  that  it  would  seem  pos- 
sible and  practicable  now  to  present  a  unified 
story  of  our  national  development  down  to  the 
present.  There  is  a  real  place  for  a  medium- 
sized  history  of  the  United  States  such  as  Dr. 
Elson  conceived,  and  a  thorough-going  revision 
of  his  book  in  the  light  of  recent  scholarship 
with  a  greater  emphasis  on  recent  history  would 
be  welcome.  But  it  should  be  done  rightly  or 
not  at  all. 

THE  MUSEUM.  By  Margaret  Talbot 
Jackson.  Longmans,  Green;  $1.75. 
As  a  pioneer  in  its  field  this  study  of  the  mu- 
seum, its  site  and  its  architectural  plan,  its  needs, 
its  management,  the  preparation  and  care  of  its 
collections,  and  kindred  matters,  is  a  notewor- 
thy book.  The  author  has  spent  several  years  in 
visiting  and  examining  the  chief  museums  of  this 
country  and  of  seven  European  countries,  and 
her  advice  on  the  practical  questions  presented 
is  therefore  worthy  of  a  respectful  hearing. 
Among  other  wise  counsels  she  urges  economy  of 
space  in  the  architectural  plan  of  a  museum.  The 
grand  staircase,  which  in  a  European  museum  is 
often  a  reminder  of  the  original  palatial  charac- 
ter of  the  building,  of  its  having  been  erected 
in  the  first  place  to  house  royalty  or  nobility, 
has  no  useful  or  appropriate  place  in  a  modest 
museum  planned  for  the  preservation  and  exhibi- 
tion of  a  growing  collection  of  art  objects,  nat- 
ural-history specimens,  or  other  products  of 
genius  or  skill,  industry  or  research.  On  the 
topic  of  wall-coverings  the  writer  well  character- 
izes the  too-prevalent  burlap  as  somewhat 
suggestive  of  potato  sacks.  Miscellaneously  com- 
prehensive museums,  such  as  the  South  Ken- 
sington and  the  Metropolitan,  she  pronounces 
"monstrosities"  and  advises  instead  a  number  of 
smaller  specialized  collections  "dotted  about  in 
the  different  quarters  of  the  city."  But  there  is 


something  to  be  said  in  favor  of  the  vastness  and 
variety  of  a  great  museum.  Such  a  storehouse  of 
wonders  attracts  the  young  especially,  and  facili- 
tates certain  studies  of  a  widely  inclusive  nature 
and  those  which  call  for  research  along  parallel 
or  divergent  lines. 

THE    RELIGIONS    OF    THE    WORLD.     By 

George  A.  Barton.     University  of  Chicago 

Press;  $1.50. 

Instruction  in  comparative  religions  has  had  a 
varied  history  in  American  colleges.  When  it 
first  appeared,  it  was  as  an  advanced  course  in 
"Bible."  Later,  anthropologists  began  to  talk 
about  primitive  religions,  diverging  from  them 
into  the  higher  types.  But  recently  sociologists 
have  been  claiming  the  field  as  theirs.  They 
have  not  succeeded,  however,  in  substantiat- 
ing their  claim  to  any  great  extent.  The 
present  work  makes  one  wish  they  had,  for  its 
author  is  obviously  a  Protestant  theologian, 
though  one  who  has  read  some  anthropology. 
His  work  is  colored  throughout  by  the  convic- 
tion of  the  Protestants  that  man  is  saved  by  faith 
alone;  his  book  is  little  more  than  a  summary 
of  the  views  which  various  peoples  have  enter- 
tained in  regard  to  God,  the  soul,  immortality, 
and  so  on.  The  following  passage,  which  con- 
tains not  the  slightest  hint  that  it  is  to  be  taken 
ironically,  well  sets  forth  the  author's  opinion: 
"Among  primitive  peoples  the  essential  part  of 
religion  is  not  belief  but  practice.  One  must  be 
careful  to  do  the  things  that  are  pleasing  to  the 
gods.  They  are  supposed  to  be  pleased  not  with 
what  men  think  of  them,  but  by  the  service  that 
is  rendered  them.  The  emphasis  in  early  re- 
ligions is  quite  different  from  that  in  the  so- 
called  positive  religions." 

As  we  read  this  book,  therefore,  we  see  a 
number  of  religious  philosophies  spread  out  be- 
fore us.  One  can  take  one's  choice.  In  con- 
cluding his  chapter  on  Christianity,  the  author 
tells  us  that  he  prefers  his  own  particular  choice, 
and  that  he  thinks  it  would  be  better  if  all  men 
were  of  his  opinion.  But  if  men  persist  in 
disagreeing,  it  can,  in  the  last  analysis,  only  be 
because  tastes  differ;  perhaps  with  the  advance- 
ment of  public  education  tastes  will  be  brought 
into  closer  harmony.  But  this  is  all  that  can 
be  said  so  long  as  it  is  generally  believed  that 
a  religion  is  merely  a  system  of  metaphysical  prop- 
ositions, unanimously  admitted  as  true  by  all 
the  believers  in  that  particular  religion,  and 
rejected  as  false  with  equal  unanimity  by  all 
others,  and  as  to  the  truth  or  falsity  of  which, 
argument  is  impossible. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  are  told  to-day  that 
concepts  are  but  tools,  and  that  philosophical 
systems  are  generally  ex  post  facto  justifications 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


75 


of  what  we  are  doing — or  at  best  rationalizations 
of  it.  A  society  organized  in  a  certain  way,  and 
pursuing  certain  aims,  may  find  the  metaphys- 
ical statement  of  one  religion  useful,  and  another 
prefer  a  different  one.  Thus  these  differences  of 
metaphysics  reduce  to  differences  of  social  envi- 
ronment: a  history  of  religious  thought  should 
be  the  story  of  the  repercussions  of  society  and 
metaphysics  upon  one  another. 

But  our  author  does  not  realize  this.  For 
example,  in  the  chapter  on  the  Hebrew  religion, 
he  speaks  of  the  development  which  that  religion 
underwent  at  the  time  of  the  prophets;  he  is 
apparently  oblivious  of  the  fact  that  at  just  that 
time  the  Hebrew  people  were  engaged  in  a  life- 
and-death  struggle  for  their  national  existence. 
In  agony  and  bloody  sweat,  Isaiah,  Jeremiah,  Eze- 
kiel,  and  the  others  hammered  out  a  conception 
of  God  and  the  world,  which  they  induced  their 
countrymen  to  accept  and  which  enabled  this 
people  to  survive  when  another  would  have  gone 
into  oblivion.  To  speak  of  this  conception  as 
"purer"  or  "higher"  is  meaningless;  it  was  more 
useful  on  that  particular  occasion.  In  so  far  as 
all  races  of  men  are  generally  in  a  position  some- 
what analogous  to  that  of  the  Hebrews  in  the 
sixth  century  B.  C.,  this  conception  will  be  use- 
ful to  them  all — though  of  course  another  may 
be  still  more  useful.  If  religious  beliefs  were 
thus  shown  in  the  environment  in  which  they 
were  born,  we  might  come  to  see  that  belief  is 
not  so  important  a  part  of  religion  as  practice, 
after  all,  though  of  course  it  may  determine  ac- 
tion. If  studies  were  made  along  this  line — if 
religions  were  watched  working  in  their  social 
environment — we  might  eventually  arrive  at  an 
answer  to  the  perennial  question  of  what  religion 
is.  To  this,  the  most  fundamental  of  all  ques- 
tions in  the  study  of  comparative  religions,  the 
author  gives  no  answer:  we  lay  his  book  down 
no  better  able  to  answer  it  than  we  were  before, 
nor  could  we  recognize  a  new  religion,  if  we  saw 
it,  without  a  label. 

TOWN  PLANNING  FOR  SMALL  COMMUNI- 
TIES. Edited  by  Charles  S.  Bird,  Jr.  Apple- 
ton  ;  $2. 

Civic  beauty  has  come  to  be  almost  as  much 
a  popular  demand  as  that  for  civic  efficiency. 
Indeed,  the  two  are  not  infrequently  comple- 
mentary motives.  But  hitherto  the  smaller  cities 
and  the  semi-rural  communities  have  been  sadly 
neglected  in  matters  both  of  efficiency  and  of 
beauty.  This  little  volume  is  a  practical  pre- 
sentation of  the  reasons  for,  and  the  methods  of 
securing,  planned  cities  and  towns.  So  many 
communities  have  already  embarked  upon  schemes 
for  physical  reorganization  that  it  would  seem 
scarcely  necessary  to  raise  the  question  of 


feasibility,  but  because  many  do  raise  a  question 
of  policy,  it  may  be  pertinent  to  say  that  the  gains 
in  property  values  and  the  greater  security  of  life 
from  an  improved  sanitation,  to  say  nothing  of 
bettered  recreational,  transportation,  and  civic 
facilities,  make  town-planning  decidedly  worth 
while  from  most  or  all  angles  from  which  it  may 
be  considered. 

This  volume  concerns  itself  with  such  aspects 
of  town-planning  as  the  organization  and 
improvement  of  housing,  parks  and  playgrounds, 
streets  and  roads,  town  forests,  social  life,  public 
health,  and  transportation.  The  book  itself  is 
an  outgrowth  of  the  research  of  the  Walpole 
(Mass.)  Town  Planning  Committee,  which  got 
together  for  their  own  guidance  the  source  mate- 
rials here  published.  Parts  two  and  three  of 
the  volume  consist  of  detailed  plans  for  the  work- 
ing over  of  Walpole  and  descriptions  of  the 
publicity  methods  employed  to  arouse  popular 
interest  in  the  project.  The  inclusion  of  this 
practical  matter  renders  the  book  all  the  more 
useful  as  a  guide  to  other  communities  seeking 
to  rebuild  themselves  in  a  scientific  and  eco- 
nomical manner. 

ANTHOLOGY  OF  SWEDISH  LYRICS.  Trans- 
lated by  Charles  Wharton  Stork.  The 
American-Scandinavian  Foundation;  $1.50. 
There  is  something  reminiscent  of  the  textbook 
in  the  bird's-eye  view  of  Swedish  poetic  literature 
shown  forth  in  this  volume.  It  boasts  not  merely 
notes  on  pronunciation,  textual  and  biographical 
notes,  but  an  introductory  sketch  as  well.  From 
this  one  gathers  that  the  lyric  poetry  of  Sweden 
"is  inferior  to  none"  in  quality,  "and  in  richness 
it  is  not  far  behind  the  best  of  any  nation  during 
a  similar  period  of  time,"  that  is,  from  the  mid- 
eighteenth  century  to  the  present.  Free  compari- 
sons are  drawn  between  the  poets  represented 
and  Burns,  Arnold,  Heine,  Rossetti,  and  Goethe. 
One  turns  to  examples  of  their  emphasized  excel- 
lences with  an  eagerness  not  unnaturally  tem- 
pered by  fear. 

The  compiler  and  translator  does  not  transmit 
his  enthusiasm  in  the  verse  which  he  presents. 
The  distinctions  which  shine  out  so  clearly  to  him 
between  the  work  of  the  Horatian  Bellman  and 
the  realist  Froding  are  less  apparent  to  one  who 
depends  on  the  anthology  for  his  appreciation  of 
them.  One  receives  less  a  definite  impression  of 
the  change  and  development  of  Swedish  poetry, 
as  suggested  by  the  introduction,  than  of  certain 
things  which  the  lyrists  of  Sweden  continuously 
celebrate.  The  awful  majesty  and  bright  loveli- 
ness of  the  forests  and  the  fields,  a  cherishing  of 
the  name  of  Sweden,  recurrence  to  her  martial 
history  as  well  as  to  dim,  mythical  legend,  these 
inform  the  lyrics  of  both  the  older  and  the  more 
recent  poets.  Whether  the  naive  sentimentality 


76 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


and  morality  which  prevail  are  due  to  the  man- 
ner of  translation  or  to  the  poems  themselves,  it 
is  difficult  to  say.  Inversion  and  frequent  dac- 
tyls combine  to  detract  from  that  intensity  which 
is  the  essence  of  lyrism.  The  variance  between 
the  significance  of  the  poetry  presented  and  that 
which  its  translator  believes  to  attach  to  the  an- 
thology weakens  the  effect  of  the  interesting 
poems  it  contains. 

THE   LIFE   OF   ULYSSES   S.    GRANT.     By 

Louis  A.  Coolidge.     Houghton  Mifflin ;  $2. 

Of  those  personalities  emerging  from  the  Civil 
War  with  distinction,  Ulysses  S.  Grant,  next  to 
Abraham  Lincoln,  commands  the  largest  share 
of  our  interest.  But  for  the  monumental  achieve- 
ment of  the  "Personal  Memoirs,"  we  should 
doubtless  have  had,  by  this  time,  a  greater  num- 
ber of  serious  attempts  to  represent  him  through 
the  medium  of  biographical  writing.  The  vol- 
ume just  added  to  the  "American  Statesmen 
Series"  is  written  by  Mr.  Louis  A.  Coolidge,  and 
differs  in  general  from  the  other  volumes  of  the 
series  in  being  less  academic  in  style.  Not  only 
is  the  book  highly  readable,  but  it  fills  the  need 
of  a  biography  giving  an  adequate  proportion  of 
attention  to  the  eight  years  of  Grant's  presidency. 
After  a  rapid  survey  of  the  early  life  and  educa- 
tion of  Grant,  the  writer  engages  attention  upon 
those  military  operations  in  the  Mississippi  Val- 
ley culminating  in  the  brilliant  coup  de  maitre 
at  Vicksburg.  The  credit  for  this  determining 
blow  against  the  rebellion  in  the  West  is  given, 
on  the  authority  of  General  Sherman,  exclusively 
to  Grant.  The  chapter  on  the  campaign  against 
Chattanooga  shows  Mr.  Coolidge  at  his  best  in 
the  ability  to  unite  picturesqueness  with  due 
restraint  in  narration.  It  concludes  with  the 
interesting  judgment  that  the  three  days'  fight 
at  Chattanooga  was  "the  most  completely  planned 
of  all  his  battles,  a  feat  unmarred  in  its  perfec- 
tion and  as  a  spectacle  unequalled  in  the  history 
of  war." 

The  "Clinch  with  Lee"  constitutes  the  heart 
of  what  remains  of  the  military  history.  The 
interest  deepens  at  this  point  because  of  the 
unpromising  situation  in  the  East  when  Grant 
took  that  situation  in  hand.  That  he  approached 
his  new  problem  with  the  silence  and  tenacity 
with  which  he  conducted  his  western  campaigns 
was  to  be  expected.  The  feverish  state  of  North- 
ern opinion,  with  its  criticism  and  discourage- 
ment, is  forcefully  described.  The  North  was 
impatient  for  the  capture  of  Richmond;  Grant, 
on  the  other  hand,  wanted  Lee's  army.  The 
North  was  anxious  for  a  swift  conclusion  of  the 
struggle;  Grant  saw  from  the  beginning  that 
the  question  of  endurance  was  involved.  His 
power  of  offensive  was  his  military  distinction. 


His  genius  is  ascribed  to  his  intuition,  not  to  his 
knowledge  of  the  science  of  war. 

Mr.  Coolidge  presents  an  informing  and,  on 
the  whole,  judicial  account  of  Grant's  presi- 
dency. The  student  of  our  history  knows  that 
this  is  no  easy  task.  Under  the  burden  of  delicate 
foreign  questions  and  the  unexampled  problems 
of  reconstruction,  Grant's  habit  of  following  his 
own  counsel  led  him,  in  the  absence  of  political 
experience,  into  numerous  difficulties.  The 
author  brings  him  out  of  the  several  scandals 
involving  subordinates  in  the  administration 
without  personal  stain.  It  is  admitted  that  Grant 
erred  in  overdevotion  to  his  friends,  in  a  too  rig- 
orous enforcement  of  the  law  in  the  South,  in 
his  disposition  to  interfere  unduly  with  the 
proper  function  of  Congress,  and  in  his  failure 
to  say  "good-bye"  to  politics  when  he  left  the 
White  House.  Per  contra,  the  biographer  gives 
the  reader  a  fair  and  interesting  presentation  of 
the  achievements  of  Grant's  presidency.  The 
more  notable  of  these  achievements,  in  which 
Grant's  own  statesmanship  shares  a  highly  hon- 
orable part,  are  the  handling  of  the  Virginius 
affair,  the  introduction  of  civil-service  reform, 
the  establishment  of  a  basis  of  sound  finance,  and 
the  arbitration  of  the  Alabama  Claims.  The 
author  quotes  Grant's  "dream"  of  a  world  court 
for  the  adjudication  of  international  problems. 
One  of  the  best  features  of  this  excellent  biog- 
raphy is  the  liberal  quotation  from  Grant's  let- 
ters and  state  papers,  written  in  that  simple  and 
forceful  style  which  proceeded  from  his  integrity 
and  strength  of  character,  and  was  prophetic  of 
the  remarkable  literary  performance  with  which 
he  closed  his  great  career. 

THE  LIFE  AND  WORK  OF  GEORGE  SYL- 
VESTER MORRIS:     A  Chapter  in  the  His- 
tory of  American  Thought  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century.     By  R.  M.  Wenley.     Macmillan. 
Professor  G.  S.  Morris  is  known  to  students 
as  the  learned  translator  of  Ueberweg's  "History 
of   Philosophy,"   and  editor  of  Grigg's   "Philo- 
sophical Classics."    That  is  to  say,  his  published 
writings   are   such   as   to  suggest   the   suspicion 
that  the  erudition  is  an  outer  garment,  and  that 
the  real  personality  of  the  man  expressed  itself 
in  his  life  rather  than  in  his  books.    The  present 
study  of  his  "life  and  work"  is  thus  peculiarly 
welcome,  as  introducing  us  to  the  real  Morris, 
of  whom  most  of  us  had  caught  only  occasional 
and  doubtful  glimpses. 

For  his  is  a  personality  worth  knowing.  Typ- 
ical, in  a  way,  for  the  age  in  which  he  lived,  his 
spiritual  development  enables  us  to  span  the 
bridge  which  separates  the  present  from  the  gen- 
eration which  has  just  passed  away.  Brought 
up  in  the  intensely  religious  atmosphere  of  New 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


77 


England,  he  is  representative  of  the  transition 
from  a  ready-made,  traditional  creed  to  that 
reasonable  faith  which  is  the  outcome  of  whole- 
hearted devotion  to  sincerity  and  truth.  Devel- 
oping though  it  does  on  the  soil  of  New  England 
traditions,  his  philosophical  position  and  final 
spiritual  home  is  with  Green,  the  Cairds,  and 
other  British  idealists — with  the  thinkers  who 
enlarged  the  rivulet  of  empirical  thought  which 
trickles  down  through  Locke,  Hume,  and  Mill, 
so  as  to  make  room  for  the  wider  and  deeper 
rivers  which  form  the  main  stream  of  European 
philosophy,  the  work  of  Kant  and  Hegel. 

It  is  impossible  to  read  the  book — and  it  is 
very  readable — without  feeling  that  Professor 
Wenley  is  peculiarly  fitted  to  be  its  author.  It 
is  not  only  the  fine  qualities  of  style  and  ripe 
knowledge*  of  men — these  one  would  expect  from 
a  writer  of  Professor  Wenley's  reputation — but 
the  remarkable  personal  sympathy  with  every 
phase  of  spiritual  experience  through  which  Mor- 
ris passes,  which  especially  impresses  the  reader. 
Rare  glimpses  of  the  biographer's  own  personal- 
ity reveal  a  kindred  spirit,  who  not  only  appre- 
ciates, but  is  one  with  his  subject,  because  he  has 
himself  passed  through  the  fire.  This  personal 
penetration  is  dominant,  and  produces  a  living 
artistic  unity  rare  in  literature;  so  that  the  book 
is  no  mere  biographical  study,  but  a  living 
drama,  a  true  Odyssey  of  the  spirit. 


NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 


"Every  race,"  writes  M.  Gustave  le  Bon, 
"possesses  a  mental  constitution  as  determined  as 
its  anatomical  constitution."  The  clash  of  tem- 
peraments and  traditions  when  two  races  are 
brought  together  in  marriage  has  been  the  theme 
of  many  a  novelist:  Henry  James,  Edith  Whar- 
ton,  Pierre  de  Coulevain,  and — George  Barr 
McCutcheon.  These  international  novels  vary 
in  treatment  from  the  psychological  analyses  of 
a  genius  to  chauvinistic  pictures  of  conquering, 
athletic  heroes.  The  latest  venture  in  this  field, 
"Mr.  Gushing  and  Mile,  du  Chastel,"  by  Fran- 
ces Rumsey,  is  worthy  of  respect  and  thoughtful 
perusal.  It  is  a  study  of  the  reaction  to  each 
other  of  the  French  and  American  types. 

Paul  Gushing  marries  Mile,  du  Chastel.  Af- 
ter two  years  she  suspects  him  of  infidelity  and 
leaves  him;  they  are  divorced;  she  becomes  the 
mistress  of  Arthur  Irish,  an  art  collector;  he 
tires  of  her;  she  leaves  him  free;  Gushing  seeks 
her  and  persuades  her  to  return  to  him.  The 
plot,  however,  is  the  least  of  the  story.  Gush- 
ing is  an  idealist  who  trusts  to  his  feelings  for 
guidance.  With  Mile,  du  Chastel,  on  the  other 
hand,  all  is  calculated — every  gesture,  word, 
act.  She  is  forever  seeing  nuances  in  what  he 


accepts  as  simplicities,  or  simplicities  in  his 
nuances,  which  she  cannot  even  express  to  him. 
In  short,  they  are  profoundly  unlike,  and  their 
love,  though  deep,  is  too  delicate  to  stand  the 
test  of  their  racial  antagonisms.  He  wishes 
to  find  in  their  marriage  the  beauty  of  the  ad- 
venturous ;  to  her,  their  marriage  has  never  been 
marriage  in  the  French  moral  and  social  accepta- 
tion of  the  term,  but  her  idea  of  the  proprieties 
requires  her  to  put  up  with  what  she  dislikes 
until  she  is  offended  by  Cushing's  imaginary  in- 
fidelity. 

After  losing  him,  however,  she  becomes  sud- 
denly sensible  of  fresh  nuances;  she  has  found 
Cushing's  points  of  view  contagious  and  his  re- 
finement of  attitude  and  imagination  unforget- 
table. She  fears  the  uncertainty  of  her  control 
over  Irish  and  longs  to  return  to  the  restrictive 
and  conventional,  so  she  returns  to  France. 
There  she  feels  a  rebirth  of  love  for  her  country, 
and  she  attempts  to  content  herself  again  with 
the  significance  of  the  perfunctory.  But  she 
finds  her  relatives  narrow,  their  conversation 
confined  to  localisms,  their  social  rules  rigid, 
their  capacity  to  feel,  limited.  In  short,  her  own 
imagination  has  expanded;  she  has  insurgent 
rushes  of  feeling,  impulses  of  rebellion,  that  lead 
her  back  in  thought  to  the  early  days  of  her 
marriage  with  Gushing. 

Then  Gushing  himself  yields  to  an  impulse 
to  disregard  the  formal  codes,  to  which  Anne- 
Marie  is  clinging  so  fiercely.  He  goes  to  see 
her,  and  before  the  interview  is  over,  she  realizes 
what  this  idealist  in  sentiment  means  to  her. 
She  gives  up  what  has  always  seemed  most  im- 
portant to  her:  her  personal  dignity,  the  sense 
of  expediency;  and  consents  to  marry  the  man 
who  had  been  her  husband. 

Thus  the  author  formulates  the  "impasse"  of 
this  couple  for  us,  a  formulation  compact  and 
veracious.  She  puts  before  us  the  significant 
episodes  in  their  life  together  and  shows  us  into 
what  spiritual  changes  these  contacts  grow.  She 
never  fumbles  in  handling  the  various  episodes 
— all  are  rich  in  details;  but  the  details  always 
contribute  finally  to  the  theme.  (Lane;  $1.40.) 
In  "The  Tortoise"  (Doran;  $1.50),  a  de- 
lightful tale  of  English  village  life,  Mr.  E.  F. 
Benson  displays  again  his  peculiarly  feminine  out- 
look to  great  advantage.  We  have  nothing  in 
our  tiled  apartment  buildings,  nor  in  Greenwich 
village,  nor  in  all  our  beanstalk  cities,  to  ap- 
proximate it,  this  stratified  conventionality  of 
the  landed  gentry.  Tragedies  we  may  offer,  and 
pathos,  but  not  these  pinched  and  wistful  groups 
of  utter  correctness.  It  is  not  a  sad  book;  it 
is  hilarious — and  pathetic. 

Who  but  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  could  have 
devised  the  crushing  blow  for  the  German  gov- 


78 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


ernment  revealed  in  "His  Last  Bow"  (Doran; 
$1.35)  ?  No  pains  are  spared  by  the  crafty  von 
Bork  to  play  havoc  with  the  plans  of  England; 
but  Sherlock  Holmes  appears,  like  a  bad  fairy, 
to  punish  his  Prussian  pride.  The  other  stories 
in  the  book  are  characteristic  of  our  old  friend 
Holmes,  but  have  been  successfully  developed 
without  the  aid  of  the  needle. 

Joseph  C.  Lincoln's  style  and  his  Cape  Cod 
folk  are  too  well  known  to  need  introduction. 
We  have,  in  "Extricating  Obadiah"  (Appleton; 
$1.50),  a  simple  sea  cook  much  at  the  mercy  of 
designing,  unscrupulous  landsmen;  a  shrewd  old 
sea  captain,  who  comes  to  his  rescue  and  more 
than  spoils  the  game  for  the  confidence  men ;  the 
step-daughter  of  the  chief  villain;  her  lover, 
much  troubled  by  the  villain's  machinations ;  and 
a  good  housekeeper,  who  eventually  tests  the  sus- 
ceptibility of  the  captain.  The  story  moves  for- 
ward at  a  leisurely  gait  and  is  full  of  the  humor 
that  we  associate  with  Mr.  Lincoln. 

In  "The  Unholy  Three"  (Lane;  $1.40)  C.  A. 
Robbins  gives  us  the  history  of  a  dwarf,  a  giant, 
and  a  witless  fellow  who  escape  from  a  circus 
and  go  forth  to  spread  terror  of  themselves  in 
the  world.  They  commit  various  gruesome  mur- 
ders and  always  escape  by  means  of  clever  dis- 
guises, the  dwarf  being  dressed  as  a  baby  and 
the  witless  one  as  a  woman.  For  one  of  the 
murders,  an  innocent  by-stander  is  arrested.  He 
rather  enjoys  the  experience  until  he  realizes  that 
his  life  is  in  danger,  for  the  notoriety  enables 
him  to  sell  the  murder  and  mystery  stories  he 
has  been  trying  to  sell  in  vain.  The  book  is 
rather  better  than  this  short  resume  of  it  would 
indicate,  for  the  tale  is  told  in  a  fantastic,  charm- 
ing style. 

Mr.  Vincent  O'Sullivan  is  one  of  those 
American  novelists  who  return  to  their  country- 
men with  a  letter  of  introduction  from  English 
critics.  If  he  had  come  with  only  "Sentiment" 
(Small,  Maynard;  $1.50)  as  a  visiting-card,  we 
should  have  to  express  a  slight  disappointment. 
The  book  has  all  the  materials  of  charming 
comedy;  his  style  has  a  light  and  yet  assured 
touch;  his  manner  is  ingratiating.  But  just 
what  is  he  trying  to  do?  The  situation  is  comic 
enough:  the  matter-of-fact  young  William, 
brought  down  by  his  aunt  to  the  country  from 
his  hated  London  job  to  woo  the  plump  and 
innocent  heiress  his  aunt  has  selected  for  him; 
his  posing  as  a  poet  in  order  to  defeat  a  lawyer 
rival;  the  coming  of  the  wilful  young  woman 
to  whom  William  has  engaged  himself  in  Lon- 
don ;  William's  alarm,  and  his  aunt's  impatience. 
The  author,  however,  before  the  story  is  finished, 
deserts  his  opportunity  for  farce,  to  draw  this 
neurotic  fiancee  in  rather  deep  and  telling  strokes. 
Her  intrigue  with  the  rival  assumes  a  tone  far 


from  comic,  and  leaves  William's  fall  into  the 
arms  of  the  heiress  as  a  note  of  bathos  rather 
than  of  comedy.  The  book  ends  with  the  amorous 
Penelope  seeing  her  hero  in  khaki  off  for  the 
wars — a  note  that  is  utterly  false  in  such  a 
comedy  as  the  story  began  to  be.  This  shift  in 
emotional  tone  betrays  an  unexpected  inexpert- 
ness  in  Mr.  O'Sullivan.  And  this  sense  of  in- 
security one  feels  in  him  is  reenforced  by  a 
sententiousness  of  comment  which  now  and  then 
cuts  across  the  comedy.  "Sentiment"  seems  like 
the  work  of  a  talented  but  not  assured  crafts- 
man. 

"The  Secret  Witness,"  by  George  Gibbs 
(Appleton;  $1.50),  and  "The  Green  Tree  Mys- 
tery," by  Roman  Doubleday  (Appleton;  $1.40), 
are  sops  to  the  public  that  loves  a  mystery. 
"The  Secret  Witness"  is  political.  A  supposed 
plot  of  Germany's  against  Austria,  a  plot  which 
the  latter  thwarts  by  the  famous  assassination  at 
Sarajevo,  affords  an  Englishman  and  an  Austrian 
countess  whom  he  loves,  all  the  agonies  of  separa- 
tion caused  by  difference  of  political  views.  "The 
Green  Tree  Mystery"  is  a  story  of  murder,  sus- 
picion, and  suspense.  Its  interest  is  largely  due 
to  the  skill  with  which  the  author  keeps  the 
reader  guessing  as  to  the  outcome. 

If  romance  be  taken  as  a  synonym  for  un- 
reality, then  "Fishpingle,"  by  Horace  Annesley 
Vachell  (Doran;  $1.35),  is  a  veritable  master- 
piece of  romanticism.  We  have  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  publishers  and  reviewers  must 
frequently  adopt  this  meaning  of  the  word; 
perhaps  their  readers  accept  it  as  a  recommenda- 
tion. All  that  can  be  seriously  commended  in 
"Fishpingle,"  however,  besides  the  title,  is  the 
attempt,  rather  half-hearted,  to  discuss  in  fic- 
tional terms  the  problem  of  the  passing  of  Eng- 
land's landed  gentry.  Beyond  that,  it  is  simply 
a  conventionally  cheerful  story  of  the  variety 
termed  pleasant. 

In  "My  Wife,"  by  Edward  Burke  (Dutton; 
$1.50),  a  husband  tells  us  about  his  wife — what 
a  deceitful,  wilful,  untidy  person  she  is.  The 
point  of  the  humor  lies  in  his  unwitting  disclosure 
of  his  own  conceit,  crudities,  and  faults.  The 
love  story  is  supplied  by  the  affairs  of  his  son 
and  daughter.  Here  the  father  through  stub- 
bornness and  muddle-headedness  both  hinders  and 
helps  the  wistful  lovers. 

"Paradise  Auction,"  by  Nalbro  Bartley  (Small, 
Maynard;  $1.50),  is  a  garrulous  tale  that  is 
chiefly  occupied  with  a  description  of  the  disas- 
trous effect  of  falling  in  love  with  the  right  per- 
son after  one  has  already  fallen  in  love  with 
and  married  the  wrong  one.  It  is  a  rather  futile 
and  exhausted  subject,  handled  in  a  manner  that 
is  skilful,  though  lamentably  typical  of  modern 
magazine  fiction. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


79 


CASUAL  COMMEXT 


WHY  DO  NOT  STATESMEN  ABANDON  THE  HABIT 

of  giving  speeches  and  devote  themselves  entirely 
to  talking  in  the  sign-language?  This  query  is 
prompted  by  the  kind  of  editorial  interpretation 
which  everywhere  greeted  Lloyd  George's  defi- 
nition of  Allied  war-aims,  delivered  before  the 
congress  of  English  trade  unions.  Whatever  else 
may  be  said  of  this  speech,  it  was  certainly  the 
clearest  and  most  explicit  utterance  which  had 
yet  come  from  any  responsible  political  leader, 
until  President  Wilson's  moving  and  strikingly 
straightforward  announcement,  less  than  four 
days  later,  of  the  objects  for  which  we  are  fight- 
ing. Its  temper  was  admirably  calm  and  judicial. 
The  old  hysterical  pugnacity  about  a  "knock-out" 
and  a  swaggering  Prussia,  the  ancient  vague 
phrases  about  "crushing  Prussian  militarism," 
the  early  boastfulness  and  threats — all  seemed 
sublimated  into  a  balanced,  sane,  intelligent 
address.  Nothing  could  be  more  obvious  than 
that  Lloyd  George  felt  deeply  the  responsibility 
for  continuing  the  war — "even  for  a  single  day" 
— and  that  he  was  determined  to  justify  what  he 
still  believes  its  necessary  continuance,  not  only 
by  general  principles,  but  by  concrete  application 
of  these  principles  to  the  actual  war-map  of  the 
world.  On  the  whole,  his  effort  was  successful, 
and  it  is  safe  to  assert  that  no  speech  of  any 
Entente  statesman  had  hitherto  surpassed  it  in 
importance.  Yet  how  was  the  speech  in  fact 
received  ?  Evidently,  according  to  the  individual 
predilection  and  caprice  of  the  editor  comment- 
ing upon  it.  For  example,  nothing  could  be 
more  definite  or  emphatic  than  Lloyd  George's 
contention  that  the  principle  which  is  to  govern 
all  territorial  settlements  after  the  war  must  be 
that  of  "self-determination,"  or,  as  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  phrase  goes,  "consent  of  the  governed." 
Apply  this  principle  to  the  difficult  and  delicate 
question  of  Alsace-Lorraine.  Does  it  mean  the 
"restoration"  of  Alsace-Lorraine?  Yes — pro- 
vided the  peoples  of  that  unhappy  province  them- 
selves wish  for  it.  In  other  words,  it  means  a 
plebiscite,  or  else  words  mean  nothing  at  all  in 
statesmen's  speeches.  Even  when  Lloyd  George 
comes  specifically  to  the  question,  he  is  extraor- 
dinarily careful  not  to  use  the  word  "restoration." 
He  employs  the  milder  term  "reconsideration." 
Nevertheless  most  editors  jumped  at  once 
to  the  conclusion  that  England  had  com- 
mitted herself  to  "restore"  Alsace-Lorraine  to 
France,  whatever  the  peoples  of  Alsace- 
Lorraine  might  themselves  have  to  say  on 
the  subject.  On  other  points,  equally  wilful 
blindness  was  displayed.  Lloyd  George  did  not 
pretend  that  he  loved  the  German  constitu- 
tion. Neither  did  he  pretend  that  England 
would  fight  to  change  it,  if  the  Germans  were 


so  perverse  as  to  wish  still  to  live  under  so 
archaic  and  feudal  a  governmental  system.  He 
expressed  a  wish  rather  than  a  war-aim.  But 
he  did  make  clear  what  he  was  doing.  Most 
editorial  writers  spend  all  their  time  expressing 
wishes  and  little  else,  only  they  don't  make  clear 
what  they  are  doing.  Again  we  ask,  why  do  not 
statesmen  talk  in  the  sign-language?  Then 
perhaps  our  publicists  could  understand  them. 

IT   IS,    ONE   BELIEVES,    MR.    PERCY   MACKAYE 

who  has  made  the  greatest  noise  about  the  possi- 
ble role  of  the  pageant  in  our  national  life.  He 
has  written  many,  and  the  name  of  one,  "Caliban 
on  the  Golden  Sands,"  has  been  conspicuous  on 
the  hoardings.  All  his  pageantry  has  been  pic- 
torial. Some  of  it  has  attained  the  dramatic; 
but  none  of  it  has  been  intelligible.  When  one 
says  intelligible,  one  means  on  the  stage,  during 
production,  not  by  the  fireside,  in  a  book.  Mr. 
Mackaye  seems  to  be  eye-minded,  and  to  think  in 
terms  of  print.  He  is  a  poet  of  tender  conceits 
and  pretty  fancies,  but  a  poet  too  lettered,  allu- 
sive, and  dressed-up  for  the  necessarily  broad  and 
sweeping  simplicities  of  the  chronicle  stage. 
These  reflections  come  to  one  who  looks  over 
Mr.  Thomas  Woods  Stevens's  "The  Drawing 
of  the  Sword."  Mr.  Stevens  makes  a  direct, 
specific,  and  unmistakable  symbolization  of  the 
nations  and  causes  involved  in  the  war.  His  text 
is  straightforward  almost  to  baldness,  but  it  has 
a  masculine  marching  rhythm,  and  its  meaning 
is  beyond  doubt.  No  wonder  great  audiences 
rose  to  it,  again  and  again,  miners  in  West  Vir- 
ginia no  less  than  mine-owners  in  New  York. 

THE   COMPLACENT    ASSUMPTION   THAT  WlL- 

LIAM  BLAKE  was  incapable  of  portraiture  must 
now  give  way.  In  "Arts  and  Decoration"  for 
this  month  Mr.  J.  E.  Robinson  makes  public  the 
presence  in  this  country  of  an  important  Blake 
collection  "consisting  of  portraits  in  fresco  and 
water  color,  original  manuscripts,  drawings,  and 
books,  none  of  which  is  mentioned  in  any  of 
the  biographies."  The  collection,  which  once 
belonged  to  Sir  Henry  Irving,  is  now  in  the 
possession  of  Dr.  John  W.  Bartlett,  President  of 
the  American  Institute  of  New  York.  The  half 
hundred  portraits  are  chiefly  of  men  of  letters 
and  include  Chaucer,  Bacon,  Shakespeare,  Jon- 
son,  Milton,  Dryden,  Pope,  Goldsmith,  Sheri- 
dan, Byron,  Burns,  Keats,  Shelley,  Leigh  Hunt, 
Lamb,  Franklin,  and  many  others.  The  Keats, 
which  is  among  those  reproduced  in  "Arts  and 
Decoration,"  is  striking  for  a  certain  refreshing 
vigor  in  the  features.  The  question  as  to 
whether  the  manuscripts  will  prove  as  important 
must  wait  upon  their  publication.  There  is  a 
fifteen  page  folio  in  verse,  "Theodicy";  a  seven 


80 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


page  folio  in  verse,  "America" ;  poems  on  a  num- 
ber of  persons;  a  1767  "Handmaid  to  the  Arts," 
with  manuscript  poems  on  the  fly  leaves;  etc. 
It  is  almost  incredible  that  this  rich  collection 
should  so  long  have  escaped  the  eye  of  modern 
publicity.  Mr.  Robinson  thinks  the  nucleus  of  the 
hidden  treasure  may  have  been  a  collection  formed 
by  the  elder  D'Israeli  and  mentioned  by  Dibden 
in  1824.  The  D'Israeli  collection  is  not  noted 
in  Gilchrist's  "Life  of  William  Blake,"  the 
manuscript  of  which  was  edited  by  D.  G.  Rossetti 
after  the  author's  death  in  1861.  It  happens 
that  the  Bartlett  collection  contains  a  letter  from 
Rossetti  which  discloses  the  fact  that  in  1856  he 
was  buying  "wonderful  drawings  and  manu- 
scripts .  .  .  portraits  and  poems"  by  Blake, 
and  also  an  agreement  to  sell  them,  dated 
the  same  year.  If  we  assume  that  Benjamin 
D'Israeli  inherited  his  father's  collection  in  1848, 
that  it  passed  to  his  friend  Rossetti  in  1856,  and 
that  Rossetti  disposed  of  it  before  revising  Gil- 
christ's book,  we  can  understand  for  what  reason 
Rossetti  may  have  avoided  mentioning  it  five 
years  afterward.  But  such  an  explanation 
only  makes  the  case  more  extraordinary:  a  col- 
lection of  portraits  of  literary  men,  done  by  a 
prominent  poet,  passes  from  an  author  to  his 
son,  who  is  a  popular  novelist  and  a  cabinet 
minister  shortly  to  be  premier;  thence  to  one  of 
the  most  brilliant  poets  and  painters  of  the  day; 
thence,  after  an  interval,  to  the  most  famous 
actor  of  his  day;  and  finally  crosses  the  Atlantic 
— but  receives  no  public  mention  between  the 
years  1824  and  1918! 

•          •         • 

WOULD  ANY  SINCERE  LOVER  OF  PEACE  DERIVE 

JOY  from  pointing  out  the  fortunate  by-products 
of  war?  Assuredly  not.  This  is  the  type  of 
casuistry  so  congenial  to  the  apologists  for  mili- 
tarism— one  legitimately  suspects  the  historian 
who  attributes  all  the  verve  and  splendor  of 
Elizabethan  literature  to  the  defeat  of  the 
Armada  or  who  makes  the  Peloponnesian  war 
synonymous  with  the  glory  of  Athenian  civiliza- 
tion, forgetting,  of  course,  that  it  was  precisely 
this  war  and  no  other  which  destroyed  that  civi- 
lization. It  is  usually  from  the  intellectual 
brothers  of  Bernhardi  that  one  hears  of  "the 
canker  of  a  long  peace."  Certainly  no  recog- 
nized thinker  today  would  urge  a  war  merely  for 
the  sake  of  its  spiritual  by-products.  No  honest 
realist  would  attempt  to  balance  gains  and  losses 
and  call  them  equal.  Of  France  alone,  can  one 
bear  to  think  of  the  human  potentialities  gathered 
so  prematurely  to  the  earth,  whose  beauties  might 
otherwise  have  been  sung  in  new  accents  or  re- 
flected in  new  forms?  Now,  the  reaction  in 
Europe  after  the  war  may  take  unexpected  turns. 
Many  believe  that  when  again  confronted  with 


the  strange  unreality  of  peace,  the  hundreds  of 
thousands  who  do  return  from  the  grinding  battle 
physically  whole  will  be  broken  in  will  and  spirit. 
Other  competent  observers  maintain  that  after 
the  war  something  like  anarchy  or  at  least  polit- 
ical violence  will  spread  slowly  over  the  Con- 
tinent and  perhaps  embrace  the  British  Isles. 
Yet  nearly  everyone  agrees  that  the  great  tradi- 
tions of  Western  civilization — what  we  know  as 
the  unbroken  heritage  of  art  and  science  and 
literature — will  for  a  generation  be  in  supine 
hands.  Lassitude  and  fatigue,  relief  from  strain, 
will  smother  the  creative  impulses  that  are  al- 
ways, in  the  end,  the  outgrowth  of  a  gracious 
and  liberal  and  economically  unworried  environ- 
ment. For  many  years  after  the  declaration  of 
peace  the  artists  of  Europe  must  call  upon  a 
Muse  of  somewhat  grim  visage.  Art  is  not  a 
flower  of  impoverishment,  any  more  than  phi- 
losophy or  verse.  And  the  task  of  carrying  on 
those  achievements  and  purposes  in  the  more 
gracious  traditions  of  Western  civilization  may 
inevitably  fall  upon  us.  The  cluster  of  activities 
which  we  call  art  may  have  to  rely  upon  America 
for  the  necessary  vitality  to  continue  it  unbroken 
through  Europe's  barren  years.  It  is  a  responsi- 
bility of  which  our  artists  and  our  writers  are 
hardly  yet  aware,  although  a  responsibility  which 
ultimately  they  cannot  shirk. 

IF  WILLIAM  JAMES  HAD  LIVED,  January  11, 
1918,  would  have  been  his  seventy-sixth  birthday. 
Almost  the  last  thing  he  wrote  before  he  died 
was  "The  Moral  Equivalent  for  War."  In 
these  days  of  opposed  madnesses,  of  the  mad- 
ness of  militarism  over-shouting  the  madness  of 
pacificism,  it  is  worth  while,  as  we  recall  the 
philosopher's  nativity,  to  recur  to  the  sanity  of 
that  essay  for  strength  and  vision.  It  takes  the 
mind  from  the  secondary  passions  and  interests 
of  controversy,  to  their  original  source  in  the 
nature  of  man.  It  defers  to  that  nature  in  its 
wholeness;  reverently,  as  is  the  manner  of  Wil- 
liam James.  It  regards  its  assumptions  and  its 
repressions,  and  withal  it  finds  that  the  adven- 
ture of  making  the  world  a  better  place  to  live 
in  affords  all  the  needed  satisfactions,  and  more, 
to  the  "military"  instinct  and  the  aboriginal 
blood-lust  whose  gratification  motivates  so  much 
that  is  war.  We  in  America,  under  the  guid- 
ance of  the  President,  are  set  to  look  forward 
to  the  incarnation  of  the  ideals  of  liberty,  jus- 
tice, and  democracy  whose  danger  has  led  us  to 
take  arms.  In  this  latter  of  the  American  phi- 
losopher's works  we  possess  an  instrument 
whereby  we  may  be  helped  to  a  realizing  vision 
of  both  the  soil  and  the  root,  the  flower  and  the 
fruitage  of  these  things. 


J918J 


THE    DIAL 


81 


BRIEFER  MENTION 


For  the  past  forty  years  Dr.  J.  H.  Kellogg,  who 
really  made  the  Battle  Creek  Sanitarium,  has  been 
answering  questions  pertaining  to  health,  and  in 
"A  Thousand  Health  Questions  Answered"  (Good 
Health  Publishing  Co.),  he  has  published  some 
answers  that  he  considers  of  most  importance.  The 
book  may  be  considered  authoritative,  though  in 
some  regards,  such  as  in  the  use  of  tea  or  coffee, 
the  author  is  an  extremist.  Where  medication  is 
needed,  he  asks  his  readers  to  consult  their 
physicians. 

If  the  versatile  Mr.  Dole  may  be  said  to  have  a 
vocation  as  distinguished  from  his  many  literary 
avocations,  it  might  not  unfairly  be  considered  to 
concern  itself  with  Tolstoy  and  his  works.  Years 
ago  he  distinguished  himself  as  a  pioneer  in  this 
country  in  the  translation  and  popularization  of 
Tolstoy's  writings,  and  now  he  has  written  "The 
Life  of  Lyof  N.  Tolstoi"  (Crowell;  $1).  No 
fresh  discoveries  or  hitherto  unknown  facts  are 
claimed  for  this  retelling  of  the  familiar  story; 
its  merit  lies  in  its  sympathetic  understanding,  its 
compactness,  and,  in  all  essentials,  its  completeness. 
After  Mr.  Aylmer  Maude's  two  ample  volumes  of 
a  few  years  ago  we  seek  rather  condensation  than 
amplification  in  any  subsequent  biography  for 
general  reading  and  handy  reference.  This  467- 
page  book  meets  the  requirements  and  is  also 
notably  in  sympathy  with  the  views  and  teachings 
of  its  subject.  Mr.  Dole's  anti-militarism  is  as 
pronounced  as  Tolstoy's,  and  in  liberality  of  creed 
he  is  not  unworthy  to  act  as  literary  portrait-painter 
to  the  author  of  "Reason  and  Religion." 

Not  yet  has  the  history  of  General  Botha's  cam- 
paign in  German  West  Africa  become  so  familiar 
as  to  render  uninteresting  such  details  of  army 
experience  as  are  given  in  Dr.  H.  F.  B.  Walker's 
"A  Doctor's  Diary  in  Damaraiand"  (Longmans, 
Green;  $2.10).  Six  months  of  hardship  in  his 
struggle  to  follow  up  his  brigade  with  his  hospital 
unit  are  vividly  described  in  these  notes  of  minor 
events  which  are  none  the  less  significant  because 
of  their  comparative  unimportance.  A  side-light  on 
the  vexed  question  of  dumdum  bullets  is  thrown  by 
the  remark  of  a  German  officer  who  "was  shot  and 
captured.  The  first  thing  he  said,  when  taken,  was, 
'Was  I  shot  with  one  of  our  rifles  or  one  of  yours?' 
On  being  told  he  was  shot  with  a  German  rifle, 
he  replied,  'I  am  done  for,  then.'  "  And  the  writer 
continues:  "One  thing  I  have  certainly  noticed  with 
regard  to  the  Mauser  bullets  is  that,  if  they  meet 
with  resistance,  such  as  buttons  or  bones,  they  are 
very  easily  stripped  of  their  nickel  casing,  and  the 
lead,  spreading  or  breaking  up,  makes  a  very  large 
wound ;  sometimes,  indeed,  there  are  several  exit 
wounds."  The  "Hun"  of  West  Africa  is  pictured 
as  true  to  type.  He  has  a  very  elastic  conscience,  we 
are  told,  and  "is  soldier  to-day,  Red  Cross  man 
to-morrow,  civilian  and  spy  combined  the  next, 
whichever  serves  his  purpose  best.  On  more  than 
one  occasion  I  have  been  asked  to  release  German 
wounded  because  they  were  'civilians.'  "  A  reading 
of  the  book  does  not  leave  one  impressed  with  the 
desirability  of  restoring  Germany's  African  colonies 
to  her  after  the  war. 


On  first  noting  the  title  of  Richardson  Brigham's 
book,  "The  Study  and  Enjoyment  of  Pictures" 
(Sully  and  Kleinteich;  $1.25),  one  is  tempted  to 
speculate  whether  the  author  makes  any  malicious 
distinction  between  the  study  of  pictures  and  the 
enjoyment  of  them,  but  one  is  reassured  and  de- 
lighted on  opening  the  book  to  discover  that  art 
is  something  to  be  enjoyed.  Only  too  often  the 
dense  fog  of  analysis  and  theory  settles  down 
between  picture  and  spectator,  embracing  the  emo- 
tions and  the  intellect  like  a  strange  malady.  The 
author,  seeking  to  make  an  abridged  statement  of 
artistic  principles,  wisely  searches  at  once  for  the 
milk  in  the  cocoanut:  "The  merit  of  a  picture  lies, 
in  general,  not  so  much  in  what  it  represents  as 
in  how  it  is  painted.  As  a  basic  quality  in  Art 
simplicity  may  be  named."  "With  simplicity  as  a 
fundamental  must  be  closely  associated  Beauty." 
Browsing  still  further  through  the  book,  one 
encounters  a  wise  quotation  from  Innes:  "A  work 
of  art  does  not  appeal  to  the  intellect.  It  does  not 
appeal  to  the  moral  sense.  Its  aim  is  not  to  instruct, 
not  to  edify,  but  to  awaken  an  emotion.  Its  real 
greatness  consists  in  the  quality  of  this  emotion." 
To  emphasize  further  the  fact  that  literature  and 
painting  are  something  to  be  enjoyed,  the  author 
refuses  to  interpret  works  of  art  or  literature  for 
anyone  else,  which  is  a  noble  resolve.  However,  the 
author  has  evidently  made  up  her  mind  about 
Futurism  and  Post-Impressionism,  for  she  consigns 
them  to  limbo.  There  are  chapters  on  composition, 
on  the  relation  of  poetry  to  painting,  and  on  what 
pictures  to  see  in  America  and  Europe. 

The  function  of  chemistry  in  the  development 
of  the  civilization  of  to-day,  as  well  as  in  its 
appalling  destruction,  is  made  plain  for  the  non- 
technical reader,  if  he  be  diligent  and  thoughtful,  in 
Ellwood  Hendrick's  "Everyman's  Chemistry"  (Har- 
per; $2.).  At  least  Mr.  Hendrick  attempts  the 
seemingly  impossible  task  of  its  presentation  for 
the  man  in  the  street.  He  may  not  succeed  in 
making  wholly  lucid  many  of  the  obscure  phases  of 
ions  and  valencies,  asters  and  ethers,  and  the  other 
more  formidable  features  of  the  jargon  of  the 
laboratory,  but  he  lures  the  reader  on  from  soap 
to  candles  and  from  bees  to  "deresinified  Pontianak 
rubber"  or,  to  be  bald  about  it,  cheap  chewing- 
gum.  In  fact  the  industrial  profiteers  of  crude 
stuffs  must  feel  somewhat  abashed  to  find  their 
ways  so  fully  explained  as  they  are  by  our  chemical 
reporter.  One  should  use  this  book  as  a  guide  to 
the  industrial  advertising  pages  of  our  magazine 
press.  There  is  much  of  the  whimsical  interlarded 
with  formulae  and  reactions.  It  shocks  the  scientific 
mind  to  find  the  Brownian  movements  served  up 
in  lilting  doggerel  and  the  Periodic  Law  "put  into 
Irish."  Indeed,  ere  one  has  finished  the  book,  as 
he  is  tempted  to  do  before  putting  it  down,  he 
has  a  strong  suspicion  that  the  author  is  no  mere 
chemist,  but  a  journalistic  bull  that  has  broken 
loose  in  the  reagent  room.  One  reads  with  interest 
of  the  magnanimous  action  of  one  chemical  inven- 
tor, Frederick  G.  Cottrell,  whose  income-producing 
chemical  patents  now  support  the  Research  Corpora- 
tion, while  their  author  lives  on  a  modest  govern- 
ment salary.  He  learns  also  of  the  wonderful 
progress  made  in  this  country,  since  the  war,  in  the 


82 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


dye  industry,  with  all  its  infinite  ramifications  in 
drugs,  explosives,  and  photographic  chemicals.  The 
butcher,  baker,  and  candlestick-maker,  and  all 
their  patrons,  can  find  much  to  interest,  much  to 
learn,  and  not  a  little  to  reread  with  care  in 
these  pages. 

With  a  fine  feeling  for  artistic  detail  and  setting 
Sir  Thomas  Graham  Jackson,  the  well-known 
English  architect,  presents  his  short  book  of  recol- 
lections of  Italian  travel,  "A  Holiday  in  Umbria" 
(Holt;  $3.)-  Less  than  a  dozen  cities  of  north- 
eastern Italy  comprise  the  list,  but  each  castle, 
each  doorway  of  artistic  importance,  brings  with  it 
a  mass  of  rich  historical  detail.  And  to  present  to 
the  reader  in  the  midst  of  this  development,  extracts 
from  the  famous  "Cortegiano  of  Castiglione,"  which 
Dr.  Johnson  called  "the  best  book  that  was  ever 
written  on  good  breeding,"  is  to  present  him  in 
person  at  that  delightful  court  of  Urbino  in  the 
fifteenth  century.  The  author's  contribution  to  the 
literature  of  travel  is  a  valuable  one. 

Thomas  F.  Millard  has  recently  published  the 
third  of  his  volumes  on  the  Far  East.  The  present 
one,  "Our  Eastern  Question"  (Century),  possesses 
the  desirable  qualities  of  the  earlier  works,  the 
voluminous  appendixes  made  up  of  state  papers 
and  other  documents,  the  gathering  up  of  interest- 
ing bits  of  information,  and  the  generally  readable 
presentation.  But  it  also  contains  all  the  old 
faults,  and  to  a  higher  degree.  The  work  is 
frankly  "a  journalistic  summary  rather  than  a 
literary  production,"  and  the  author  might  well 
have  said,  "rather  than  a  sober,  well-reasoned,  and 
well-balanced  production."  The  great  bulk  of  the 
work  is  devoted  to  a  scathing  indictment  of  the 
conduct  and  of  the  policies  of  Japan.  In  this  part 
of  the  work,  as  another  reviewer  has  said,  "he  is 
vindictive  when  he  should  be  impartial;  vitupera- 
tive where  he  should  be  expository;  condemnatory 
to  the  exclusion  of  all  mitigating  facts  or  qualify- 
ing circumstances."  In  addition,  Mr.  Millard 
makes  a  plea  for  the  enforcement  by  the  United 
States  of  the  so-called  "Hay  Doctrine."  In  this 
argument  he  proceeds  from  false  premises  to 
generally  erroneous  conclusions.  The  "Hay 
Doctrine"  so  casually  cited  by  Mr.  Millard  will 
have  to  be  defined  by  the  student  of  international 
law  and  diplomacy  rather  than  by  the  journalist. 
For  one  who  is  fairly  well  informed  concerning 
what  has  happened  in  the  Far  East  in  the  past 
few  years  Mr.  Millard's  work  is  of  little  value,  and 
for  one  who  is  not  in  a  position  to  check  up  his 
statements  and  his  inferences  it  may  prove  a  source 
of  much  misinformation. 

Two  interesting  volumes  of  the  "Worth  Know- 
ing Series"  are  "Trees  Worth  Knowing,"  by  Julia 
E.  Rogers,  and  "Wild  Flowers  Worth  Knowing," 
adapted  from  Neltje  Blanchan's  works  by  Asa  Don 
Dickinson  (Doubleday,  Paee;  $1.60  each).  To 
nature  students,  the  names  of  Julia  E.  Rogers  and 
Neltje  Blanchan  are  well  known,  for  they  have 
written,  in  large  and  small  volumes,  of  trees  and 
flowers.  "Trees  Worth  Knowing,"  ^  for  example, 
is  a  compromise  between  the  author's  comprehen- 
sive "Tree  Book"  and  her  small  "Tree  Guide," 
recently  published.  An  essay,  "The  Life  of  the 


Trees,"  and  general  paragraphs  on  tree  and  flower 
families  contain  elementary  information  of  value. 
Both  volumes  are  attractively  illustrated  in  color 
and  are  of  a  convenient  size  to  carry  about  for 
purposes  of  identification. 

Alfred  M.  Hitchcock  found  Japan  a  land  of 
unfailing  and  ever-fresh  interest;  hence  "Over 
Japan  Way"  (Holt;  $2.)  is  free  from  the  ennui 
of  the  way-worn  traveller  and  the  author's  quick 
eye  catches  many  points  of  interest  which  have  lost 
their  charm  to  the  expert  in  Japanese  matters. 
His  book  is  therefore  an  excellent  introduction  to 
Japan  as  it  is  to-day,  in  the  process  of  rapid  com- 
mercialization and  industrial  transformation.  He 
presents  an  occidental  interpretation  of  this  part 
of  the  Orient,  sympathetic  and  critical  without 
being  either  rapturous  or  caustic.  The  main  points 
of  interest  to  the  tourist  are  touched  upon  and 
not  a  few  of  the  less  frequented  paths  of  travel 
are  followed.  For  a  quick  introduction  to  the  life 
of  Japan  it  is  satisfactory  and  reliable  as  well  as 
entertaining,  a  welcome  relief  from  the  indis- 
pensable but  verbose  Terry  and  the  damascened 
minutiae  of  the  official  imitations  of  Baedeker  with 
which  the  enterprise  of  Japan  is  providing  the 
Far  East. 

The  woman  with  the  hoe  is  not  so  common  a 
sight  in  America  as  in  Europe;  but  the  trend  of 
events  is  fast  habituating  us  to  the  spectacle  of 
women  engaged  in  what  hitherto  has  been  regarded 
by  us  as  men's  work,  and  if  the  work  is  strength- 
ening and  health-giving,  there  will  be  cause  for 
felicitation  rather  than  for  regret  at  this  latest 
industrial  development.  England  has,  naturally 
enough,  gone  ahead  of  us  in  discovering  fresh  fields 
of  usefulness  for  women,  and  Canada,  with  a  new 
country's  freedom  from  restraining  conventions,  has 
led  the  way  for  the  parent  land.  Viscountess 
Wolseley,  founder  and  head  of  the  College  of 
Gardening  at  Glynde,  depicts  attractively  and  hope- 
fully in  "In  a  College  Garden"  (Scribner;  $2.25) 
the  agricultural  possibilities  open  to  young  women 
in  quest  of  a  vocation.  An  experience  of  twelve 
years  or  more  in  teaching  the  more  ladylike 
branches,  if  one  may  so  express  it,  of  farming  has 
qualified  her  to  speak  with  authority  upon  what 
may  and  what  may  not  be  profitably  and  properly 
undertaken  by  women  in  the  tillage  of  the  soil 
and  the  marketing  of  crops.  Also,  glimpses  are 
afforded  of  woman's  work  and  woman's  capabilities 
in  other  directions. 

"In  the  Claws  of  the  German  Eagle,"  by  Albert 
Rhys  Williams  (Dutton;  $1.50),  the  war  corre- 
spondent for  the  "Outlook,"  last  year  met  with 
a  favorable  reception  in  its  serial  form.  Accounts 
of  frightfulness  might  have  added  to  the  attractive- 
ness of  his  story  for  those  who  enjoy  shuddering, 
but  Mr.  Williams  finds  himself  unable,  as  an  eye- 
witness, to  record  any  such  atrocities,  and  so  very 
wisely  leaves  them  for  others  to  write  down.  Yet 
it  is  no  flattering  picture  he  paints  of  German 
conduct  in  Belgium,  and  without  the  prompt  and 
energetic  intervention  of  Ambassador  Whitlock 
he  himself  might  have  fallen  a  victim  to  Teutonic 
severity. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


83 


NOTES  AND  NEWS 


Of  the  contributors  to  the  present  issue  of  THE 
DIAL,  the  following  are  somewhat  new  to  our 
readers: 

Van  Wyck  Brooks  has  written  several  volumes 
of  critical  studies  of  American  literature  and  was 
one  of  the  editors  of  the  "Seven  Arts."  He  has 
recently  become  a  contributing  editor  on  the  staff 
of  THE  DIAL. 

Jean  Muriel  Batchelor,  who  writes  under  the 
name  of  "J.  M.  Batchelor,"  is  a  graduate  of  Bryn 
Mawr.  She  has  published  poems  in  several  maga- 
zines, but,  as  she  writes  us,  "The  single  dollar 
derived  from  the  sale  of  these  being  insufficient 
for  my  needs,  I  do  what  is  called  'teaching'  Eng- 
lish." She  at  present  "teaches"  in  Narberth,  Penn- 
sylvania. 

Hartley  B.  Alexander  is  a  member  of  the  fac- 
ulty of  the  University  of  Nebraska. 

William  Chase  Greene,  who  has  recently  contrib- 
uted to  THE  DIAL,  is  an  instructor  in  Greek  and 
Latin  at  the  Groton  School.  He  has  contributed 
to  the  "North  American  Review,"  "The  Unpopu- 
lar Review,"  and  other  periodicals,  since  his  grad- 
uation from  Oxford. 

R.  K.  Hack  is  a  member  of  the  faculty  of  Har- 
vard University  and  has  contributed  recently  to 
"The  Atlantic  Monthly"  as  well  as  THE  DIAL. 

Louis  Untermeyer  is  a  well  known  poet  and 
critic.  His  home  is  in  New  York. 


The  Century  Co.  announces  the  forthcoming  pub- 
lication of  "D'Orcy's  Airship  Manual,"  by  Ladislas 
D'Orcy,  M.S.A.E. 

The  Revell  Company  has  just  published  "Facing 
the  Hindenburg  Line,"  by  Burris  A.  Jenkins,  and 
announces  "The  New  Spirit  of  the  New  Army,"  by 
Dr.  Joseph  H.  Odell. 

Norman  Prince's  letters  from  France  are  shortly 
to  be  published  by  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  in  con- 
nection with  a  memoir  by  George  F.  Babbitt,  "Nor- 
man Prince:  An  American  Who  Died  for  the 
Cause  He  Loved."  Prince  was  among  the  first 
American  aviators  to  die  for  France. 

Arrangements  have  been  concluded  for  publica- 
tion in  England  of  "Militarism,"  Karl  Liebknecht's 
suppressed  study  of  the  war.  The  American  pub- 
lisher, B.  W.  Huebsch,  has  now  issued  the  third 
edition  here. 

The  Marshall  Jones  Company  announces  for 
immediate  publication  an  essay  by  Ralph  Adams 
Cram  entitled  "The  Nemesis  of  Mediocrity."  The 
speeches  of  the  members  of  the  Russian  Commis- 
sion have  just  been  published  by  the  same  company. 

The  Thomas  Y.  Crowell  Co.  will  shortly  pub- 
lish a  "Dictionary  of  Military  Terms,"  by  Edward 
S.  Farrow;  "The  New  Warfare,"  by  G.  Blanchon, 
translated  by  Frederick  Rothwell;  and  a  revised 
edition  of  "Tuberculosis,"  by  E.  O.  Otis,  to  in- 
clude material  about  tuberculosis  in  the  army. 

Apparently  the  British  and  Indian  governments 
have  lifted  their  ban  on  Lajpat  Rai's  "Young  In- 
dia"; for  Commander  Josiah  Wedgwood,  M.P., 
has  written  the  introduction  to  an  edition  just 
brought  out  by  the  London  Home  Rule  for  India 


League  and  each  member  of  Parliament  has  re- 
ceived a  copy.  "England's  Debt  to  India,"  by  the 
same  author,  who  is  now  in  this  country,  was 
published  last  month  by  B.  W.  Huebsch. 

Critical  papers  by  Helen  Thomas  Follett  and 
Wilson  Follett,  some  of  which  have  appeared  in 
the  "Atlantic"  and  the  "Yale  Review,"  have  just 
been  published  by  Henry  Holt  &  Co.  under  the 
title  "Some  Modern  Novelists."  Henry  James  and 
DeMorgan,  it  appears,  are  already  "Novelists  of 
Yesterday"  with  Gissing,  Hardy,  and  Meredith. 
The  "Novelists  of  Today"  include  Howells,  Phill- 
potts,  Wells,  Bennett,  Galsworthy,  Wharton,  and 
Conrad. 

Longmans,  Green  &  Company's  January  an- 
nouncements include:  "The  Life  of  John  Cardinal 
McCloskey,  First  Prince  of  the  Church  in  America, 
1810-1885,"  by  His  Eminence  John  Cardinal  Far- 
ley; "Canon  Sheehan  of  Doneraile,"  by  Herman  J. 
Heuser,  D.D. ;  "Physical  Chemistry  of  the  Pro- 
teins," by  T.  Brailsford  Robertson;  "The  Gate  of 
Remembrance,"  by  Frederick  Bligh  Bond,  F.R.I. 
B.A. ;  "Visions  and  Vignettes  of  War,"  by  the  Rev. 
Maurice  Ponsonby;  "French  Windows,"  by  John 
Ayscough;  "The  Outer  Courts,"  by  M.  Agnes  Fox. 

January  publications  from  Little,  Brown  &  Com- 
pany include:  "The  Unmarried  Mother,"  by  Percy 
Gamble  Kammerer,  and  two  novels — "Cabin 
Fever,"  a  Western  story  by  B.  M.  Bower,  and 
"The  Wolf-Cub,"  a  picaresque  romance  of  mod- 
ern Spain  by  Patrick  and  Terence  Casey — as  well 
as  a  play  based  on  the  invasion  of  Belgium,  "Pawns 
of  War,"  by  Bosworth  Crocker;  "A  Yankee  in  the 
Trenches,"  by  Corporal  R.  Derby  Holmes,  a  Bos- 
tonian  who  fought  alongside  the  tanks  at  the 
Somme;  and  "Letters  of  a  Canadian  Stretcher 
Bearer,"  by  R.  A.  L. 

The  first  of  "Les  Cahiers  Brittaniques  et  Ameri- 
cains,"  paper  covered  translations  from  contempo- 
rary English  and  American  letters,  was  Sir  Herbert 
Tree's  "The  Ultimatum,"  which  appeared  Decem- 
ber 15  with  the  Sargent  portrait  of  Tree  and  a 
poem,  "To  My  Father,"  by  Iris  Tree.  The  series 
is  published  to  further  an  "Entente  Cordiale  Intel- 
lectuelle  Franco-Anglo-Americaine."  Among  the 
American  authors  listed  for  translation  are  Henry 
James,  Edward  Carpenter,  Bret  Harte,  O.  Henry, 
Isaac  Marcosson,  Josiah  Royce,  Stephen  Leacock, 
and  Edith  Wharton.  American  friends  are  urged 
to  subscribe  in  order  that  free  copies  may  be  sup- 
plied to  French  soldiers  at  the  front  or  in  hospital. 
The  annual  rate  is  $3.50;  and  subscribers,  whose 
names  will  be  printed  in  the  "Cahiers,"  may  indi- 
cate to  whom  they  wish  the  books  sent.  Corre- 
spondence should  be  addressed  to  the  translator  and 
editor,  M.  Cecil  Georges-Bazile,  8  Rue  Bochart- 
de-Saron,  Paris. 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  will  shortly  issue  a  novel  of 
ancient  Roman  life,  "The  Unwilling  Vestal,"  by 
Edward  Lucas  White,  author  of  "El  Supremo." 
Other  books  which  the  publishers  have  ready  for 
publication  are  Mme.  Marcelle  Tinayre's  "To 
Arms!"  translated  by  Miss  Lucy  Humphrey,  with 
an  introduction  by  Dr.  John  H.  Finley,  President 
of  the  University  of  New  York  and  Commissioner 
of  Education  in  New  York  State;  "Songs  of  a 


84 


THE    DIAL 


[January  17 


"AT  McCLURG'S" 

It  is  of  interest  and  importance 
to  Librarians  to  know  that  the 
books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  pur- 
chased  from  us  at  advantageous 
prices  by 

Public  Libraries,  Schools, 
Colleges  and  Universities 

In  addition  to  these  books  we 
have  an  exceptionally  large 
stock  of  the  books  of  all  pub- 
lishers—a more  complete  as- 
sortment than  can  be  found  on 
the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
store in  the  entire  country.  We 
solicit  correspondence  from 
librarians  unacquainted  with 
our  facilities. 

LIBRARY  DEPARTMENT 
A.C.  McClurg  &  Co.,  Chicago 


The    consummation  of   a   great  work 

Hauptmann's 
Dramatic  Works 

Volume  VII.     Miscellaneous  Dramas 
CONTENTS: 


Commemoration  Masque 
The  Bow  of  Odysseus 
Elga 


Fragments: 

I.  Helios 

II.  Pastoral 

$1.50  net 


If  you  write,  act,  read  or  criticise,  you 
need  this  book 

Thomas  H.  Dickinson's 

The  Insurgent  Theatre 


A  survey  of  the  modern  movement  in 
the  American  theatre,  featuring  the  aim, 
scope  and  experience  of  pioneers  in  the 
various  fields.  The  economic  as  well  as 
the  artistic  factors  are  thoroughly  con- 

$1.25  net 


sidered . 


THIS  MARK  ON 
GOOD  BOOKS 


B.  W.  HUEBSCH    Publisher    NEW  YORK 


Mother,"  written  and  illustrated  by  Marietta  M. 
Andrews;  and  "Great  Problems  of  British  States- 
manship," by  J.  Ellis  Barker,  a  prospectus  of  the 
questions  which  must  be  solved  when  Britain  makes 
peace.  The  four  volume  authoritative  edition  of 
Pinero's  plays,  edited  by  Clayton  Hamilton,  and 
Montrose  J.  Moses's  selection  of  early  American 
plays,  the  publication  of  which  was  postponed  in 
December,  are  now  announced  for  the  middle  of 
January.  The  latter  volume  will  be  the  first  of  a 
series  which  Dutton  &  Co.  intend  to  make  include 
all  important  American  plays  which  have  been 
successfully  produced. 

A  prize  of  fifty  dollars  is  offered  for  the  best 
and  most  beautiful  definition  of  poetry — in  poetry. 
This  contest  has  been  inaugurated  by  The  Poetry- 
Lovers  of  New  York  City,  and  is  open  to  all.  The 
winning  manuscript  becomes  the  property  of  The 
Poetry-Lovers  and  publication  proceeds  will  be  do- 
nated by  them  to  the  work  of  the  Red  Cross  Am- 
bulance in  Italy,  the  country  particularly  dear  to 
poets  and  poetry-lovers.  The  judges  will  be  Edwin 
Markham,  George  Woodberry,  Florence  Wilkin- 
son, Ridgely  Torrence,  Edith  Wynne  Mattheson, 
and  Robert  Frost.  The  conditions  are  as  follows: 
The  definition  is  restricted  to  thirty-five  words, 
all  words  counted,  and  may  be  less  than  that  num- 
ber. Competitors  may  send  in  more  than  one  def- 
inition. Manuscripts  must  be  signed  by  a  nom-de- 
plume  only,  accompanied  by  the  name,  address,  and 
nom-de-plume  of  the  writer  in  a  separate  sealed 
envelope,  and  must  be  received  before  noon  of  Feb- 
ruary 28,  by  The  Poetry-Lovers,  122  West  llth 
Street,  New  York  City.  The  result  of  the  com- 
petition will  be  made  known  on  March  28,  1918. 

From  France  a  friend  sends  THE  DIAL  the  fol- 
lowing list  of  books  concerning  the  war,  all  of 
which  are  regarded  there  as  having  more  than 
ordinary  importance.  Novels:  "Le  feu,"  Bar- 
busse  (Dutton)  ;  "Gaspard,"  R.  Benjamin;  "L'appel 
du  sol,"  Bertrand;  "Bourru,  soldat  de  vanquois," 
Jean  des  Vignes  Rouges;  "Le  soldat  Bernard,"  Paul 
Acher;  "L'adjudant  Benoist,"  M.  Prevost;  "La 
guerre,  Madame,"  Geraldy  (Scribners)  ;  "La  veillee 
des  armes,"  Marcelle  Tinayre  (Dutton)  ;  "16  his- 
toires  de  soldats,"  Claude  Farrise;  "Celles  qui  les 
attendent,"  F.  Boutet;  "L'embusque,"  P.  Marguer- 
itte;  "Le  sens  de  la  mort,"  P.  Bourget;  "Le  coeur 
et  1'absence,"  L.  Daudet;  "La  vie  a  Paris  une  annee 
de  guerre,"  Abel  Hermant;  "Grandes  heures," 
Lavedan;  "Journal  d'une  Parisienne  pendant  le 
guerre,"  Baronne  Michaud.  Documents:  "Lettres 
d'un  soldat  a  sa  mere,"  Anonymous  (McClurg); 
"Ma  piece,"  Linbier;  "Dixmude,"  Le  Goffie;  "Les 
derniers  jours  du  fort  de  Vaux,"  H.  Bordeaux; 
"Garnets  de  route  de  combatants  allemands,"  J.  de 
Dampierre;  "L'avant-guerre,"  L.  Daudet.  Dis- 
cussions of  the  war:  "Enseignements  psycholo- 
giques  de  la  guerre"  and  "Premieres  consequences 
de  la  guerre,"  G.  le  Bon;  "Les  causes  profondes 
de  la  guerre,"  E.  Hovelaque;  "Les  bases  d'une 
paix  durable,"  A.  Schwan;  "La  guerre  et  le 
progres,"  J.  Sageret;  "Savoir  consideration  sur  la 
methode  scientifique  la  guerre  et  la  morale,"  Le 
Dantec;  "Les  lecons  intellectuelles  de  la  guerre," 
R.  Lotte;  "Les  troucons  du  serpent,"  L.  Dimier; 
and  "La  guerre  nouvelle,"  G.  Blanchon. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


85 


LIST  or  NEW  BOOKS 


[The  following  list,   containing  93   titles,   includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.'] 

BIOGRAPHY   AND    REMINISCENCES. 

Further  Memories.  By  Lord  Redesdale.  Illus- 
trated, 8vo,  307  pages.  E.  P.  Button  &  Co. 
$3.50. 

Weasell  Gansfort.  Life  and  Writings.  By  Edward 
Waite  Miller.  Principal  works  translated  by 
Jared  Waterbury  Scudder.  Illustrated,  2  vol- 
umes, 8vo,  333-369  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 
Boxed.  $4. 

The  Ufe  of  Lieutenant  General  Chaffee.  By  Wil- 
liam Harding  Carter.  Illustrated,  8vo,  296 
pages.  University  of  Chicago  Press.  $2.50. 

Correspondence  of  John  Henry  Newman  -with  John 
Keble  and  others.  8vo,  413  pages.  Longmans, 
Green  &  Co.  $4. 

GENERAL   LITERATURE. 

On  Contemporary  Literature.  By  Stuart  P.  Sher- 
man. 12mo,  312  pages.  Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
$1.50. 

Platonism.  By  Paul  Elmer  More.  12mo,  307  pages. 
Princeton  University  Press.  $1.75. 

The  Oxford  Stamp,  and  Other  Essays.  By  Frank 
Aydelotte.  12mo,  219  pages.  Oxford  University 
Press.  $1.20. 

Memories  of  Old  Salem.  By  Mary  H.  Northend. 
Illustrated,  8vo,  341  pages.  Moffat,  Yard  &  Co. 
Boxed.  $4. 

Frenzied  Fiction.  By  Stephen  Leacock.  12mo,  294 
pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.25. 

The  Spirit  of  Protest  in  Old  French  Literature. 
By  Mary  Morton  Wood.  12mo,  201  pages.  Co- 
lumbia University  Press. 

Appreciations  and  Depreciations.  By  Ernest  A. 
Boyd.  12mo.  162  pages.  The  Talbot  Press. 
Dublin. 

The  Riddle  of  Hamlet  and  the  Newest  Answers. 
By  Simon  Augustine  Blackmore.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  494  pages.  The  Stratford  Co.  $2. 

Mod  and  Purple.  By  Seumas  O'Sullivan.  With 
frontispiece,  12mo,  96  pages.  The  Talbot  Press. 
Dublin. 

PUBLIC   AFFAIRS,    SOCIOLOGY,    ECONOMICS, 
AND  POLITICS. 

The  Great  Problems  of  British  Statesmanship.     By 

J.  Ellis  Barker.  12mo,  445  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton 
&  Co.  $4. 

Japan  at  the  Cross  Roads.  By  A.  M.  Pooley.  8vo, 
362  pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $3.50. 

The  Unmarried  Mother.  By  Percy  Gamble  Kam- 
merer.  8vo,  342  pages.  Little,  Brown  &  Co. 
$3. 

"With  Poor  Immigrants  to  America.  By  Stephen 
Graham.  Illustrated,  12mo,  306  pages.  The 
Macmillan  Co.  $2.25. 

State  Sanitation.  By  G.  C.  Whipple.  Volume  2. 
8vo,  452  pages.  Harvard  University  Press.  $2.50. 

The  Development  of  the  British  West  Indies.  By 
Frank  Wesley  Pitman.  8vo,  495  pages.  Yale 
University  Press.  $2.50. 

England's  Debt  to  India.  By  Lajpat  Rai.  12mo, 
364  pages.  B.  W.  Huebsch.  $2. 

The  Foreign  Policy  of  Woodrow  Wilson,  1913-17. 
By  Edgar  E.  Robinson  and  Victor  J.  West. 
12mo,  428  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.75. 

The  Sum  of  Feminine  Achievement.  By  Dr.  W.  A. 
Newman  Dorland.  12mo,  237  pages.  The  Strat- 
ford Co.  $1.50. 

Universal  Training  for  Citizenship  and  Public  Serv- 
ice. By  William  H.  Allen.  12mo,  281  pages. 
The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.50. 

Inside  the  Russian  Revolution.  By  Rheta  Childe 
Dorr.  Illustrated,  12mo,  243  pages.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.  $1.50. 

Shakespeare  and  the  Founders  of  Liberty  in  Amer- 
ica. By  Charles  Mills  Gayley.  12mo,  270  pages. 
The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.50. 

Our  Money  and  the  State.  By  Hartley  Withers. 
12mo,  119  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.25. 

The  World's  Debate.  By  William  Barry.  12mo, 
332  pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co.  $1.25. 

The  Works  Manager  of  Today.  By  Sidney  Webb. 
12mo,  162  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  $1. 


Two  January 
Books 

WILL  an  early  and  sudden 
destruction  of  the  present 
world   or   a  gradual  process   of 
human  endeavor  be  the  method 
for  correcting  the  ills  of  society? 

The  answer  will  be  found  in 

The 
Millennial  Hope 

A  Phase  oi 
War-Time  Thinking 

BY  SHIRLEY  J.  CASE 

Professor  of  Early  Church  History  and  New 
Testament  Interpretation,  the  University  of  Chicago 


$1.35,  postage  extra 


EVERYONE  is  interested  in 
the  phenomena  of  heredity 
and  their  governing  laws.  Much 
accurate  knowledge  regarding 
these  phenomena  has  been  re- 
cently acquired,  the  essentials  of 
which  are  presented  in 

The 

Third  and  Fourth 
Generation 

An  Introduction  to  Heredity 

BY  ELLIOT  R.  DOWNING 

Associate  Professor  of  Natural  Science  in  the  School 
of  Education,  the  University  of  Chicago 


fl.OO,  postage  extra 


The  University  of  Chicago 


Chicago 


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86 


THE   DIAL 


[January  17 


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A  New  Basis  for  Social  Progress.  By  William  C. 
White  and  Louis  J.  Heath.  12mo,  22»  pages. 
Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  $1.25. 

Anglo-German  Rivalry  as  a  Cause  of  the  Great 
War.  By  Oscar  Albert  Marti.  12mo,  83  pages. 
The  Stratford  Co.  $1. 

National  Strength  and  International  Duty.  By 
Theodore  Roosevelt.  12mo,  103  pages.  Prince- 
ton University  Press.  $1. 

Ireland  in  the  Last  Fifty  Years.  By  Ernest  Bar- 
ker. 12mo,  108  pages.  Oxford  University  Press. 
Paper.  60  cts. 

RELIGION. 

Problems  of  Mysticism  and  Its  Symbolism.     By  Dr. 

Herbert  Silberer.  Translated  by  Dr.  Smith  Ely 
Jelliffe.  12mo,  451  pages.  Moffat,  Yard  &  Co. 
$3. 

Immortality.  By  A.  Glutton-Brock,  C.  W.  Emmet, 
J.  A.  Hadfield,  and  the  author  of  "Pro  Christo 
et  Ecclesia."  12mo,  381  pages.  The  Macmillan 
Co.  $2.25. 

In  the  Footsteps  of  St.  Paul.  By  Francis  E.  Clark. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  418  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons.  $2. 

Higher  Living.  By  Smith  Baker.  12mo,  404  pages. 
Sherman,  French  &  Co.  $1.75. 

A  Book  of  Prayer  for  Use  in  the  Churches  of  Jesus 
Christ.  Compiled  by  a  Presbyter.  IGmo,  299 
pages.  Sherman,  French  &  Co.  Limp  leather. 
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A  Theology  for  the  Social  Gospel.  By  Walter 
Rauschenbusch.  12mo,  279  pages.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.  $1.50. 

Protestantism  in  Germany.  By  Kerr  D.  Macmillan. 
12mo,  282  pages.  Princeton  University  Press. 
$1.50. 

Our  Bible.  By  Herbert  L.  Willett.  12mo,  278 
pages.  The  Christian  Century  Press,  Chicago. 
$1.35. 

African  Missionary  Heroes  and  Heroines.  By  H. 
K.  W.  Kumm.  12mo,  215  pages.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.  $1.25. 

Love  Stories  of  the  Bible.  By  Billy  Sunday.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  329  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 
$1.50. 

The  Tender  Pilgrims.  By  Edgar  DeWitt  Jones. 
88  pages.  The  Christian  Century  Press,  Chi- 
cago. 85  cts. 

American  Civil  Church  Law.  By  Carl  Zollmann. 
8vo,  473  pages.  Columbia  University. 

The  Church  and  the  Alan.  By  Donald  Hankey. 
16mo,  89  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  W  cts. 

POETRY   AND    DRAMA. 

The  Book  of  New  York  Verse.     Edited  by  Hamilton 

Fish    Armstrong.      Illustrated,    8vo,    450    pages. 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     $2.50. 
Anthology   of   Magazine   Verse.    1017.     By   William 

Stanley   Braithwaite.      12mo,   412   pages.     Small, 

Maynard  &  Co.     $2. 
Elegy    in     Autumn.       By    Clinton     ScollarsL       8vo. 

Frederick   Fairchild   Sherman.     $2.50. 
The    Odes    of    Horace.      Translated    by    Warren    H. 

Cudworth.     12mo,   161  pages.     Alfred  A,  Knopf. 

$1.50. 
Poems  of  Conformity.     By  Charles  Williams.     12mo, 

127  pages.     Oxford  University  Press.     $1.40. 
Madame  Sand.    By  Philip  Moeller.     12m»,  167  pages. 

Alfred  A.  Knopf.     $1.25. 
Unmade  in  Heaven.     By  Gamaliel.     12mo,  138  pages. 

Dodd.  Mead  &  Co.     $1.25. 
Somewhere     Beyond.       A    Year     Book     of     Francis 

Thompson.      Compiled    by    Mary    Carmel    Haley. 

16mo.   161   pages.     E.   P.   Dutton  &  Co.     $1.25. 
Songs   of  the   Heart   and    Soul.     By   Joseph   Roland 

Piatt.      12mo,    111    pages.      Sherman,    French    & 

Co.     $1.25. 
A    Voice    from    the    Silence.      By    Anna    B.    Bensel. 

12mo,  91  pages.     Sherman,  French  &  Co.     $1. 
The  Hill  Trails.     By  Author  Wallace  Peach.     ISSmo, 

88  pages.     Sherman,  French  &  Co.     $1. 
In  Praise  of  War.    By  Don  C.  Seitz.    12mo.  51  pages. 

Harper  &  Bros.     $1. 
The     Tower    of    Ivory.      By    Archibald     MacLeish. 

12mo,    69  pages.     Yale  University  Press.     $1. 
Songs  of  a  Grandmother.    By  Marietta  M.  Andrews. 

12mo,  79  pages.     E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.     $1. 
The   Evergreen   Tree.     By   Percy   Mackaye.      Illus- 
trated,    8vo,     79     pages.       D.     Appleton     &    Co. 

Boxed. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


87 


Kngllmh    B.      By    Agnes    Porter.      12mo,    61    pages. 

Sherman,  French  &  Co.     $1. 
Green    Fruit.      By    John    Peale    Bishop.      12mo,    45 

pages.     Sherman.   French  &  Co.     80   cts. 
P«ems.     By  Carroll  Aikins.     12mo,  36  pages.     Sher- 
man,  French   &  Co.     75  cts. 
The    Ballad    of    Ensign    Joy.      By    E.    W.    Hornung. 

16mo,  55  pages.     E.  P.  Button  &  Co.     75  cts. 
A    Book    of   Yale   Review   Ver»e.      16mo,    61    pages. 

Yale  University  Press.     75  cts. 
Ireland:    A   Song  of  Hope,   and  Other  Poems.     By 

Padric  Gregory.     12mo,   116   pages.     The  Talbot 

Press,  Dublin. 
Poems  of  Life  from  California.     By  Anna  B.   New- 

begin.     With  frontispiece,  16mo,  63  pages.     John 

J.  Newbegin. 
Italian  Rhapsody,   and  Other  Poems  of  Italy.     By 

Robert    Underwood    Johnson.      12mo,    37    pages. 

Published  by  the  Author. 
Poems  of  War  and  Peace.     By  Robert  Underwood 

Johnson.      12mo,    107    pages.      Published    by    the 

Author. 
A  Banjo  at  Armageddon.     By  Berton  Braley.     12mo, 

124  pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1. 
The   Silent  Voice.     Second   Series.      16mo,   68   pages. 

G.  Bell  &  Sons,  Ltd.,  London.     Is. 
The   Little   Tailor   of   the   Winding  "Way.     By   Ger- 
trude Crownfield.     Illustrated,   12mo,   132   pages. 

The  Macmillan  Co.     60  cts. 
The   Airman.      By   C.   M.   Tatham.      12mo,    16    pages. 

Oxford  University  Press.     Paper.     30  cts. 
Silence    and    True   Love.     J.    Brookes   More.      16mo, 

15  pages.     Thrash-Lick  Publishing  Co. 
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pages.    The  Hampshire  Bookshop.    Paper.    25  cts. 

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The  Crime.  By  a  German.  Volume  1.  8vo,  539 
pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co.  $2.50. 

The  Flyer's  Guide.  By  Captain  N.  J.  Gill.  8vo, 
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Topography  and  Strategy  in  the  "War.  By  Douglas 
W.  Johnson.  Illustrated,  8vo,  211  pages.  Henry 
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Harry  Butters.  R.  F.  A.  Life  and  War  Letters. 
Edited  by  Mrs.  Denis  O'Sullivan.  Illustrated, 
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The  Eyes  of  the  Army  and  Navy.  By  Albert  H. 
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The  Journal  of  Submarine  Commander  Von  Forst- 
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Cardinal  Mercier.  Pastorals,  Letters,  Allocutions. 
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The  Old  Front  Line.  By  John  Masefield.  Illus- 
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FICTION. 

The  Foundling  Prince,  and  Other  Tales.  Translated 
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Julia  Collier  Harris  and  Rea  Ipcar.  8vo,  284 
pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  $4. 

The  City  of  the  Discreet.  By  Pio  Baroja.  Trans- 
lated by  Jacob  S.  Fassett,  Jr.  12mo,  356  pages. 
Alfred  A.  Knopf.  $1.50. 

The  Cabin.  By  V,  Blasco.  Translated  by  Dr.  Fran- 
cis Haffkine  Snow  and  Beatrice  M.  Mekota. 
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What  Never  Happened.  By  "Ropshin"  (Boris  Sa- 
vinkov).  Translated  by  Thomas  Seltzer.  12mo, 
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The  Girl  and  the  Faun.  By  Eden  Phillpotts.  Il- 
lustrated, 8vo.  78  pages.  J.  B.  Lippincott  Co. 
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Stories  of  the  Old  Missions  of  California.  By 
Charles  Franklin  Carter.  12mo,  184  pages.  Paul 
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The  Winds  of  the  World.  By  Talbot  Mundy.  Il- 
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The  Wolf-Cub.  By  Patrick  and  Terence  Casey. 
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Cabin  Fever.  By  B.  M.  Bower.  With  frontispiece, 
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Adventures  in  Girlhood.  By  Temple  Bailey.  12mo, 
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THE    DIAL 


[January  17,  1918 


What  Are  You  Paying 


For  Typewriters  Now? 


IF  you  are  paying  more  than  $49  —  the  price  of  a 
brand  new  Oliver  Nine  —  whatever  you  pay  over 
that  amount  is  merely  the  extra  cost  of  selling  a 
typewriter  to  you. 

By  eliminating  such  wasteful  selling  methods,  the  price  of 
the  Oliver  Nine  has  been  reduced  from  $100  to  $49,  without 
changing  the  typewriter  in  the  slightest. 

Mind  you,  this  $49  Oliver  is  not  second  hand,  nor  rebuilt, 
but  exactly  the  same  Oliver  in  size,  material  and  workman- 
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fewer  parts.  It  is  built  in  our  own  factories,  devoted  exclu- 
sively to  the  manufacture  of  Olivers.  Additional  factories 
have  increased  our  output  over  300  per  cent. 

Over  600,000  Olivers  have  been  sold.  Among  the  users 
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Hart,  Schaff ner  &  Marx 
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^  Fortnightly  Journal  of 

CRITICISM' AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


Volume  LXIV. 
No.   759. 


CHICAGO,  JANUARY  31,  1918 


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And  What  of  Art? 

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A  Pilgrim  Interprets  the  Promised  Land 


By  ELSIE  CLEWS  PARSONS 


A  Complete,  Clear,  Concise   History   of   the  War  for 

American  Readers 

UNDER  FOUR  FLAGS  for  FRANCE 

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biggest  battles  of  this  generation.  Com- 
bined with  his  knowledge  of  military  mat- 
ters is  the  rare  gift  of  the  born  story-teller 
and  in  this  book  will  be  found  an  authori- 
tative account  of  the  present  war  from  its 
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No.  734.     ANCIENT  LAW  by  Sir  Henry  Maine 

With  a  Lengthy  Introduction  by  Professor  J.  H.  Morgan,  of  London  University 

The  World  Famous  history  of  the  great  English  jurist  and  historian,  who  was  successively  Professor  at  Cam- 
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A  revised-reissue  of  the  Translation  of  1723  by  P.  Davall. 
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Newly  translated  by  Cecil  Jane  and  Lucy  Menzies. 

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No.  739.  SELECTED  PAPERS  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

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of  personality  and  survival  which  has  been   forced  upon  the  attention  of  all  thinking  people  at  the  present  time. 


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THE^DIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  759 


JANUARY  31,  1918 


CONTENTS 


AND  WHAT  OF  ART?     .     .     .     .     .     Laurence  Binyon 
THE  FOLK  CULTURE  OF  THE  KEN- 


93 


William  Aspenwall  Bradley  95 

Amy  Lowell 98 

H.M.Kallen    ....     99 
Edward  Sapir    .     .     .     .102 

.  103 

.  105 

.  107 
.  109 
111 


TUCKY   CUMBERLANDS        .       .      .      * 

THE  Two  RAINS     .     .     Verse     .     . 

THE  STRUCTURE  OF  LASTING  PEACE 

REPROOF    .     .     .     .     .     Verse     .     . 

OUR  LONDON  LETTER Edward  Shanks 

THISTLES  AND  GRAPES  IN  PROFESSOR 

SHERMAN'S  GARDEN  .  .  .  .  .  Henry  B.  Fuller  . 

A  PILGRIM  INTERPRETS  THE  PROM- 
ISED LAND  .  . Elsie  Clews  Parsons 

THE  PAINTED  DEVIL  OF  POLITICS     .     Harold  Stearns  .     . 

NEW  CURIOSITY  SHOP — AND  A  POET     Conrad  Aiken    .     . 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 114 

The  Romance  of  the  Romanoffs. — Asgard  and  the  Gods. — Epics  and  Romances  of 
the  Middle  Ages. — Rinconete  and  Cortadillo. — A  Priest  of  the  Ideal. — Militarism. 
— Pain  and  Pleasure — The  Sense  of  Sight. 

NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 117 

The  Sturdy  Oak. — A  Woman  of  Genius. — Missing. — The  Four  Corners  of  the 
World. 

CASUAL  COMMENT ,.   ...    ,  .»     .     .  118 

BRIEFER  MENTION    .„ ..  ,^    .     .  120 

COMMUNICATIONS 121 

La  Malquerida. — An  Unpublished  Poem  by  Poe. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS ,,*...     .  122 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  .  ,123 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


CONRAD  AIKEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 
Contributing  Editors 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

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THE   DIAL 


[January  31,  1918 


A     New    Novel     by    May    Sinclair 

"The  Tree  of  Heaven  is  a  perfect  performance." — London  Illustrated  Newt 

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Si  jFortniff&tty  Uournal  of  Criticism  and  2Dtecu00ton  of  Eiterature  anu  ^t  flrtg 


And  What  of  Art? 


When  I  was  in  the  United  States  in  the 
early  winter  of  1914  I  was  continually 
being  asked  how  the  war  was  going  to 
affect  art.  As  if  I  knew!  As  if  anyone 
knew!  I  soon  became  weary  of  this  ques- 
tion. But  as  the  war  bites  deeper  into  our 
lives,  those  who  are  interested  in  art  as 
a  living  thing  cannot  help  asking  it  of 
themselves,  even  if  they  forbear  from 
worrying  others  with  it;  and  it  is  worth 
while  to  face  the  question  and  see  whether 
there  is  anything  that  can  profitably  be 
suggested  in  answer. 

The  first  thing  to  note  is  the  fact  that  no 
analogies  from  the  past  are  likely  to  help  us. 
So  far  as  we  can  see,  the  Franco-Prussian 
war  made  no  difference  to  French  art, 
which  just  went  on  as  before.  And  one 
may  doubt  whether  the  far  more  pro- 
longed, world-engulfing  wars  of  Napoleon 
made  much  greater  difference  to  the  art 
of  the  countries  involved,  except  by  reac- 
tion. The  Romantic  movement  of  1830 
in  France  may  well  have  been  the  reaction 
of  youth  from  a  period  of  drab,  following 
on  a  time  crowded  with  glorious  life  and 
itself  full  of  the  romance  of  action  and  of 
marvelous  events.  In  England  the  long 
peace  after  Waterloo  meant  increased 
manufactures  and  a  new  wealth  which  got 
the  kind  of  art  it  wanted,  an  art  reflecting 
comfort  and  complacency  rather  than  any- 
thing heroic  or  inspired.  But  this  war  is 
not  like  any  other  war,  and  we  cannot 
expect  that  the  years  which  have  irrevoca- 
bly altered  the  world  for  so  vast  a  number 
of  its  inhabitants  will  not  affect  in  some 
way  all  the  activities  of  life.  In  this  war 
the  whole  of  a  country's  population,  if  not 
actually  engaged,  is  tried  and  challenged; 
there  is  no  sitting  at  ease,  a  remote  and 
indifferent  spectator,  as  in  older  days. 
And  the  artists  of  the  young  generation — 
in  England  and  France  at  least;  I  cannot 
speak  with  knowledge  of  the  other  coun- 


tries— are  most  of  them  in  the  war  them- 
selves, those  that  have  not  already  given 
their  lives. 

On  the  day  I  write  this  I  have  seen 
Wyndham  Lewis,  the  leader  of  the  Eng- 
lish Vorticists — one  of  the  groups  inspired 
by  the  new  reaction  from  "representative" 
art — on  his  way  back  to  the  front.  He  is 
now  a  gunner  in  Flanders.  He  told  me 
he  wanted  to  paint  a  picture  of  a  gun-pit, 
and  he  was  sure  that  with  his  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  guns  he  would  produce 
something  of  far  more  character  than  the 
pictures  by  those  artists  who  draw  such 
subjects  from  outside  after  a  casual  visit. 
Since  he  has  the  real  artist's  gift,  as  well 
as  the  gunner's  knowledge,  he  is  probably 
correct,  and  I  hope  he  may  get  the  chance. 
Already  in  England  we  have  had  many 
pictures  of  the  war  from  Nevinson,  a 
young  artist  who  was  something  of  a 
Cubist  but  who,  from  contact  with  the 
moving  and  terrible  reality  of  war,  has 
struck  out  a  new  style,  in  which  his  pre- 
occupation with  geometrical  forms  finds  a 
natural  outlet.  Modern  war-machinery, 
the  march  of  drilled  men,  the  searchlights 
and  aeroplanes,  give  him  the  straight  lines 
and  angles  formerly  wooed  rather  forci- 
bly and  capriciously  from  peaceful  and 
reluctant  landscapes.  But  it  is  not  only 
the  young  men,  those  who  have  been  in 
the  actual  fighting,  men  like  Nevinson  and 
like  Eric  Kennington  (a  painter  who 
promises  great  things),  who  have  painted 
at  the  front.  JMuirhead  Bone,  William 
Orpen,  and  now  Augustus  John  are  among 
the  brilliant  painters  who  have  been  sent 
on  official  missions  to  portray  the  war  for 
Britain  or  Canada.  It  is  somewhat  sur- 
prising, indeed,  to  find  how  well  the 
authorities  have  chosen,  how  awake  their 
advisers  have  shown  themselves  to  the  liv- 
ing forces  in  English  art. 

But,  after  all,  pictures  of  the  war  won't 


94 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


in  themselves  make  a  new  art.  The  war 
may  beget  images  as  terribly  memorable  as 
Goya's  "Desastros  de  la  Guerra,"  and 
the  deeply  flowing  currents  of  art  remain 
in  their  old  channel.  Artists  as  a  race 
have  a  faculty  for  remaining  wonderfully 
impervious  to  external  circumstances.  Yet 
can  we  relegate  this  planet-convulsing  war 
to  external  circumstances?  Does  it  not  go 
too  deeply  into  mankind's  experience?  It 
comes  to  us  all — man,  woman,  and  child, 
noncombatants  no  less  than  soldiers — as 
discipline,  suffering,  sacrifice.  We  endure 
and  hope  through  it  all,  but  not  perhaps 
till  it  is  over  shall  we  -realize  either  the 
extremity  of  the  stress  we  have  borne  or 
the  tremendous  changes  it  has  wrought. 
It  is  then  that  we  may  expect  a  difference 
in  mood  among  those  who  express,  in 
whatever  form,  the  desires  and  emotions 
of  men. 

Was  there  not  in  the  years  just  preced- 
ing the  war's  outbreak  a  wave  of  restless- 
ness and  violence  visible  in  the  arts,  among 
the  young  men  ?  It  seemed  an  energy  that 
craved  to  break  itself  upon  something,  it 
did  not  quite  know  what.  I  think  it  may 
have  been  partly  the  result  of  the  tenden- 
cies which  had  imposed  themselves  on 
modern  painting.  Pictorial  art  has  been 
trying  to  empty  itself  of  content.  The 
dogma  that  one  should  paint  only  what 
one  sees  with  one's  eyes  had  been  widely 
accepted.  The  fear  of  being  "literary" 
had  become  a  perfect  terror.  Hence  a 
narrowing-down  of  theme  and  motive,  and 
an  enforced  passivity  in  the  artist.  Then 
came  a  younger  generation  which  wanted 
to  conquer  a  new  kingdom,  but  was  still 
afraid  of  imagination  and  romance,  and, 
using  the  same  meagre  stock  of  subjects, 
tried  to  force  into  them  a  significance  they 
did  not  possess.  Primitive  and  savage  art 
have  come  into  fashion;  the  advanced 
youth  are  all  for  the  fierce  emphasis  of  the 
roughhewn.  Ludicrous  things  sometimes 
result,  as  when  one  sees  a  picture  of  what, 
twenty  years  ago,  would  have  been  a  cozy 
group  in  a  parlor,  ambitiously  trans- 
formed into  savagely  angular  figures,  with 
a  false  air  of  being  tremendously  signifi- 
cant of  something  for  which  there  is  no 
motive  in  the  picture.  It  seems  to  be  a 
hunger  to  be  heroic  in  style,  combined  with 


a  determination  to  have  nothing  heroic  in 
subject — an  outbreak  and  a  suppression  at 
the  same  time. 

Curiously,  art  seems  to  have  anticipated 
the  atmosphere  of  war  before  the  war 
itself  exploded.  I  will  not  prophesy  about 
the  effect  of  the  altered  world  on  the  arts; 
I  will  only  say  what  I  hope.  That  is  that 
art  may  recover  its  full  freedom.  The  lat- 
est movement  in  art  is  of  real  value,  in  spite 
of  numberless  eccentricities,  affectations, 
and  incongruous  applications  of  a  new  for- 
mula, because  it  tends  to  get  away  from 
surface-imitation,  to  liberate  energy,  to 
bring  into  use  a  more  direct  and  vibrant 
means  of  expression.  What  it  lacks  is 
adequate  content;  it  tortures  itself  with 
self-consciousness,  obsessed  by  theories  of 
revolt.  It  is  not  human  enough.  Well, 
I  hope  that  in  the  world  of  new  experience 
after  the  war,  art  will  no  longer  be  afraid 
to  take  all  that  is  human  for  its  province, 
will  picture  for  us  things  imagined  as  well 
as  things  observed.  To  confine  painting 
to  what  is  presented  to  our  eyes  is  to  rob 
it  of  a  whole  world  of  riches,  the  world 
of  dynamic  movement,  of  forms  in  com- 
plex rhythm,  which  imagination  alone  can 
master  and  express.  Why  turn  away  from 
that  mine  of  creative  symbol,  for  fear  of 
being  called  "literary"  ?  Poets  are  not 
reproached  for  being  pictorial  in  their 
poetic  way.  Painters  need  not  become 
"literary,"  in  the  only  sense  in  which  that 
term  is  a  condemnation — I  mean  by  trying 
to  express  in  paint  what  words  could  bet- 
ter express — because  they  take  into  their 
range  of  subject  matter  not  only  sense- 
impressions  but  the  memories,  the  dreams, 
the  central  emotions  and  spiritual  desires 
of  our  race.  Triviality  of  approach  is 
a  worse  sin  even  than  encroaching  on 
another  art.  And  if  once  painters  can  rid 
themselves  of  the  bad  old  habits  of  the 
studios,  the  dressing-up  of  posed  models 
and  the  copying  of  them  so  posed  in  a 
static  arrangement  against  a  pseudo-nat- 
uralistic background,  there  will  not  be  the 
prejudice  now  justifiably  prevalent  against 
the  painting  of  history  and  legend.  A  con- 
gruous and  coherent  symbolism,  the  find- 
ing of  an  idiom  in  which  the  essence  of  a 
theme  can  be  pictorially  expressed,  with 
no  false  out-of-key  elaboration  of  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


95 


parts — that  is  what  is  wanted:  a  method 
that  uses  the  spirit  and  not  the  letter. 
Whether  the  style  be  summarily  short- 
hand or  piercingly  imaginative  in  detail 
does  not  matter,  so  it  be  personal  and 
native  to  the  artist.  Intensity,  conviction, 
human  emotion,  directness,  breadth — 
these  are  the  essentials.  And  here,  it 
seems  to  me,  is  the  true,  as  yet  unrealized, 
goal  of  the  new  movement  in  contempo- 
rary art,  which  as  yet  is  so  uneasy  and 


restless  because  it  is  so  clogged  by  lega- 
cies of  dogmas  it  has  no  need  for.  The 
tragic  and  spirit-searching  experience  of 
the  war,  the  wrestle  of  fundamental 
causes  which  underlies  all  its  waste  and 
horror,  draws  us  down  into  the  burning 
elements  and  energies  of  man.  Why 
should  not  these  find  as  direct  and  potent 
expression  in  painting  and  sculpture  as  in 
poetry  and  music? 

LAURENCE  BINYON. 


The  Folk  Culture  of  the  Kentucky  Cumberlands 


I  venture  to  assert  that,  in  spite  of  all 
that  has  been'  written,  less  is  really  known 
about  the  Cumberlands  than  about  any 
other  corner  of  the  country.  The  reason 
is  that  those  who  have  done  the  writing 
have  usually  had  a  very  slight,  or  else  a 
very  narrow  and  limited,  knowledge  of 
their  subject.  Often  they  have  had  none 
at  all,  at  first  hand.  This  applies  particu- 
larly to  the  novelists.  I  know  of  two 
mountain  novels  whose  authors  had  never 
seen  the  mountains.  Not,  of  course,  that 
it  is  in  the  least  necessary  to  see  them. 
The  mountain  novel  has  become  stand- 
ardized, and  anyone  can  easily  get  the 
formula.  Several  stock  types — the  moon- 
shiner, the  feudist,  and  the  rest — con- 
stantly reappear  in  them,  and  the  dialect 
is  passed  along  from  one  hand,  or  mouth, 
to  another. 

But  the  novelists  are  not  the  only  offen- 
ders. The  same  evidence  of  superficial 
acquaintance  is  to  be  encountered  in  much 
that  is  not  fiction.  It  is  to  be  encountered 
even  in  the  work  of  such  a  writer  as  Miss 
Ellen  Churchill  Semple,  who  is  an  author- 
ity on  the  relation  of  geographic  environ- 
ment to  historic  development,  and  whose 
article  "The  Anglo-Saxons  of  the  Ken- 
tucky Mountains,"  which  appeared  orig- 
inally in  the  "Geographical  Journal,"  is, 
all  things  considered,  the  best  descriptive 
account  of  the  mountain  world  of  Ken- 
tucky. 

To  begin  with,  Miss  Semple's  title  is  a 
misnomer.  She  herself  admits  the  pres- 
ence of  Scotch-Irish,  French  Huguenot, 
and  Pennsylvania  Dutch  elements,  though 
she  seeks  to  minimize  this  admission  by 


the  rather  loose  assertion,  regarding  the 
former,  that  they  are  "largely  Teutonic 
in  origin";  but  she  says  nothing  at  all  here 
of  the  aboriginal  element,  which  she 
refers  to  elsewhere  as  "insignificant." 
Now,  on  the  contrary,  Indian  blood  is 
widely  diffused,  and  it  is  a  question 
whether  there  is  a  single  family  without 
at  least  a  trace  of  it.  Some  families  have 
much  more  than  a  trace.  In  short,  far 
from  being  "the  purest  Anglo-Saxon  stock 
in  all  the  United  States,"  as  Miss  Semple 
calls  them,  these  mountaineers  are  perhaps 
the  most  composite;  though  the  thorough- 
ness with  which  the  melting-pot  has  done 
its  work,  and  the  freedom  from  any  recent 
tide  of  immigration,  may  entitle  them,  in 
a  very  special  sense,  to  be  called  "pure 
Americans" — types  strangely  prophetic,  it 
may  be,  of  the  Americans  of  the  future. 

But  the  most  remarkable  passage  in 
Miss  Semple's  article  is  that  dealing  with 
the  negro. 

If  the  mountains  have  kept  out  foreign  elements, 
still  more  effectively  have  they  excluded  the 
negroes.  This  region  is  as  free  from  them  as 
northern  Vermont.  There  is  no  place  for  the 
negro  in  the  mountain  economy,  and  never  has 
been.  In  the  days  of  slavery  this  fact  had  momen- 
tous results.  The  mountains  did  not  offer  condi- 
tions for  plantation  cultivation,  the  only  system  of 
agriculture  in  which  slaves  could  be  profitably 
employed.  The  absence  of  these  conditions  and 
of  the  capital  wherewith  to  purchase  negroes  made 
the  whole  Appalachian  region  a  non-slave-hold- 
ing section.  Hence,  when  the  rupture  came 
between  the  North  and  South,  this  mountain 
region  declared  for  the  Union,  and  thus  raised  a 
barrier  of  dissatisfaction  through  the  centre  of  the 
Southern  States.  It  had  no  sympathy  with  the 
industrial  system  of  the  South;  it  shared  the  demo- 
cratic spirit  characteristic  of  all  mountain  people, 


96 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


and  likewise  their  conservatism,  which  holds  to  the 
established  order.  Having,  therefore,  no  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  negro,  our  Kentucky  mountain- 
eers do  not  show  the  deep-seated  prejudice  to  the 
social  equality  of  the  blacks  and  whites  which  char- 
acterizes all  other  Kentuckians. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  compose  a  single 
paragraph  more  completely  packed  with 
misstatements  and  false  conclusions 
derived  therefrom.  There  is,  indeed,  but 
one  gleam  of  truth  in  it.  This  appears  in 
the  last  sentence.  It  is  a  fact  that  the 
mountaineers  do  not  show  the  deep-seated 
prejudice  to  the  social  equality  of  the  blacks 
and  whites  which  characterizes  all  other 
Kentuckians;  but  it  is  not  a  fact  that  this 
is  because  the  mountaineer  has  no  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  negro,  though  the  theory 
is  undoubtedly  a  convenient  and  comfort- 
able one  for  the  "other  Kentuckians,"  who 
can  find  in  it  a  sort  of  negative  support 
for  their  own  attitude.  For  there  are 
negroes  in  the  mountains.  Not  many,  to 
be  sure,  and  not  in  all  parts  alike;  but  still 
enough,  and  of  sufficiently  wide  distribu- 
tion, to  confute  Miss  Semple's  broad  state- 
ment of  fact,  and  to  discredit  her  theory 
based  upon  it. 

There  are  negroes  in  Clay  County, 
where  they  are  thick-settled  all  about 
Manchester,  the  county  seat;  and  there 
are  negroes  also  in  Knott  and  Perry  coun- 
ties, where  they  have  their  principal  set- 
tlements on  the  waters  of  Carr's  Fork. 
What  is  more,  these  negroes  are  all  the 
descendants  of  slaves,  and  of  slaves  held 
in  the  mountains.  For  it  is,  again,  not 
true  that  slavery  did  not  exist  there.  The 
mountains  as  a  whole  certainly  did  not 
offer  conditions  for  plantation  cultivation; 
but  there  are  certain  creeks  with  broad 
bottoms  that  did,  and  slaves  were  owned 
there,  precisely  as  they  were  in  the  Blue 
Grass. 

These  sections,  moreover,  did  have  a 
very  decided  sympathy  with  the  industrial 
system  of  the  South,  sided  with  Secession, 
and  fought  for  it;  so  that,  in  Kentucky,  at 
least,  the  mountains  were  by  no  means  the 
absolute  barrier  of  disaffection  they  are 
represented  to  be.  Indeed,  the  division  of 
sentiment  which  marked  the  state  of  Ken- 
tucky as  a  whole,  extended  right  through 
this  southeastern  end  of  it.  Hence  the  bit- 


ter guerilla  warfare  that  raged  there,  and 
hence  the  dominance  of  the  Democratic 
party  in  at  least  one  mountain  county — 
Knott — at  the  present  day,  and  its 
strength  in  several  others. 

For  there  is  by  no  means  that  "staunch 
adherence  to  the  Republican  party"  on  the 
part  of  the  mountaineers  as  a  whole,  that 
Miss  Semple  speaks  of  later  on  in  her 
article,  and  it  was  not  so  many  years  ago 
that  a  party  of  "furrin"  women — daring 
and  devoted  settlement  workers — riding 
through  the  North  Fork  country,  came 
near  being  mobbed  by  the  mountaineers 
because  they  displayed  an  American  flag, 
known  in  that  particular  locality  only  as 
the  Republican,  or  "Radical,"  emblem! 

I  have  thought  it  worth  while  to  men- 
tion these  misstatements,  first,  because  so 
far  as  I  am  aware  they  have  never  been 
corrected  before ;  and  second,  because  they 
illustrate  so  well  the  prevailing  ignorance 
about  the  mountains,  even  among  those 
who,  like  Miss  Semple,  herself  a  Kentuck- 
ian,  have  actually  been  there.  I  am  not, 
however,  primarily  interested  in  ethnolog- 
ical questions;  nor  do  I,  as  Miss  Semple 
does,  attach  any  particular  importance  to 
these  racial  differences,  an  importance 
which  clearly  cloaks  an  Anglo-Saxon  chau- 
vinism in  her  case,  as  when  she  turns 
certain  admirable  traits  of  the  mountain- 
eer— his  gentle,  gracious  manners — into  a 
tribute  to  the  "inextinguishable  excellence 
of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race."  My  own  prin- 
cipal preoccupation  is  with  the  civilization, 
the  culture,  of  the  mountain  people,  or 
perhaps  more  exactly,  with  the  cultural 
survivals  among  them;  and  these,  I  am 
quite  prepared  to  admit,  are  pretty  nearly 
pure  Anglo-Saxon,  or  English. 

It  is  really  amazing,  when  one  considers 
the  number  of  racial  elements  that  have 
entered  into  this  strange  mountain  amal- 
gam, how  little  they  have  contributed  to 
the  common  store.  Or  it  would  be  amaz- 
ing, if  we  did  not  already  know  how  com- 
pletely one  culture  can  dominate,  and 
eventually  supplant,  all  other  cultures, 
even  when  it  is  that  of  the  Submerged 
minority — as  in  Rumania,  where  we  have 
the  spectacle  of  a  nearly  pure  Slav  people 
with  a  Romance  language  and  literature. 
I  have  met  mountaineers  with  German 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


97 


names,  such  as  Schell,  Huff,  Gayhart, 
Amburgy,  Eversole,  Reisner,  and  so  on, 
who  could  recall  that  their  grandparents 
spoke  German;  but  not  a  vestige  of  that 
tongue  remains  in  the  mountains  to-day, 
or,  indeed,  anything  else  that  is  specifically 
Germanic.  For  surely  we  cannot  so  regard 
that  Faustian  legend  of  a  man  who  sells 
his  soul  to  the  Devil,  a  legend  which  one 
encounters  everywhere  and  of  which,  in 
one  of  my  mountain  tales,  I  have  given  a 
version  almost  verbatim  as  a  mountain 
story-teller  told  it  to  me. 

It  is  the  same,  or  nearly  the  same,  with 
the  French;  since  the  few  French  words, 
or  derivatives,  that  survive — such  as  "ner- 
vous" (nerveux}  for  "strong,"  "muscu- 
lar"; and  "denounce"  (denoncer)  for 
"announce" — may  very  well  have  entered 
into  the  popular  speech  (as  the  second,  of 
course,  did  into  legal  phraseology)  long 
before  the  migration  to  America.  In  one 
instance  what  persists,  apparently,  is  not 
the  word  itself,  but  the  idea  underlying  it. 

In  the  little  village  of  Hindman,  Knott 
County,  there  is  a  settlement  school,  the 
first  of  its  kind  instituted  in  the  mountains. 
Among  the  buildings  that  belong  to  it  is 
one  small  cottage,  high  up  on  the  hillside, 
where  tired  workers  may  rest  and  recuper- 
ate. It  is  called  "Rest  Cottage."  But 
the  village  people  have  another  name  for 
it,  "pouting-house."  Now  one  has  only  to 
consider  the  derivation  of  the  French 
boudoir  from  bonder — "to  pout"  or,  in 
the  older  sense,  to  "absent  oneself" — in 
order  to  perceive  the  curious  interest,  if 
not  necessarily  the  etymological  signifi- 
cance, of  this  quaint  mountain  coinage. 

When  we  come  to  the  Scotch-Irish  or, 
better,  the  Scotch  and  Irish — for  there  are 
both — the  case  is  somewhat  different. 
Certain  traits  of  the  mountaineer  suggest 
the  Scotchman,  and  a  trace  of  the  Scotch 
dialect  is  often  discernible  in  his  speech. 
Also,  there  is  his  passion  for  theological 
discussion,  coupled  with  the  harsh,  Cal- 
vinistic  cast  of  his  historic  creed.  Finally, 
he  may  have  contributed  to  the  common 
stock  of  songs  and  ballads;  though  it  is 
difficult  to  determine  to  just  what  extent, 
inasmuch  as  the  two  countries,  England 
and  Scotland  (Lowland),  constitute,  I 
believe,  a  single  area  for  the  folklorist. 


Next  to  the  speech — the  mountain 
speech  at  once  so  fresh,  so  vigorous,  and 
so  archaic;  so  close  to  that  of  the  Eliza- 
bethans— these  songs  and  ballads  are,  of 
course,  the  chief  cultural  possession  of  the 
Cumberlands.  There,  favored  by  the 
widespread  illiteracy,  they  have  been 
handed  down  from  generation  to  gener- 
ation by  authentic  oral  tradition.  Every- 
one to-day  knows  something  about  the 
romance  of  their  recovery  there,  long 
after  it  was  assumed  that  they  had  all  but 
disappeared  from  the  modern  world.  It 
was  on  this  assumption  that  the  late  Pro- 
fessor Child  made  his  monumental  com- 
pilation of  "English  and  Scottish  Bal- 
lads," deriving  them  almost  entirely  from 
printed  sources.  He  included  a  few  vari- 
ants reported  to  him  as  still  surviving  in 
the  United  States  but  he  attached  no 
importance  to  them,  and  after  his  death 
those  who,  in  a  sense,  became  his  heritors 
committed  themselves  to  the  view  that  bal- 
lad-singing, like  ballad-making,  was  a  lost 
art.  Yet  to-day  between  70  and  80  of 
Child's  305  have  been  identified  on  Amer- 
ican soil,  besides  many  not  included  in  his 
collection,  some  of  which  he  doubtless 
never  knew. 

In  this  number,  however,  it  is  necessary 
to  distinguish  between  those  found  in  such 
sophisticated  sections  as  New  England, 
and  those  collected  in  the  South,  where 
alone  they  may  be  said  to  survive  in  any 
vital  sense.  Of  these  last  Professor  C. 
Alphonso  Smith,  the  head  of  the  move- 
ment in  this  country,  gives  a  total  of  42. 
Mr.  Cecil  J.  Sharp  includes  versions  of 
only  33  in  his  recent  book,  "Folksongs 
from  the  Southern  Appalachians,"  which 
is  largely  confined  to  the  Carolina  moun- 
tains; but  since  then  he  has  visited  Ken- 
tucky and  increased  his  bag  to  46.  He 
has  also  taken  down  a  thousand  tunes. 
For  the  modern  collector  understands  bet- 
ter than  the  old  that  the  ballad  is  not  a 
mere  literary  composition;  it  is  song — a 
form  of  musical  speech,  or  story-telling. 
This  speech  lingers  to-day,  as  perhaps 
nowhere  else  in  the  civilized  world,  on  the 
lips  of  men  and  women  in  the  Smokies  and 
in  the  Cumberlands.  In  England,  Mr. 
Sharp  tells  us,  only  the  old  people,  past 
seventy,  sing  these  ballads ;  in  this  country 


98 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


he  hears  everyone  sing  them,  even  the  chil- 
dren— especially  the  children.  I  myself 
have  heard  them  everywhere — on  the 
creek,  in  the  cabin,  in  the  cornfield — and 
I  know  of  nothing  more  strangely  moving 
than  to  listen,  in  those  lost  lands,  to  the 
slow,  mournful,  tragic  strains  of  such 
forgotten  old-world  songs  as  "Barbara 
Allen,"  "The  Jew's  Daughter,"  and  "The 
Turkish  Lady." 

Nor  is  the  initial  creative  impulse  itself 
by  any  means  exhausted.  Indeed,  in 
nearly  every  community  will  be  found 
someone  who  "follers  makin'  ballets."  A 
robbery  (rare  occurrence  in  this  region), 
a  railroad  wreck,  an  assassination,  like 
that  of  Goebel  or  Marcum — any  one  of 
these  affords  fitting  material  for  a  new 
folksong  which,  married  to  some  old  tune, 
passes  thus  into  general  circulation,  to  be 
sung  alone  or  to  the  accompaniment  of 
banjo  or  dulcimer. 

For  the  mountaineer  has  an  instrument 
of  his  own,  no  less  than  a  distinctive  music 
and  literature.  It  is  a  curious  instrument, 
and  there  is  considerable  mystery  as  to  its 
origin.  In  fact,  the  one  thing  absolutely 
certain  about  it  is  that  it  is  not  a  dulcimer, 
that  instrument  being,  of  course,  one  whose 
strings  are  struck  with  little  mallets,  or 
hammers,  whereas  these  are  plucked,  or 
"picked." 

Nothing  resembling  this  so-called  moun- 
tain dulcimer  has  been  found  among  the 
peasants  of  England.  The  suggestion  has 
been  made,  therefore,  that  it  may  possibly 
be  the  degenerate  form  of  some  court 
instrument  brought  over  by  an  early  gen- 
tleman-adventurer— one  of  Raleigh's,  per- 
haps, since  there  is  a  tradition  that  they 
found  their  final  refuge  in  the  moun- 
tains. But  this  is,  to  say  the  least,  doubt- 


ful ;  for,  as  far  as  I  know,  there  is  nothing 
among  the  courtly  lutes,  viols,  gitterns, 
or  citoles  that  shows  the  slightest  affinity 
with  it.  My  own  theory  is  that  it  is 
descended  from  the  medieval  monochord, 
once  common  throughout  Europe  and  still 
found  among  savage  races.  It  is  true 
that  the  monochord  has,  as  its  name 
implies,  only  one  string;  but  two  of  the 
three  strings  of  the  dulcimer  are  merely 
the  "drone"  strings  that  are  found  equally 
in  other  descendants  of  the  monochord, 
such  as  the  hurdy-gurdy  and  the  "zithers" 
used  by  German  peasants  and  Vosges 
mountaineers  as  late  as  the  eighteenth 
century.  It  is  to  these  last,  perhaps,  that 
the  mountain  dulcimer  comes  closest. 
Indeed,  there  is  in  the  Metropolitan 
Museum  an  instrument,  catalogued  as 
"German,  18th  Century,"  that  seems  to  be 
identical  with  the  standard  Kentucky  type. 
If  this  description  is  correct,  then  of  course 
the  question  of  origin  is  settled. 

But  the  dulcimer  has  nearly  disappeared 
nowadays  in  favor  of  the  inevitable  banjo, 
and  the  ballads  are  fast  following  after  it. 
Nothing  primitive  or  peculiar  can  long 
withstand  the  advance  of  civilization  in 
the  Cumberlands.  Progress  is  very  rapid 
at  the  present  day,  and  will  be  still  more 
rapid  when  the  war  is  over  and  the  price 
of  steel  rails  recedes.  The  whole  region 
is  one  vast  coal  field,  and  the  railroads  are 
invading  it  from  every  direction.  It  will 
not  be  many  years  before  every  creek  has 
its  spur,  its  mining  town,  and  its  coal  tip- 
ple. Then  goodbye  to  the  ballad  and  all 
that  strange,  fascinating,  semi-barbarous 
life  that  has  so  long  survived  in  these  hills 
and  has  made  them  the  "Balkans  of 
America." 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY. 


The  Two  Rains 


SPRING  RAIN 


SUMMER   RAIN 


Tinkling  of  ankle  bracelets. 

Dull  striking 

Of  jade  and  sardonyx 

From  whirling  ends  of  jointed   circlets. 


Clashing  of  bronze  bucklers. 
Screaming  of  horses. 
Red  plumes  of  head-trappings 
Flashing  above  spears. 

AMY   LOWELL. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


99 


The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 

VIII 


THE  ORGANIZATION  OF  PEACE 


The  business  of  organizing  lasting 
peace  is,  after  all,  only  the  business  of 
making  more  extensive,  deeper,  and  more 
thorough-going  in  application  the  irreduci- 
ble principles  which  are  the  commonplaces 
of  all  community  life.  They  are  so 
implicit  in  the  simplest  act  of  cooperation 
between  men  that  it  is  not  until  they  are 
maimed  and  bruised — as  they  are  par 
excellence  by  war — that  they  are  ever 
brought  to  vividness  and  focus.  Ironically 
and  pathetically  enough,  we  then  herald 
them  as  original  and  triumphant  methods 
for  creating  and  organizing  international 
amity,  although  they  have  been  known  and 
repeated  since  the  days  of  Plato's  "Repub- 
lic." What  are  some  of  these  ancient 
principles  to  which  the  war  has  brought  a 
new  dignity? 

The  history  of  social  development  is 
largely  the  history  of  the  acquirement,  as 
private  property,  by  a  few  peoples  and  by 
a  few  individuals  among  those  peoples  of 
most  of  the  tools  and  materials  of  life. 
One  phase  of  history  then  becomes  the 
attempt  of  the  expropriated  to  recover  a 
control  over  the  necessities  of  life,  a  chance 
for  freedom,  and  a  hope  for  happiness. 
What  we  call  the  principles  of  democracy 
and  nationality  is  simply  a  shorthand  sign 
for  this  endeavor.  Its  success  is  marked 
by  the  socialization  of  what  is  private,  by 
the  application  of  the  principle  of  "emi- 
nent domain" — the  substitution  of  the  rule 
of  law,  which  is  only  force  made  imper- 
sonal, for  the  rule  of  force,  which  is  only 
law  taken  by  the  individual  into  his  own 
hands.  Hence,  between  states,  exclusive 
sovereignty  has  invariably  meant  interna- 
tional anarchy;  equalization  of  sovereign- 
ty, international  peace.  As  for  the  peace 
within  the  nation  there  is  the  law,  be- 
fore which  all  men  are  equal,  so  for  the 
peace  between  nations  there  must  be  a  law 
before  which  all  nations  are  equal.  Such 
an  equality  does  not  mean  similarity.  On 
the  contrary,  such  an  equality  means  the 
opportunity  for  each  natural  human  group 
to  liberate,  to  develop,  and  to  perfect  its 


spontaneous  natural  differences  from  its 
fellows.  The  cases  of  the  Irish  in  the 
British  commonwealth  and  of  the  Poles 
under  Prussian  rule  will  aptly  illustrate 
how  these  principles  apply. 

Fifty  years  ago  Ireland  was  a  landlord- 
ridden  country  with  a  terribly  exploited 
and  miserable  agricultural  population.  It 
was  a  population  overtaxed,  underfed,  and 
hunted,  Catholic  in  religion  yet  paying 
tithes  to  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church. 
It  was  without  opportunity  for  decent  edu- 
cation, without  means  or  help  wherewith 
it  could  preserve  and  study  and  develop 
the  Irish  language  and  literature  and  the 
other  contents  of  the  Gaelic  culture.  In 
1869  essential  reform  began.  The  Prot- 
estant Episcopal  Church  was  disestab- 
lished and  disendowed;  the  expropriation 
of  the  landlord  and  the  establishment  of 
the  Irish  peasant  was  begun,  and  the  gov- 
ernment with  its  law  and  its  credit  has 
ever  since  stood  behind  the  latter  against 
the  landlord.  It  initiated  and  is  still  car- 
rying on  a  great  housing  reform;  it  gave 
aid  to  home  industries;  it  made  local 
self-government  universal;  it  created  a 
department  of  agriculture  and  technical 
instruction  for  the  whole  island;  it  estab- 
lished and  endowed  the  Irish  National 
University,  with  its  headquarters  in  Dublin 
and  with  colleges  in  Cork  and  Galway;  it 
made  knowledge  of  the  Irish  language  obli- 
gatory for  entrance.  This  language,  be- 
cause it  was  the  speech  of  the  poor  and  the 
miserable,  with  prosperity  began  to  be 
abandoned  by  the  Irish  in  favor  of  English. 
The  event  follows  the  definite  law  of  imi- 
tation which  governs  such  matters.  The 
law  operates  in  precisely  the  same  way  in 
the  United  States,  where  immigrants  aban- 
don their  mother-tongues  for  that  of 
the  English-speaking  upper  classes.  The 
Irish  politicians  noted  the  process  but  gave 
no  heed  to  it.  When  the  Irish  Renais- 
sance came  and  the  Gaelic  League  was 
organized,  it  was  not  the  politicians  but 
the  British  government  that  endowed  its 
endeavors,  and  endowed  the  teaching  of 


100 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


Irish  in  the  public  schools.  Indeed,  since 
1901  the  government  has  paid  about  $60,- 
000  a  year  from  the  Imperial  funds  for 
these  purposes — twice  what  was  collected 
in  the  same  period  from  voluntary  con- 
tributions in  Ireland  and  the  rest  of  the 
world.  The  result:  four  million  Irish- 
men, mostly  small  farmers,  have  lent  the 
British  government  very  nearly  $250,000,- 
000  since  the  war  broke  out.  The  Irish 
Renaissance  has  added  to  Ireland's  phys- 
ical as  well  as  spiritual  stature.  Home 
Rule  is  here  an  issue  beside  the  point,  and 
no  one  would  pretend  that  the  Irish  prob- 
lem is  solved.  The  significance  of  the  sit- 
uation is  in  the  fact  that  the  establishment 
of  equality  before  the  law  for  the  Irish 
has  liberated  the  Irishman,  given  him  at 
any  rate  the  beginnings  of  prosperity,  and 
made  him  loyal  to  the  British  common- 
wealth and  the  war  to  the  extent  of  almost 
a  quarter  of  a  billion  dollars. 

Now  consider  Prussian  Poland:  the 
Prussian  policy  has  offered  the  Poles  the 
alternative  of  extirpation  or  Prussianiza- 
tion.  For  a  score  of  years  the  Prussian 
government  spent  $5,000,000  anually  try- 
ing to  buy  out  the  Polish  landowners ;  and 
failing  that,  enacted  repressive  laws;  and 
finally,  in  1908,  passed  a  law  providing 
for  the  compulsory  expropriation  of 
Polish  landowners  who  would  not  Prus- 
sianize. Although  the  Treaty  of  Vienna 
definitely  provided  for  religious  and  cul- 
tural freedom  for  the  Poles  that  then 
came  under  Prussian  dominion,  the  use  of 
Polish  at  public  meetings  is  prohibited. 
Since  1873  German  alone  may  be  taught 
in  the  national  schools;  teachers,  under  a 
decree  of  1899,  may  not  speak  Polish  in 
their  own  homes.  Teaching  the  language 
and  possessing  Polish  literature  are  crimes 
punishable  with  imprisonment.  The  Poles 
are  unequal  before  the  law,  and  their  atti- 
tude toward  Prussia  expresses  the  inequal- 
ity. As  Plato  points  out  in  the  first  book 
of  the  "Republic,"  there  must  be  honor 
among  thieves  if  thieves  are  to  make  com- 
mon cause  against  honest  men.  How 
much  the  more  amongst  honest  men  if 
they  are  to  live  in  freedom  and  safety! 
And  that  the  system  of  exclusive  sovereign- 
ties makes  every  nation  think  of  every  other 
nation  as  a  thief,  should  become  clear 


even  after  a  cursory  reading  of  history. 
Only  if  the  common  bases  of  the  com- 
mon life,  only  if  the  world's  highways, 
harbors,  raw  materials,  and  undeveloped 
lands  are  possessed  and  used  in  common, 
only  if  a  violation  of  community  can  be 
swiftly  and  adequately  punished,  can  men 
be  free  for  the  life  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness  appropriate  to  each  accord- 
ing to  his  kind.  In  a  word,  we  require 
no  political  nostrums  to  secure  lasting 
peace.  We  need  only  shift  our  attention, 
and  profit  by  our  own  example. 

How  may  this  may  be  done?  Well, 
turn  to  the  conduct  of  the  war  itself,  par- 
ticularly to  its  failures,  for  answer.  In 
the  past  three  years  there  have  arisen 
occasions  when  complete  military  victory 
might  perhaps  have  been  attained  by  the 
armies  of  Democracy.  Such  victory  is 
indispensable,  and  we  must  go  on  fighting 
until  it  is  won;  we  must  go  on  killing  yet 
more  and  more  of  the  most  hopeful  and 
bravest  of  our  blood,  and  leaving  more 
and  more  of  the  future  in  the  hands  of 
men  too  old  for  preoccupation  with  any- 
thing but  the  past,  in  the  hands  of  back- 
ward-looking men.  Why?  Because,  in 
truth,  though  the  democracies  have  been 
fighting  a  single  enemy,  they  have  not  been 
fighting  a  single  war.  Between  Russia 
and  Rumania,  between  Italy  and  Serbia, 
even  between  France  and  Russia  there 
have  been  conflicts  of  desire.  Each  was 
fighting  first  for  its  own  ends,  then  for  the 
common  end.  Lacking  a  common  end, 
there  could  not  be  a  common  front;  lack- 
ing a  common  front,  there  could  not  be 
final  victory.  So  our  soldiers  paid  and  our 
workers  paid  for  the  illusion  of  exclusive 
sovereignty.  So  they  will  continue  to  pay 
unless  the  precarious  alliance  of  the  democ- 
racies is  turned  into  a  real  one,  into  a  gen- 
uine international  organization.  It  took 
the  defeat  of  Rumania,  the  disintegration 
of  Russia,  the  Italian  debacle  to  teach  us 
this.  And  we  have  still  much  to  learn. 
As  Norman  Angell  has  pointed  out 
again  and  again,  military  victory  is  indis- 
pensable, but  not  sufficient.  Only  the 
mobilization  of  the  public  opinion  of  the 
democracies  in  behalf  of  a  democratic  and 
lasting  peace  can  actually  establish  such  a 
peace.  The  needed  mobilization  requires 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


101 


common  understanding  and  assent  between 
the  democratic  powers,  particularly  be- 
tween the  powers  of  the  West  and  Russia. 
The  President's  message  of  January  8 
recognized  this  necessity  in  clear  and  vig- 
orous terms.  Prostrate  in  a  military  sense 
as  Russia  seems  to  be,  she  is  today  the  one 
saving  and  constructive  factor  in  the  whole 
international  situation. 

To  those  who  have  been  following 
the  political  history  of  Europe  since  the 
German  assault  upon  civilization  began, 
it  must  be  clear  that  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion has  not  merely  overturned  Czardom 
and  its  bureaucracy;  it  has  seriously 
shaken  the  whole  war-breeding  structure 
of  secret  diplomacy  among  the  Allies.  It 
upset  the  arrangements  of  the  misguided 
Paris  Conference;  it  strengthened  liberal- 
ism in  England,  France,  and  Germany; 
the  Bolshevik  publication  of  dynastic  trea- 
ties shamed  into  withdrawal  and  retire- 
ment the  ruling  Tories  who  had  made 
them;  the  Bolshevik  negotiations  with  the 
Central  Powers  have  now  exposed  the 
duplicity  of  the  German  government  and 
have  farther  deepened  the  gulf  between 
the  government  and  the  German  people. 
Lord  Lansdowne's  magnificent  protest  was 
made  possible  by  the  Bolsheviki.  The 
religiously  uncompromising  adherence  to 
the  international  position  by  the  leaders 
of  the  Bolsheviki  has  thrown  the  prepon- 
derance of  influence  at  last  with  the  plain 
people  of  Europe.  Without  it,  the  second 
of  the  great  constructive  formations  of  the 
war,  the  new  British  Labor  Party,  could 
not  have  been  encouraged  to  announce  so 
radical  a  programme ;  without  it  the  state- 
ments of  Lloyd  George  and  President 
Wilson  would  hardly  have  been  forthcom- 
ing. The  Bolsheviki  are  making  the  war 
not  only  a  war  for  democracy,  but  a  war 
at  last  of  democracy  and  by  democracy. 

For  when  the  war  began,  the  Tories 
everywhere  got  into  the  saddle.  They 
were  the  men  of  affairs  and  enterprise, 
accustomed  to  dealing  efficiently  with  large 
matters.  They  controlled,  as  they  still  are 
controlling  in  this  country,  men  and  mate- 
rial to  please  themselves.  The  masses  of 
the  people  were  only  to  feel,  to  pay  taxes, 
and  to  serve  in  army  and  factory.  The 
masses  of  the  people  everywhere  did  so 


willingly  and  happily.  Labor  gave  up  its 
rights,  and  intellect  its  necessary  preroga- 
tive; and  a  heyday  of  profiteering,  tax- 
dodging,  and  bitter-endism  began.  But  the 
people  soon  grew  restive.  England  and 
France  changed  the  incidence  of  taxation; 
their  governments  deferred  more  and 
more  to  the  condition  of  labor,  though  not 
to  its  position.  Liberalism  and  intelli- 
gence were  everywhere  censored  and 
repressed.  Secret  diplomacy  prevailed; 
the  obvious  will  of  the  people  to  a  just 
and  democratic  and  lasting  peace  was 
ignored.  An  abyss  developed  between 
peoples  and  governments,  an  abyss  which 
Lloyd  George's  address  to  the  Labor 
Party  closed  in  England,  but  which  the 
intransigeant  attitude  of  Clemenceau 
widens  in  France.  Governments,  speak- 
ing for  the  future  of  capital,  saw  peace  in 
the  old  terms  of  diplomatic  deceit.  Peo- 
ples, war  weary,  hungry  for  freedom  and 
happiness,  saw  peace  in  the  new  terms  of 
a  commonwealth  of  nations.  Friction  and 
unrest  began  to  show  themselves,  with  one 
terminus  in  the  Rumanian  debacle  and 
another  in  the  Italian  disaster.  Mean- 
while came  the  Russian  revolution  and  the 
fear  of  it  and  revulsion  against  it  by  the 
Tories,  embattled  everywhere  but  in  the 
trenches,  where  Toryism  cannot  survive. 
Accusations,  condemnations  —  everything 
that  the  interests  who  saw  their  preroga- 
tives threatened  thereby  could  hurl,  was 
hurled  against  the  revolution.  Mean- 
while events  in  Russia  took  their  inevitable 
course.  Two  provisional  governments 
that  failed  to  execute  the  deep-lying  will 
of  the  Russian  people  for  a  just,  demo- 
cratic and  lasting  peace  disintegrated  and 
disappeared  in  much  smoke  and  some 
blood.  The  history  of  the  present  Bol- 
shevik administration  merits  all  that  Pres- 
ident Wilson  said  of  it,  and  much  more: 
it  is  the  one  fertilizing  force  that  through- 
out Europe  is  making  governments 
answerable  to  peoples.  By  its  mere  being 
it  is  forcing  an  extension  of  the  scope  of 
democracy  not  less  in  England  than  in 
Rumania  and  Austria  and  Germany. 

The  one  country  where  it  has  not  this 
effect  is  the  United  States.  The  reasons 
are  not  too  ambiguous.  President  Wilson 
at  least — I  will  not  say  our  government — 


102 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


has  an  international  vision  coincident  with 
the  Russians'.  The  very  causes  that 
brought  us  into  the  war  throw  together 
the  hopes  of  the  two  democracies.  And 
so  the  government  of  the  United  States 
has  from  the  beginning  stood  by  the  new 
Russia  with  men,  material,  and  opinion; 
and  it  has  in  this  carried  out  the  will  of 
the  American  people.  But  the  vocal  class 
of  our  country,  the  class  that  controls  the 
press,  that  is  amassing  fortunes  because  of 
the  war,  that  resists  equitable  taxation 
such  as  our  allies  have  ordained,  that  is 
administratively  in  the  saddle,  and  that 
demands  the  (to  it)  profitable  establish- 
ment of  permanent  and  universal  military 
service — this  class  has  opposed  that  coop- 
eration. It  has  done  all  it  could,  by 
denunciation  and  what  not,  to  destroy  the 
understanding,  precarious  at  best,  between 
Russia  and  the  United  States.  So  has  it 
given  aid  and  comfort  to  the  enemy.  It 
has  strengthened  the  morale  of  the  enemy 
by  creating  materials  that  the  enemy  gov- 
ernment could  use  in  urging  the  German 
people  to  go  on  fighting  in  "self-defence." 
It  has  used  patriotism  as  a  cloak  for  par- 
tisanship, and  national  loyalty  for  local 
advantage.  It  has  been  loud  in  denounc- 
ing freedom  of  speech  and  of  the  press. 
In  Russia  this  class,  the  Junker  and  ruling 
class,  has  been  heard  and  discussed  far 
more  than  any  other  American  class.  To 
the  Russian  democracy  they  are  America, 
and  until  the  democracy  of  America 
makes  itself  heard  as  the  democracy  of 
England  has  made  itself  heard  they  will 
remain  America.  Today  it  is  not  believed 
in  Russia  that  President  Wilson  will  be 
able  to  carry  out  that  wise  programme  of 
war  aims,  restated  upon  the  demand  of  the 
democracy  of  Russia.  Only  the  action  of 
American  labor,  in  common  with  all  our 
country's  other  liberal  forces,  discussing 
and  endorsing  these  aims,  can  awaken  that 
belief.  Only  the  action  of  labor,  in  com- 
mon with  all  our  country's  other  liberal 
forces,  in  demanding  and  helping  to  create 
an  international  machinery,  can  make  that 
belief  secure.  Such  action  will  render  dem- 
ocratic and  lasting  peace  inevitable.  It  will 
enable  the  democratic  allies  to  reap  the 
full  benefit  of  military  victory  because  it 
will  detach  the  German  people  from  the 


German  government.  It  is  an  action  that 
must  be  taken  at  once,  in  common  with  the 
workingmen  of  England,  France,  Italy, 
and  Russia.  It  means  getting  efficiently 
behind  our  President  at  home  and  holding 
up  the  hands  of  our  soldiers  abroad. 

But  how  is  such  action  to  be  taken? 
What  is  to  be  asked  for  and  how  is  it  to 
be  obtained?  All  the  peace  conferences 
that  have  ever  been,  have  been  held  by 
diplomats  under  appointment  and  behind 
closed  doors.  How  can  the  forthcoming 
conference  be  held  otherwise?  There  is 
no  precedent. 

But  there  is  a  precedent,  and  a  prece- 
dent that  is  absolute  in  similarity.  It  is 
to  be  found  in  the  history  of  our  own 
country.  We  do  not  regard  it  as  a  prece- 
dent, because  we  have  come  to  think  of  the 
United  States  of  America  as  one  nation. 
But  between  1776  and  1787  the  thirteen 
independent  and  sovereign  states  that 
underwent  the  American  Revolution  were 
in  precisely  the  same  position  and  con- 
fronted precisely  the  same  problems,  in 
principle,  as  the  present  states  and  gov- 
ernments of  the  world.  They  won 
through  to  a  combination  of  interstate 
unity  with  state  sovereignty  from  which 
we  benefit  today.  There  is  far  less  reason 
why  the  peoples  and  states  concerned  in 
the  present  war  should  not  win  through, 
and  by  methods  analogous  or  the  same,  to 
an  analogous  end.  H  M  KALLEN. 


Reproof 

E'en  as  the  mole  blinks  at  the  sun  and  makes 
In  the  dank  earth  his  starless  heaven,  black 
And  furrowed  with  a  hundred  roots  that  track 
Out  downward  ways  and  outward,  and  mistakes 
The   gleamless   paths    for   light,    and    shrewdly 

breaks 

New  burrows  in  his  endless  realm,  and  back 
And  forth  disports  himself  with  never  lack 
Of  proud  to-do;  so  dost  thou  blink  the  aches 

And  ecstasies  of  living  in  the  light 

Of    sorrowing    and    gladsome    day,    thou   weak 

Vainglorious  soul  of  me,  and  in  a  night 

Of  endless,  brooding  self-pursuit  dost  seek 

To  build  thyself  a  heaven  dead  to  sight? 

And  can  to  thee  no  stranger's  music  speak? 

EDWARD  SAPIR. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


103 


Our  London  Letter 


(Special  Correspondence  of  THE  DIAL.) 
The  war  poets  are  always  with  us;  and  as  if 
there  were  not  enough  of  them  appearing  every 
day,  Mr.  E.  B.  Osborn  has  made  a  selection  of 
pieces  which  have  already  been  published  and 
has  called  the  volume  "The  Muse  in  Arms." 
Mr.  Osborn  is  a  member  of  the  staff  of  the 
"Morning  Post,"  which  is  almost  the  only  paper 
in  England  which  has  not  paid  even  lip-service 
to  the  creed  that  the  winning  of  the  war  stands 
above  our  ante-bellum  internal  quarrels.  But  in 
spite  of  this  it  is  perhaps  the  most  vociferous  and 
blood-thirsty  of  all  the  organs  which  demand  a 
fight  to  the  finish,  and  Mr.  Osborn  himself  re- 
joices in  a  sort  of  academic  blood-lust  which  is 
terrifying  to  witness.  Even  our  determined  jus- 
qu 'auboutistes — I  am  one  of  them — cannot  bring 
themselves  to  believe  that  war  is  a  thing  in  itself 
good  or  to  do  anything  but  deplore  the  necessity 
under  which  we  find  ourselves  of  continuing  this 
riot  of  misery  and  pain.  But  from  the  begin- 
ning Mr.  Osborn  has  taken  the  attitude  that 
slaughter  is  the  queen  of  outdoor  pastimes  and 
has  written  about  it  very  much  in  the  spirit  of 
a  football  reporter  who  has  at  last  found  some- 
thing worthy  of  his  most  frenzied  paragraphs. 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  caricatured  him  mercilessly  in 
"Boon,"  drawing  him  in  several  pictures  as  the 
embodiment  of  the  martial  spirit.  One  of  them 
that  I  remember  was  a  spirited  composition  enti- 
tled "Mr.  Osborn,  in  a  moment  of  virile  indig- 
nation, swiping  St.  Francis  of  Assisi  one  with  a 
club."  But  Mr.  Osborn  survived  ridicule  that 
would  have  oppressed  a  man  whose  thirst  for 
blood  was  less  fervent,  and  the  great  "Morning 
Post"  building  in  the  Strand  still  echoes  daily 
with  his  calls  for  carnage. 

But,  oddly  enough,  this  quaint  aberration  has 
done  nothing  to  rob  him  of  a  taste  in  literature 
singularly  fine  and  exact.  His  newspaper  arti- 
cles have  always  been  distinguished  by  a  curious 
talent  for  apt  and  unhackneyed  quotation,  and 
his  judgment  and  skill  have  enabled  him  to  make 
a  very  presentable  volume  out  of  a  highly  miscel- 
laneous mass  of  material.  He  has  not  given  each 
of  his  poets  in  a  lump  but  has  divided  his  book 
into  sections  according  to  subject  and  has  arrayed 
the  pieces  really  "in  the  most  poetically  effective 
order,"  as  Palgrave  called  it.  It  cannot  be  said 
that  the  war  has  yet  produced  much  which  could 
startle  any  critic  who  tested  it  by  the  highest 


standards  of  English  literature,  but  it  has  pro- 
duced a  dozen  or  more  fine  pieces  and  a  mass  of 
stuff  the  average  level  of  which  is  really  much 
higher  than  we  had  any  right  to  expect.  All  the 
established  favorites  are  here,  set  against  a  back- 
ground of  lesser  work  which  Mr.  Osborn  has 
disposed  so  cunningly  as  to  draw  from  it  the 
utmost  effect  of  which  it  is  capable.  Indeed  the 
only  offense  committed  against  literary  standards 
is  that  the  book  is  so  well  edited  as  to  make  a 
great  many  poems  seem  better  poetry  than  they 
actually  are.  The  chief  weakness  revealed  is  one 
that  can  be  detected  not  only  in  our  own  war- 
poetry  but  also  in  that  of  previous  ages ;  namely,  a 
certain  lack  of  concreteness.  Love-poets  write, 
thank  Heaven!  not  only  about  Love  but  also 
about  love-affairs.  War-poets  prefer  to  confine 
themselves  to  War,  and  the  best  of  them  seem 
unable  to  come  to  grips  with  the  things  that  hap- 
pen in  war.  This  has  been  due  in  the  past 
largely  to  the  fact  that  poets  have  not  often  been 
fighters  and,  like  wise  men,  have  dealt  very  gin- 
gerly with  affairs  of  which  they  had  no  first- 
hand knowledge.  Most  of  the  men  writing  to- 
day, though  they  have  the  requisite  first-hand 
knowledge,  are  imitative  souls  and  cannot  get 
past  the  only  models  available  to  them.  But  the 
few  who  are  real  poets  are  getting  closer  to  the 
facts,  and  we  shall  have  the  full  fruit  of  their 
experience  when  the  war  is  over.  Meanwhile 
Mr.  Osborn's  anthology  provides  an  excellent 
interim  report  from  the  poets  upon  the  matter, 
and  at  the  same  time  it  owes  much  more  to  its 
editor  than  anthologies  usually  do.  Were  Mr. 
Osborn  to  encounter  my  timid  attempt  at  prais- 
ing him,  he  would  no  doubt  repudiate  it  and  call 
me — I  am  not  a  constant  reader  of  the  "Morn- 
ing Post"  and  so  I  am  not  aware  of  the  present 
state  of  its  vocabulary  of  abuse,  but  I  think  he 
would  call  me  either  a  Bolshevik  or  a  Bolo.  But 
he  would  be  wrong.  And  I  am  inclined  to 
believe  that  if  he  could  read  the  thoughts  of 
some  of  his  fighting  contributors  he  would  call 
them  Bolsheviki  and  Bolos  also,  and  be  equally 
wrong. 

One  at  least  among  his  contributors  has  pub- 
lished a  volume  which  deserves  to  be  better 
known  than  it  can  be  by  a  few  extracts  in  an 
anthology.  Mr.  Robert  Graves  is  a  captain  in 
the  Welsh  Fusiliers.  He  is  also  a  son  of  Mr. 
Alfred  Perceval  Graves,  who  wrote  "Father 
O'Flynn"  and  other  well-known  pieces.  These 
two  influences,  presumably,  have  bred  between 
them  an  odd  mongrel  of  a  book  called  "Fairies 


104 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


and  Fusiliers,"  which — it  is  the  kind  of  book 
that  calls  for  a  personal  recommendation — has 
given  me  huge  and  undiluted  pleasure.  Mr. 
Graves  has  a  pleasant  phantasy,  a  strong,  whim- 
sical sense  of  humor,  an  equally  strong  vein  of 
poetry,  and  a  good  style;  and  he  has  just  man- 
aged, as  the  mythical  sergeant  advised  his  men, 
not  to  take  this  war  too  seriously.  He  is  gay 
without  affectation  and  can  be  proud  without 
pomposity  or  false  sentiment,  as  in  this  first  stanza 
from  "To  Lucasta  on  Going  to  the  Wars — for 
the  Fourth  Time": 

It  doesn't  matter  what's  the  cause, 

What  wrong  they  say  we're  righting, 
A  curse  for  treaties,  bonds,   and  laws, 

When  we're  to  do  the  righting! 
And  since  we  lads  are  proud  and  true, 

What  else  remains  to  do? 
Lucasta,  when  to  France  your  man 
Returns  his  fourth  time,  hating  war, 
Yet  laughs  as  calmly  as  he  can 
And  flings  an  oath,  but  says  no  more, 
That  is  not  courage,  that's  not  fear — 
Lucasta,  he's  a  Fusilier 

And  his  pride  sends  him  here. 
The  easiness  of  the  piece  substantiates  its  swag- 
ger, and  a  certain  exactitude  in  the  style  justi- 
fies the  presumption  implied  in  using  the  name 
Lucasta.  This  poem  is  a  genuine  and  individual 
attempt  at  expressing  a  genuine  and  individual 
emotion.  And  in  some  way  the  poet  has  con- 
trived to  get  far  enough  away  from  his  trench 
experiences  to  make  vivid  pictures  of  them  in  a 
few  words,  as: 

Here  by  a  snowbound  river 
In  scrapen  holes  we   shiver, 
And  like  old  bitterns  we 
Boom  to  you  plaintively. 

This  is  not  quite  what  we  expected  our  best 
war-poetry  would  be  when  we  should  get  it  at 
last;  but  after  all  what  right  have  we,  in  a  war 
of  surprises,  to  predict  exactly  what  kind  of  war- 
poetry  it  will  produce?  Enough  that  Mr.  Graves 
has  genius  and  that  he  writes  neither  haughtily 
about  War  nor  vulgarly  on  subjects  suitable  for 
recitation,  but  sincerely  and  humanly  about  what 
he  himself  has  felt. 

Mr.  Graves  is  included  with  other  new  poets 
in  the  new  volume  of  "Georgian  Poetry"  which 
has  just  appeared  for  1916-7.  Among  the  other 
new  men  are  Mr.  Robert  Nichols,  whom  I  have 
mentioned  in  a  previous  letter,  and  Mr.  Siegfried 
Sassoon.  Both  of  these  are  soldiers  and  owe,  I 
think,  some  of  their  popularity  to  the  fact;  and 
both  of  them  show  promise  and  should  improve 
considerably  when  they  have  forgotten  the  war. 
Neither  of  them  can  render  military  experience 
as  can  Mr.  Graves.  "Georgian  Poetry,"  of 


course,  is  a  periodical  publication,  purporting  to 
gather  up  every  couple  of  years  or  so  the  best 
verse  which  has  been  produced.  Such  a  venture 
is  obviously  open  to  criticisms,  which  are,  as  obvi- 
ously, not  sufficiently  profitable  to  be  worth  the 
trouble  of  making.  I  will  content  myself  there- 
fore with  random  observations,  such  as  that  it 
includes  Mr.  J.  C.  Squire's  magnificent  poem 
"The  Lily  of  Malud"  and  an  outwardly  less 
impressive  but  deeper  piece  by  him  called  "The 
House."  There  are  also  six  very  remarkable 
pieces  by  Mr.  W.  J.  Turner.  Eighteen  poets  in 
all  are  included ;  but  of  the  rest  I  will  only  men- 
tion Mr.  Drinkwater,  and  him  only  because, 
having  established  for  himself  a  factitious  popu- 
larity in  England,  he  will  probably  soon  make  an 
attempt  on  the  American  public.  I  can  see  in  his 
work  only  a  sort  of  essence  of  bad  poetry,  all  the 
poetical  common-places  of  all  time  embodied  in 
a  language  of  the  utmost  splendor,  the  meaning 
of  which  is  very  imperfectly  understood  by  the 
author.  I  cannot  see,  for  example,  anything  but 
sheer  pretence  in  this: 

Lord  Rameses  of  Egypt  sighed 
Because  a  summer  evening  passed ; 

And  little  Ariadne  cried 

That  summer  fancy  fell  at  last 

To  dust;   and  young  Verona  died 
When  beauty's  hour  was  overcast. 

Theirs  was  the  bitterness  we  know 
Because  the   clouds   of  hawthorn   keep 

So  short  a  state,  and  kisses  go 
To  tombs  unfathomably  deep, 

While  Rameses  and  Romeo 
And  little  Ariadne  sleep. 

It  seems  to  me  to  be  nothing  more  than  the 
merest  manipulation  of  the  counters  of  poetry,  an 
appeal  to  facile  emotion,  what  in  short  is  called 
by  low-down  newspaper  reporters  a  "clutch-at- 
the-heart-strings  story."  I  would  not  thus  go  out 
of  my  way  to  attack  Mr.  Drinkwater  if  he  had 
not  made  a  reputation ;  Heaven  knows  there  are 
too  many  bad  poets  for  even  the  most  zealous  of 
critics  to  be  always  weeping  over  them.  But  I 
hereby  solemnly  warn  the  American  public 
against  Mr.  Drinkwater's  verse.  I  may  be 
wrong.  It  may  be  that,  instead  of  showing  too 
patently  the  effects  of  a  study  of  Swinburne, 
Shelley,  and  Milton  (with  others),  he  is  the 
Swinburne,  Shelley,  and  Milton  (with  others) 
of  our  time,  all  in  one.  But  I  think  not. 

It  would  have  been  more  profitable  perhaps 
to  have  left  myself  space  to  say  something  about 
Mr.  Hardy's  new  "Moments  of  Vision"  instead 
of  attacking  a  man  who  has  never  done  me  any 
harm — for,  after  all,  I  am  under  no  compulsion 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


105 


to  read  Mr.  Drinkwater's  voluminous  and  rap- 
idly increasing  works.  But,  on  the  whole,  I 
think  I  have  done  right.  Mr.  Hardy's  book  is  a 
glorious  collection  of  over  one  hundred  and  fifty 
new  poems,  not  one  of  which  is  not  thoroughly 
characteristic,  none  of  which  are  without  merit, 
and  a  large  proportion  of  which  are  in  his  very 
best  manner.  But  there  is  nothing  new  to  say 
about  Mr.  Hardy.  As  is  only  natural,  he  shows 
no  special  change  or  development.  He  continues 
to  perform  miracles  with  a  style  which  would  at 
once  sink  any  other  poet  to  the  bottom;  and  he 
sends  the  reader  away  in  a  state  of  mind  in 
which  only  delight  at  the  power  of  his  poetry 
mitigates  the  profound  gloom  it  induces. 

EDWARD  SHANKS. 
London,  January  15,  iQi8. 


Thistles  and  Grapes   in    "Professor 
Sherman's  Garden 

ON   CONTEMPORARY   LITERATURE.     By   Stuart   P. 
Sherman.     (Holt;  $1.50.) 

To  say  that  Professor  Sherman's  book  is  a 
reprint  of  essays  from  "The  Nation"  would  not 
give  an  adequate  description  of  it.  For  the  es- 
says have  been  retouched,  have  been  adjusted  to 
one  another  as  component  parts  of  a  general 
scheme,  and  have  been  provided  with  an  intro- 
duction of  some  explicitness,  as  well  as  with  a 
Shakespearean  epilogue  to  drive  the  thesis  home. 
In  addition  to  all  these  points,  which  disclose 
themselves  gradually,  the  reader  is  met  at  the 
start  with  a  motto  from  Matthew  Arnold  on  the 
title-page  and  a  dedication  to  Paul  Elmer  More. 
These  last  arouse  expectations — or  apprehensions. 

Arnold's  line  says:  "Man  must  begin,  know 
this,  where  nature  ends."  Nature,  one  soon 
comes  to  surmise,  means  that  body  of  "natural 
men"  who  are  more  intent  on  indulgence  in  in- 
dividual latitude  than  on  a  due  deference  to  an 
established  social  organization.  More  specifically, 
and  for  the  purposes  of  this  book,  the  "natural- 
ist" is  the  writer  who  gives  the  natural  man 
and  his  lawless  ways  support  and  countenance, 
and  who  shows  but  a  light  regard,  or  none,  for 
the  conventional  framework  of  things  as  they 
have  come  to  be. 

Possibly  the  blackest  of  Mr.  Sherman's  betes 
noires — though  not  the  most  important — is  The- 
odore Dreiser,  as  he  shows  himself  in  his  five 
notorious  novels.  Those  who  feel  that  Mr. 


Dreiser's  work  is  essentially  a  complete  nega- 
tion of  all  artistry  will  think  that  he  has  re- 
ceived too  much  attention — has  drawn  too  much 
space  too  emphatically  employed.  But  the  critic 
is  determined  to  drive  his  point  home.  He  will 
make  the  distinction  between  a  "naturalist"  and 
a  "realist."  The  realistic  novel,  he  maintains, 
is  a  representation  based  on  a  theory  of  human 
conduct,  whereas  a  naturalistic  novel  is  a  repre- 
sentation based  on  a  theory  of  animal  behavior. 
Thus  is  Dreiser  sealed  of  the  tribe  of  Zola  and 
branded  as  a  follower  of  a  discredited  theory  of 
fiction. 

If  Theodore  Dreiser  is  the  blackest  of  Pro- 
fessor Sherman's  beasts,  George  Moore  is  the 
"highest" — the  most  odoriferous.  Moore,  it  is 
declared,  denies  the  notion  of  a  rational  self- 
determination,  of  an  intelligible  object  guiding  a 
man  to  ideal  ends:  man  is  but  the  victim  of  the 
same  unconscious  energy  that  animates  the  beasts 
of  the  field.  But  to  maintain  the  concurrence  of 
nature  in  the  moral  ends  of  man  is  impossible. 
The  fork  in  the  road  awaits  us:  either  "we  must 
turn  to  the  right  with  reason  to  guide  us  into 
the  walled  and  steepled  cities  and  the  civil  life 
of  our  kind,  or  turn  to  the  left  and  trust  to 
instinct."  In  that  case,  there  lies  ahead  the  land 
whose  chief  offer  is  but  the  flush  and  fading  of 
sensual  excitement.  "When  a  man  has  shaken 
off  the  bonds  that  united  him  with  civil  society, 
the  only  confession  that  he  can  make  of  sig- 
nificance to  civil  readers  is  that  such  emancipa- 
tion is  exile." 

But,  after  all,  Mr.  Sherman's  favorite  bete 
noire  appears  to  be  H.  G.  Wells.  A  recent 
American  critic  has  declared  that  Wells  will  be 
thought  to  have  played  in  his  own  time  a  part 
much  like  that  played  by  Matthew  Arnold  in  his: 
"Wells,  on  Education,  on  Criticism,  on  Politics, 
.  .  .  even  on  Religion,  continues  the  propa- 
ganda of  Arnold."  This,  Mr.  Sherman  indig- 
nantly and  with  full  circumstantiality  denies;  he 
finds,  with  a  circumstantiality  as  full,  the  earlier 
Wells  not  in  Arnold  but  in  Shelley.  This  serv- 
ice, he  thinks,  should  be  gratefully  received  by 
Wells  and  his  followers:  "for  I  have  denied  him 
the  rank  of  a  Victorian  critic  only  that  I  might 
elevate  him  to  the  rank  of  a  Georgian  angel." 

An  analogue  equally  acute  and  startling 
"places"  John  M.  Synge.  Synge's  years  in  Paris 
left  their  mark.  He  became  steeped  in  Anatole 
France:  "the  two  men  are  absolutely  at  one  in 
their  aloof,  pyrrhonic  irony  and  their  homeless 
laughter — the  laughter  of  men  who  have  wan- 


106 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


dered  all  the  highways  of  the  world  and  have 
found  no  abiding  city."  Synge,  among  the  Aran 
Islands,  was  as  Hearn  in  Japan  or  as  Loti  in 
Polynesia:  "he  wished  to  escape  into  a  per- 
fectly strange  and  virgin  environment" ;  and  "the 
drift  of  all  his  work  is  to  emphasize  the  eternal 
hostility  between  a  harsh  and  repugnant  world 
of  facts  controlled  by  law,  and  the  inviting  realm 
of  lawless  imagination." 

Well,  all  these  items  are  on  one  side  of  the 
ledger.  Let  us  look  a  little  on  the  other.  Come, 
here  are  Arnold  Bennett  and  Mark  Twain. 
Yes,  and  Shakespeare. 

Henry  James,  it  will  be  recalled,  gave  due 
recognition  to  Bennett's  prodigious  accumulation 
of  facts,  but  asked,  in  effect,  "Where  does  it  all 
get  you?"  Mr.  Sherman  gives  the  answer.  He 
quotes  Bennett's  own  words:  "The  full  beauty 
of  an  activity  is  never  brought  out  until  it  is 
subjected  to  discipline  and  strict  ordering."  This 
represents,  says  Mr.  Sherman,  the  views  of  a 
man  who  has  taken  his  stand  against  Wells's 
Utopia  on  the  one  hand  and  Dreiser's  jungle  on 
the  other.  Such  views,  as  old  as  civilized  so- 
ciety, have  the  conservative  complexion  of  all  tra- 
ditional and  enduring  things.  The  line  of  prog- 
ress in  human  society  cannot  possibly  lead  "back 
to  nature" — society  being  in  great  part  an  or- 
ganized opposition  to  nature.  The  promptings 
and  inclinations  of  the  natural  man — the  man 
detached  from  social  relations — are  not  to  be  ap- 
proved and  encouraged.  No  novelist  can  quite 
afford  to  treat  a  small  detached  group  "in  the 
round."  Socialized  man  cries  for  relationships 
and  background.  Nothing  less  praiseworthy  than 
amorous  wantonings  in  an  ethical  vacuum — or, 
what  is  just  as  bad  for  the  present  purpose,  a 
social  vacuum.  That  way  D'Annunzio  lies.  A 
novelist  who  paints  men  in  preference  to  tigers, 
supermen,  or  scientific  angels,  justly  says  our 
author,  has  interestingly  taken  sides.  His  pref- 
erence is  indeed  "an  entirely  discussible  'criticism 
of  life.'  " 

The  essay  on  "The  Democracy  of  Mark 
Twain"  contributes  less  to  the  cause.  I  find  it 
perfunctory  and  pumped-up.  I  don't  blame  the 
writer.  If  I  were  doing  an  essay  on  Mark 
Twain,  I  should  be  even  more  perfunctory  and 
pumped-up.  Mr.  Sherman  seems  to  feel  it  ap- 
propriate that  he,  a  highly  literate  inhabitant  of 
the  Mississippi  Valley,  should  show  himself  ap- 
preciative and  sympathetic  toward  one  of  that 
valley's  major  literary  lights.  But  he  doesn't 
quite  bring  it  off.  He  is  too  self-disciplined,  too 


refined,  too  fastidious.  I  know  the  type,  and  like 
it.  Let  us  pass  on  to  Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare  is  present  because  our  author  finds 
him  the  most  interesting  and  suggestive  of  living 
writers.  His  presence  helps  one  to  distinguish  the 
value  of  his  competitors.  His  humanism  serves 
as  a  measure  of  the  degrees  of  their  naturalism. 
Banish  the  current  notion  that  Shakespeare  was 
but  a  neutral,  unmoral,  unconscious  creative 
force.  On  the  contrary :  he  knew  immensely  well 
what  he  was  about.  Though  he  ranged  through 
various  planes,  he  "dwelt  habitually  in  that 
cleared  and  settled  and  spacious  region  of  con- 
sciousness in  which  a  man's  thinking  is  right  and 
his  feelings  are  sure,  in  which  the  elementary 
human  values  are  fixed,  in  which  truth  and  good- 
ness and  beauty  remain  the  same  from  age  to 
age." 

All  these  differing  names  by  no  means  exhaust 
the  items  found  in  Mr.  Sherman's  ledger.  Vary- 
ing testimonies  in  addition  are  wrung  from 
George  Meredith,  Henry  James,  and  even  from 
that  "complacent  tory,"  Alfred  Austin.  But  we 
know  by  this  time  about  where  we  stand.  We 
are  asking  for  a  definite  social  order,  and  we  re- 
quire that  man  be  responsibly  exhibited  in  re- 
sponsible relations  to  that  order.  But  what  are 
that  order's  characteristics?  The  fixed,  the  static. 
We  are  in  the  qualified  paradise  of  the  middle- 
aged  conservative.  The  young  man  of  the  new 
generation  and  the  young-spirited  genius  of  the 
earlier  generation  must  not  bumptiously,  defi- 
antly, deliriously  presume  to  ask  for  change. 
This  order  is,  in  perhaps  too  great  a  degree,  one 
in  which  an  exceptional  Middle-Westerner  has 
been  found  worthy  to  write  for  "The  Nation" 
and  now  enjoys  the  privilege  of  dedicating  his 
volume  to  its  former  editor.  It  is  an  acceptable 
order,  of  course,  but  one  in  which  even  the  best 
of  us  does  well  to  mind  his  p's  and  q's.  This  is 
all  just  a  bit  of  a  pity.  For  Mr.  Sherman  really 
offers  us  many  acute  and  many  weighty  pages; 
there  is  a  subterranean  stream  of  humor  from 
whose  half-hidden  courses  one  may  occasionally 
sip  a  gratefully  saline  draught;  and  his  intro- 
duction, which  is  really  the  essence  of  the  book, 
begins  on  a  charming,  captivating  note,  and  rises 
toward  the  end,  where  the  war  enters,  to  a  tone 
of  noble  gravity.  Yet  one  finds  a  little  too  much 
deference,  however  cloaked,  for  our  farther  East, 
and  an  unwillingness  to  give  recognition  to  the 
fact  that  this  spinning  world  must  change. 

HENRY  B.  FULLER. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


107 


A  Pilgrim  Interprets  the  Promised 
Land 


AN  AMERICAN  IN  THE  MAKING.    The  Life  Story 
of  an  Immigrant.    By  M.  E.  Ravage.     (Harper; 

$1.40.) 

In  my  Bahama  picture  gallery  I  have  a  pic- 
ture of  a  walk  along  the  flat  shore  of  Andros, 
now  on  a  curving  beach,  now  on  a  rough-cobbled, 
shrub-bordered  path — a  walk  where  neither  coral 
sands  nor  cocoanut  trees  nor  translucent  seas 
were  as  usual  first  claimants  on  attention;  but 
in  their  stead  a  retinue  of  barefoot  little  girls, 
no  longer  shy  and  dumbly  curious,  but  full  of 
questions  about  the  world  outside  or  of  chat- 
ter about  that  notorious  island  pair,  B'o  Rabby 
and  B'o  Boukee,  in  whom  the  stranger  from  New 
York  had  shown  such  unexpected  interest.  On 
this  occasion,  however,  it  was  the  questions 
rather  than  the  folklore  that  appealed  to  me. 
"They  say  you  can  go  in  a  store  in  New  York 
and  get  everything  you  want;  is  that  so?"  "Is 
it  true  houses  in  New  York  are  ten  story  high?" 
It  was  a  fairy  land  they  wanted  to  hear  about. 
As  we  neared  the  settlement  where  lived  the 
old  man  who  told  so  well  the  "ol'  storee,"  I 
could  not  forbear  adding  to  the  legend  of  New 
York  that  after  all  there  were  no  beaches  there 
to  run  on,  no  seas  to  swim  in,  no  piles  of  pink 
conchs,  but  little  sunshine  and  much  cold.  But 
in  this  supplement  the  children  were  not  in- 
terested. 

They  were  as  little  interested  as  I  find  certain 
New  York  friends  in  accounts  of  life  or  culture 
outside  of  New  York.  Some  years  ago  I  had 
a  "revelation"  of  New  Mexico — of  its  mesas 
and  skies,  of  its  Indians  and  ranchers — and 
returning  home  I  tried  to  share  the  revelation; 
but  I  soon  saw  it  was  impossible  to  give  the 
friend  who  slept  between  linen  and  silk,  and  who 
ate  a  five  course  dinner  served  by  Englishmen, 
any  desire  to  sleep  between  blankets  on  a  roof 
or  eat  from  a  common  bowl  off  an  earthen  floor, 
even  were  she  to  wake  to  glorious  sunrises  or 
to  find  sitting  next  to  her  hospitable  members 
of  a  race  whose  culture  allured  to  endless  study. 

Such  indifference  of  one  culture  to  another 
as  New  York  has  of  New  Mexico,  or  such  mis- 
understanding as  Andros  Island  has  of  Manhat- 
tan Island,  is  described  with  marvelous  skill 
and  charm  in  "An  American  in  the  Making." 
For  the  townspeople  of  Vaslui,  Rumania,  the 
New  York  legend  is  initiated  by  the  return  of  a 
townsman  bringing  with  him  such  impressive 


presents  as  a  safety  razor,  a  fountain  pen,  and  a 
music  box.  From  an  American  millionaire  the 
unwitting  ex-Rumanian  is  elevated  in  popular 
fancy  into  a  prefect,  a  minister,  and  at  last,  that 
he  may  live  up  to  the  picture,  by  his  own  admis- 
sion, into  an  American  Ambassador.  Then  with 
fervor  indeed  he  sets  in  to  preach  the  gospel  of 
New  York,  pointing  out  in  the  advertisements 
in  the  Yiddish  papers  he  has  with  him  the  choice 
positions  offered  to  all,  even  to  girls  in  that  amaz- 
ing land  where  girls  are  not  a  burden.  In  New 
York  is  one  not  paid  even  for  voting?  There 
were  other  reports:  "that  in  New  York  the  rail- 
ways ran  over  the  roofs  of  houses;  that  the 
dwellings  were  so  large  that  one  of  them  was 
sufficient  to  house  an  entire  town  in  Rumania; 
that  all  the  food  was  sold  in  sealed  metal  pack- 
ages ;  that  the  water  came  up  into  people's  homes 
without  having  to  be  carried;  and  that  no  one, 
not  even  a  shoemaker,  went  to  the  temple  on 
Saturdays  without  wearing  a  stovepipe  hat."  In- 
flamed by  such  lore,  the  America  fever  spreads 
and  in  the  year  1900  a  national  exodus  across 
seas  begins.  The  propertied  classes  are  the  first 
to  go,  selling  houses  and  farms  and  forest-hold- 
ings, and  giving  away  their  personal  goods  in 
such  quantities  that  trade  comes  to  a  standstill. 
For  the  poorer  sort  the  Walking  Movement  de- 
velops, a  phenomenon  curiously  reminiscent  of 
the  Children's  Crusade. 

As  a  belated  member  of  one  of  these  pilgrim 
groups  our  autobiographer  himself  starts  forth, 
leaving  home  with  two  gold  napoleons  sewed 
into  his  waistcoat  and  in  his  bag  the  gold-clasped 
prayer-book  given  his  mother  by  his  father  at 
betrothal.  When  he  has  arrived  in  New  York 
and  the  East  Side,  his  spirit  of  high  adventure 
becomes  an  acute  sense  of  depression,  broken 
only  by  bewilderment  over  the  life  he  sees  his 
own  people  leading.  He  sees  them  eating  cake 
for  breakfast,  and  meat  twice  a  day,  not  to  speak 
°f  eggplant  in  midwinter  and  cauliflower,  a  rar- 
ity at  home  at  any  season.  They  even  drink 
beer  in  their  houses.  To  go  to  market  his  kins- 
woman wears  the  taffeta  dress  she  had  been  mar- 
ried in.  To  clean  her  kitchen  she  uses  soap  too 
good  at  home  to  wash  clothes  with,  and  this 
kitchen  and  the  other  rooms  are  located  on  the 
third  floor,  whereas  at  Vaslui  only  the  rich  lived 
upstairs,  and  only  one  flight  up  at  that.  And 
yet  in  this  kitchen  his  kinswoman  and  her  baby 
would  sleep  at  night  on  the  washtubs,  and  the 
parlor  sofa  became  a  bed  for  four  boarders,  with 
others  sleeping  on  the  floor.  The  air  was  fetid 
and  the  elevated  road  clattered  by  the  sealed  up 


108 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


windows.  And  at  home  was  it  not  only  the  very 
lowest  people  who  kept  boarders?  As  for  the 
other  shifts  to  make  money  the  newcomer  sees 
his  townspeople  put  to — 

Here  was  Jonah  Gershon,  who  had  been  the  chair- 
man of  the  hospital  committee  in  Vaslui  and  a  prom- 
inent grain-merchant.  He  was  dispensing  soda-water 
and  selling  lollypops  on  the  corner  of  Essex  Street. 
This  was  Shloma  Lobel,  a  descendant  of  rabbis  and 
himself  a  learned  scholar.  In  America  he  had  at- 
tained to  a  basket  of  shoe-strings  and  matches  and 
candles.  I  myself  recognized  young  Layvis,  whose 
father  kept  the  great  drug  store  in  Vaslui,  and  who, 
after  two  years  of  training  in  medicine  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Bucharest,  was  enjoying  the  blessings  of 
American  liberty  by  selling  newspapers  on  the  streets. 

More  and  fuller  pictures  of  the  seething  life 
of  the  New  York  ghetto  follow,  of  that  life 
which  is  neither  Old  World  nor  New,  where 
as  one  of  "the  semi-independent  allied  states  of 
the  miniature  federation  of  the  East  Side"  a  gay 
Rumanian  city  is  "framed  in  the  stench  and 
squalor  and  the  oppressive,  noisy  tenements  of 
New  York's  dingiest  slums";  where  vermin  and 
filthy  ways  unknown  at  home  are  taken  as  a 
joke;  where  respect  for  the  elders  has  disap- 
peared, the  elders  aping  the  "Americanism"  of 
their  more  facile  juniors;  where  "a  grossness  of 
behavior,  a  loudness  of  speech,  a  certain  repellent 
American  smartness  in  intercourse,  were  thought 
necessary  if  one  did  not  want  to  be  taken  for  a 
greenhorn  or  a  boor" !  Max,  who  at  home  was 
known  as  Mordecai — in  this  land  names,  like 
the  rest,  lose  their  dignity  and  romance — Max 
passes  through  the  greenhorn  period  of  struggle, 
starvation,  and  disappointment,  an  experience 
known  to  the  East  Siders  as  "purification,"  a 
heart-breaking  circle  in  which  American  clothes 
are  necessary  to  get  the  job  without  which  Amer- 
ican clothes  are  ungetable.  After  peddling  and 
tending  bar  Max  reaches  the  sweatshop,  his  cradle 
of  liberty  and  first  university.  Here  literature 
and  labor  problems  and  socialism  are  talked  of; 
here  books  are  read  during  the  lunch  hour;  and 
here  Max  becomes  aware  of  the  cleavage  of 
East  Side  society  into  "clodpates"  and  "intelli- 
gents,"  those  who  care  more  for  dollars  than 
ideas,  who  work  hard  so  that  some  day  they  may 
have  others  to  work  hard  for  them,  whose  amuse- 
ments are  dance  hall  or  card  party,  and  whose 
course  is  that  scrupulous  respectability  which 
qualifies  for  business  success  and,  let  me  add, 
even  for  the  possession  of  an  opera  box  in  the 
Metropolitan — and  those  whose  nights  are  spent 
in  school  or  lecture  hall  or  at  serious  plays, 
young  people  to  whose  radicalism  the  only  choice 
is  between  socialism  or  anarchism,  who  are  ut- 


terly intolerant  of  the  American  heathen  given 
over  to  wealth  and  show,  and  who  keep  an  ever 
burning  faith  in  the  regeneration  of  human 
society. 

After  vicissitudes  in  private  night  school  and 
public  high  school  Max,  the  indomitable,  turns 
away  from  the  intelligentsia  of  the  East  Side  to 
seek  out  "the  real  Americans"  and  to  qualify  for 
the  professional  life  he  has  always  dreamed  of. 
He  enters  the  Missouri  State  University.  Dis- 
cerning and  subtle  as  are  the  pictures  of  the  con- 
tacts between  Vaslui  and  New  York,  they  are 
surpassed  by  the  pictures  of  Max  in  the  Western 
college  town,  where  he  felt  farther  from  New 
York  than  in  New  York  from  Vaslui.  From 
the  spiritual  fervor  of  the  East  Side  it  was  a  far 
call  to  the  practical  indifference  of  the  Mis- 
sourian  to  things  of  the  spirit.  Talk  of  religion 
was  tabooed  by  the  college  boys;  their  Christian- 
ity they  took  as  a  sort  of  drug  to  make  them  feel 
good.  Socialism  was  dreaded  by  them,  and  all 
reference  to  sex  was  precluded  except  by  way 
of  the  funny  story.  Their  worship  was  of  the 
"strong  man,"  their  talk  was  mostly  of  ath- 
letics, and  their  cult  was  football. 

A  football  match  in  full  swing  had  all  the  solem- 
nity and  all  the  fervor  and  color  of  a  great  religious 
service.  The  band  and  the  songs,  the  serpentine 
processions  and  the  periodic  risings,  the  mystic  sig- 
nals and  the  picturesque  vestments,  the  obscure  dra- 
matic conflict  with  its  sudden  flights  and  hot  pursuits, 
the  transfigured  faces  of  the  populace,  the  intense 
silences  alternating  with  violent  outbursts  of  approv- 
ing cheers  and  despondent  groans — all  this  was  plainly 
not  a  game  but  a  significant  natioml  worship. 

A  diverting  bit  of  ethnology,  is  it  not  ? 

The  East  Sider  grasped  these  general  aspects 
of  alien  life,  but  in  little  personal  ways  he  was 
baffled  by  his  college  mates.  He  could  not  make 
his  successive  roommates  stay  with  him ;  he  found 
it  was  but  a  matter  of  time  for  them  to  look 
the  other  way  when  he  spoke  to  them,  or  to  take 
the  other  side  of  the  street.  Their  manners  were 
not  his.  Too  "polite"  for  decisiveness  in  argu- 
ment, yet  they  would  go  whistling  about  indoors  ; 
insistent  on  elaborate  introductions  (one  of  the 
oddities,  let  me  say,  not  only  of  Missouri  but 
of  certain  American  circles  anywhere),  yet  they 
would  toss  biscuits  at  one  another  in  the  dining- 
room.  To  get  into  touch  with  them  the  in- 
domitable adventurer  read  Mark  Twain  aloud 
for  the  vernacular  and  labored  over  the  Mis- 
sourian  vocabulary;  he  set  about  acquiring  that 
lore  of  field  and  forest  and  workshop  taken  for 
granted  by  his  fellows  but  sealed  to  him;  he 
even  joined  the  cadet  corps  and  went  scrupulously 
to  chapel,  although  the  speeches  bored  him  and 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


109 


the  prayers  jarred.  The  harassing  discipline  and 
the  tragic  loneliness  were  made  supportable  by 
a  growing  realization  that,  given  the  normal 
openness,  and  even  the  warmth,  of  the  distinctive 
pioneer  neighborliness  of  the  Missourians,  if  he 
was  not  taken  in  among  them  the  fault  was  not 
with  them  but  with  himself.  That  insight  went 
far  to  take  the  conceit  out  of  him  and  to  give 
him,  as  he  truly  observes,  something  novel  for 
an  East  Sider — a  sense  of  humor. 

Finally  Max  made  a  college  friend,  his  first 
American  friend,  and  the  exchange  of  values 
friendship  brings  rescued  him  from  his  heart- 
sickening  isolation.  Even  this  process  in  denat- 
uralization  has  its  price,  however;  for  when  Max 
returned  in  the  vacation  to  his  people  in  the 
East  Side  he  seemed  different  to  them,  and  to 
him  the  atmosphere  around  them  had  become  re- 
pellent. Even  the  ardent  revolutionary  meeting 
he  attended  with  his  girl  friend  seemed  a  sham 
— what  did  they  know  of  Americans?  Given 
this  stirring  of  the  defensive  impulse,  it  needed 
but  the  genial  welcome  Max  received  on  his  re- 
turn to  college  for  his  allegiance  to  be  made 
valid,  for  him  to  feel  that  now  at  last  he  was  an 
American. 

An  American,  yes,  if  you  like,  but  not  a  Mis- 
sourian,  and  not  a  New  Yorker,  East  Side  or 
West  Side  or  Morningside,  indeed  not  the 
product  at  all,  thank  God!  of  those  American- 
izers  who  would  purify  the  newcomer  of  the 
dross  of  the  Old  World  and  improve  him  by 
making  him  as  much  like  themselves  as  can  be 
— a  practical,  clean,  and  humorous  American, 
uncritical  of  spiritual  values,  without  passion, 
drab  and  anaemic.  These  loud  mouthed  senti- 
mentalists to  whom  the  city  slum  is  merely  an 
importation,  better  at  that  than  the  conditions 
of  life  the  immigrant  has  escaped  from,  and  the 
immigrant  himself  blank  paper  to  write  on  or 
fresh  putty  to  mold,  these  complacent  and  fatu- 
ous Americanizers  will  find  scant  comfort  in 
"An  American  in  the  Making."  Indeed,  there 
is  perhaps  little  encouragement  in  the  book  for 
any  American  if  the  experience  of  the  immi- 
grants in  bulk  be  considered — a  vastly  demoral- 
izing experience.  And  yet  a  country  is  revealed 
where  there  are  at  least  no  insuperable  walls 
for  the  spirit  that  will  not  succumb  in  the  small- 
est degree  to  the  mere  pressure  of  untoward  cir- 
cumstance. 

That  indomitable  spirit  is  incorporated,  as 
nowhere  else  in  the  country,  in  Jewish  youth. 
In  it,  too,  are  incorporated  other  inspiring  traits. 


As  far  as  North  America  is  concerned  the  Jews 
are  indeed  the  chosen  people.  To  what  other 
element  in  the  population  can  Americans  look 
for  that  leaven  of  spiritual  fervor  they  so  sorely 
lack?  Unfortunately  the  function  is  not  always 
recognized  even  by  the  Jew  himself.  The  dif- 
ferentiation between  "clodpate"  and  "intelligent" 
is  not  limited  to  the  East  Side.  Throughout 
America  the  Jew  tends  to  be  either  the  betrayer 
of  modern  culture  or  its  regenerator,  the  leader 
in  science  or  the  exploiter  of  gullibility,  the  fem- 
inist par  excellence  or  the  cadet,  the  interna- 
tionalist or  the  profiteering  politician,  the  Judas 
or  the  Jesus  of  American  society. 

But  not  as  a  portrayal  of  the  Jewish  spirit 
nor  as  a  recognition  of  its  leaven,  not  as  a  study 
in  Americanization,  despite  the  rather  unfortu- 
nate title  and  the  occasional  lapses  to  conform 
to  title,  is  this  book  primarily  arresting.  It  is 
a  remarkable  sketch  indeed  of  contacts  between 
diverse  cultures,  but  it  is  not  alone  an  ethno- 
logical sketch;  it  is  a  picture  of  the  life  of  the 
spirit,  it  is  literature.  In  its  ironic  restraint  and 
subtle  interpretation  the  book  is  unsurpassed,  it 
seems  to  me,  in  the  literary  art  of  this  country. 

ELSIE  CLEWS  PARSONS. 


The  'Painted  T)evil  of  Politics 

THE    UNITED    STATES    AND    PANGERMANIA.      By 
Andre   Cheradame.      (Scribner;   $1.00.) 

M.  Cheradame  is  an  ingenious  gentleman 
who  has  spent  some  twenty  years  of  his  life 
elaborately  proving  a  plot  which  everyone 
knew  existed  beforehand;  namely,  the  Berlin  to 
Bagdad  railroad  scheme  of  the  German  im- 
perialists. In  fact  the  "plot"  was  so  fully 
known  in  England  before  the  war  that  the  Eng- 
lish government  had  come  to  a  written  agree- 
ment with  the  German  government  concerning 
a  division  of  capitalization  in  the  project. 
This  agreement  had  been  sanctioned  by  the  dip- 
lomatic representatives  of  both  powers  and 
awaited  only  the  formal  approval  of  their  re- 
spective governments.  Yet  M.  Cheradame  did 
a  useful  service  in  pointing  out  the  dangerous 
political  ambitions  involved  in  this  seemingly 
innocent  commercial  enterprise.  He  discovered 
Pangermanism  and  he  labored  to  make  others 
see  its  menace.  Unquestionably  it  would  have 
been  of  immense  value  to  the  Allied  nations  if 
they  had  given  more  heed  to  M.  Cheradame's 
warning  and  admonitions  before  the  war  began. 


110 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


Today,  however,  the  value  of  his  advice  is  ex- 
tremely questionable. 

Why?  Because  the  basic  presumption  of  M. 
Cheradame — that  the  Pangerman  plot  has  been 
largely  accomplished — is  in  fact  a  false  presump- 
tion. Furthermore,  in  so  far  as  Pangermany 
does  exist  today,  it  is,  paradoxically  enough,  an 
asset  to  the  Allies  rather  than  an  asset  to  Ger- 
many as  such.  Mittel-Europa  is  not  so  much 
an  accomplished  fact  for  Prussian  militarism  as 
a  precarious  adventure  already  bristling  with 
difficulties  and  likely  to  collapse  totally  on  the 
resumption  of  peace.  And  as  to  Pangermanism 
outside  Mittel-Europa — well,  ask  the  Ham- 
burg exporter,  ask  the  Berlin  business  man,  ask 
the  Munich  manufacturer  for  Argentine  how 
much  of  that  Pangermania  exists  today.  Not 
even  M.  Cheradame  pretends  any  longer  that 
there  is  serious  danger  from  German  influence 
beyond  the  seas.  He  still  clings,  however,  to  his 
idea  of  Middle  Europe,  and  he  never  tires  of 
— to  quote  President  Wilson's  phrase — "From 
Hamburg  to  the  Persian  Gulf  the  net  is  spread." 

Now  what  warrant  has  anyone  for  saying  that 
Mittel-Europa,  in  M.  Cheradame's  sense,  is 
by  no  means  an  accomplished  fact?  First  of  all, 
let  us  look  at  the  map  to  which  he  himself  so 
frequently  refers  us;  just  where  is  the  British 
line  today  in  Palestine?  Is  it  this  side  of  Bag- 
dad, or  is  it  on  the  Turkish  side?  In  fact,  was 
Bagdad  not  in  the  possession  of  the  British  for 
many  weeks,  even  before  President  Wilson  gave 
his  Flag  Day  speech?  Second,  what  of  the 
famous  reorganization  which  the  German  general 
staff  was  to  effect  in  the  Turkish  army?  Has  M. 
Cheradame  read  General  Allenby's  recent  report 
that  over  160,000  Turkish  troops  have  deserted 
within  the  last  few  months?  The  Persian  Gulf, 
except  as  an  object  of  desire,  hardly  enters  into 
the  calculations  of  even  the  most  extreme  Pan- 
germans  when  confronted  with  the  realities  of 
today.  Mesopotamia  seems  definitely  lost  to  Ger- 
man influence.  So  much  for  the  war  map. 

And  how  about  the  vassal  states — Austria- 
Hungary,  Bulgaria,  and  Turkey — which,  accord- 
ing to  M.  Cheradame,  are  willing  accomplices  in 
the  German  plot  because  of  military  and  financial 
obligations  to  Prussia?  Does  M.  Cheradame  re- 
call Arthur  Balfour's  recent  statement  in  the 
House  of  Commons  that,  whatever  the  outcome 
of  the  war  in  other  respects,  it  was  the  object  of 
the  English  government  to  see  that  it  resulted  in 
a  "strong"  Bulgaria?  Could  even  this  obsessed 
author  contend  today  that  Turkey  is  blissfully 


happy  in  her  alliance?  Yet  it  is  true  that 
chief  consideration  revolves  after  all  around  Aus- 
tria-Hungary. As  long  as  the  Dual  Monarchy 
follows  the  leading  strings  of  Berlin,  the  peril 
which  M.  Cheradame  pictures  will  be  more  or 
less  a  reality.  It  is  a  pertinent  question,  however, 
just  to  what  extent  Austria-Hungary  is  a  vassal 
of  Germany,  and  if  she  is,  how  long  she  is  likely 
to  remain  so.  Certainly  she  is  not  a  vassal  in  an 
economic  sense,  even  after  nearly  four  years  of 
war.  Professor  Naumann's  plea  for  a  better  un- 
derstanding between  Germany  and  Austria  was 
after  all  a  plea.  The  great  customs  union  has  not 
yet  come  into  existence,  even  under  moral  isola- 
tion, economic  blockade,  and  close  military  inter- 
dependence. If  the  economic  alliances  which  are 
to  make  Mittel-Europa  a  reality  cannot  be  put 
through  under  such  stress,  then  in  the  name  of 
common  sense  how  can  one  reasonably  ex- 
pect them  to  be  put  through  when  that  pressure 
is  removed?  Consider  Hungary,  for  example: 
not  once  during  this  war  has  Hungary  furnished 
an  ounce  of  bread  or  other  foodstuffs  to  Germany, 
or  even  to  Austria,  her  own  neighbor,  except  for 
a  definite  quid  pro  quo.  Or  read  carefully  this 
dispatch : 

"When  the  Brest-Litovsk  developments  made  it  less 
likely  that  the  German  military  leaders  could  carry 
out  undisturbed  the  program  of  absorbing  Lithuania 
and  Courland,  Germany  apparently  began  pressing 
Austria  for  this  grant  of  commercial  concessions.  At 
the  same  time  it  appears  that  this  grant  began  to  lose 
its  attractiveness  for  Austria.  Both  Vienna  and  Buda- 
pest began  to  put  obstacles  in  the  way  of  a  commercial 
settlement."  (Chicago  "Daily  News,"  January  22, 
1918,  page  2.) 

For  a  vassal,  Austria-Hungary  s'eems  to  have  an 
embarrassing  amount  of  individual  spirit. 

We  need  to  regard  the  larger  outlines  of  the  re- 
lations between  Austria-Hungary  and  Germany. 
As  long  as  Russia  existed  as  a  unified  militaristic 
nation  controlled  by  an  irresponsible  autocracy, 
Austria-Hungary  could  feel,  perhaps  with  some 
justification,  that  there  was  a  Panslavic  menace. 
Of  course  German  militarism,  while  outwardly 
bewailing  the  existence  of  this  menace,  secretly 
was  thankful  for  it,  if,  indeed,  the  Junkers  did  not 
encourage  it.  It  gave  her  an  opponent  against 
whom  she  could  claim  the  legitimate  right  to  arm. 
But  the  whole  political  complexion  of  southeast- 
ern Europe  has  undergone  a  radical  transforma- 
tion since  the  Russian  revolution.  That  worst 
bugaboo  of  European  politics,  the  Panslavic 
menace,  has  vanished.  Austria-Hungary,  who 
allied  herself  with  Germany  for  protection  against 
Russia,  has  now  no  reason  for  that  unpleasant 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


in 


defensive  alliance.  Unpleasant  ?  Well,  it  would 
be  difficult  anywhere  in  the  world  to  find  more 
cordial  hatred  of  Prussian  militarism  today  than 
exists  in  the  Dual  Monarchy.  If  the  Allies  really 
wish  to  embarrass  Germany,  they  could  play  no 
worse  trick  upon  her  than  by  making  her  an  open 
gift  of  Mittel-Europa.  After  the  experience  of 
this  present  war,  it  is  no  paradox  to  state  that 
Germany  may  find  many  of  her  former  allies 
more  embarrassing  to  any  policy  of  commercial 
expansion  than  her  former  enemies.  As  with 
all  industrial  nations,  Germany's  future  depends 
upon  her  ability  to  take  her  place  in  the  in- 
ternational organization  of  world  trade — a  place 
which  she  so  frivolously  threw  away  when  she 
started  on  her  great  imperial  adventure.  Against 
this  real  place  in  the  sun  the  sullen  resentment 
of  Austria-Hungary  at  the  suffering  she  has  gone 
through  will  act  for  many  years  as  a  definite  bar- 
rier. Indeed,  at  no  time  in  recent  modern  history 
has  the  outlook  for  Pangermany,  in  any  effective 
sense,  been  so  black. 

Why,  then,  does  M.  Cheradame  insist  on  paint- 
ing Germany's  prospects  for  the  accomplishment 
of  this  desire  in  such  rosy  colors?  Primarily,  be- 
cause he  is  afraid  of  what  he  calls  the  "drawn 
game,"  or  a  negotiated  peace.  Anything  short 
of  that  will  of  course  be  but  a  respite  and  breath- 
ing space  before  the  next  attack.  So  sure  of  this 
is  M.  Cheradame  that  he  states  that  nothing 
would  be  so  agreeable  to  the  Prussian  militarists 
as  a  peace  "without  annexations  and  without  in- 
demnities." This  sort  of  peace  is,  according  to 
him,  nothing  but  a  German  "plot."  Yet  it  would 
be  easier  to  believe  M.  Cheradame  if  the  German 
militarists  had  in  fact  showed  alacrity  in  accept- 
ing the  Russian  formula  in  all  its  implications. 
What  is  the  homely,  unromantic  truth?  They 
appear  to  regard  it  as  a  defeat,  and  they  have 
not -hesitated  to  say  so.  Russia  offered  them  the 
chance  to  accept  this  formula;  yet  they  were  so 
crude  in  their  practical  rejection  of  it  that  even 
the  Bolsheviki  lost  their  temper.  Who  would 
deny  today  that  Germany  is  split  in  two  in  a  polit- 
ical fight  between  the  annexationists  and  the  no- 
annexationists — a  real  fight,  not  a  sham  one? 
But  this  is  very  curious.  If,  as  M.  Cheradame 
would  have  us  believe,  Germany  would  give  us 
even  Alsace-Lorraine  for  the  sake  of  retaining 
Middle  Europe,  why  this  sudden  reluctance  of  the 
Pangermanists  even  to  come  within  reasonable  dis- 
tance of  the  minimum  demands  of  the  Allies  for 
restitution?  According  to  M.  Cheradame's  view, 
Middle  Europe  is  such  a  prize  that  they  would 


jump  at  the  chance  of  abandoning  their  "map"  of 
conquests  to  retain  this  jewel.  Somehow,  however, 
the  facts  appear  to  be  otherwise.  The  Pan- 
germans  cling  desperately  to  the  jewels  of  con- 
quered land  and  say  very  little  about  Berlin  to 
Bagdad.  The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  the  Ger- 
man imperialists  realize  that  Middle  Europe  is 
only  a  painted  devil  wherewith  to  frighten  the 
Allies.  They  themselves  are  quite  aware  of  its 
difficulties,  its  lack  of  permanent  value  and  its 
meagre  compensation  for  what  they  cynically  term 
"sacrifice  of  the  people."  They  know  only  too 
well  that  the  average  German  citizen  will  not 
regard  a  very  problematical  winning  of  a  road  to 
the  Near  East  as  a  victory  of  German  arms  in  this 
war.  They  know  that  Middle  Europe  is  crum- 
bling beneath  their  fingers.  The  war  has  utterly 
changed  its  character  since  1914 — and  they  know 
it.  M.  Cheradame  still  cherishes  a  belief  which, 
whatever  its  validity  even  as  late  as  a  year  ago, 
has  by  this  time  entered  the  stage  of  legend.  If 
Germany  knows  this  and  acts  on  it,  American 
public  opinion  will  lose  its  intelligent  driving 
force  if  it  is  lured  by  such  specious  and  clever 
writing  as  M.  Cheradame's  to  linger  in  the  dark 
ages  of  ante-bellum  "balance  of  power"  concepts. 
It  is  high  time  for  intelligent  optimism  on  that 
bugaboo,  Pangermania.  .  .  .  "Terrify  babes, 
my  lord,  with  painted  devils.  I  am  past  such 
needless  palsy."  HAROLD  STEARNS. 


New  Curiosity  Shop — and  a  Poet 

OTHERS:  AN  ANTHOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW  VERSE. 
1917.  Edited  by  Alfred  Kreymborg.  (Knopf; 
$1.25.) 

THE  CLOSED  DOOR.  By  Jean  de  Bosschere.  Trans- 
lated by  F.  S.  Flint.  With  an  introduction  by 
May  Sinclair.  (Lane;  $1.25.) 

Who  it  was  that  started  the-  current  poetic 
fad  for  curio-collecting  is  a  question  not  hard 
to  answer:  Ezra  Pound  is  the  man,  let  the  Im- 
agists  and  others  deny  it  as  loudly  as  they  will. 
Pound  has  from  the  outset,  both  as  poet  and 
as  critic,  been  a  curio-collector — a  lover  of 
trinkets,  bijoux  of  phrase,  ideographic  objets  de 
vertu,  carved  oddities  from  the  pawn-shops  of 
the  past,  aromatic  grave-relics,  bizarre  importa- 
tions from  the  Remote  and  Strange.  There  is 
no  denying,  either,  that  it  is  a  delightful  vein 
in  verse.  No  great  exertion  is  demanded  of  the 
reader;  he  is  invited  merely  to  pause  before  the 
display-window  and  to  glance,  if  only  for  a  mo- 
ment, at  the  many  intriguing  minutiae  there  ar- 


112 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


ranged  for  him  in  trays.  Is  he  tired  of  strug- 
gling with  the  toxic  energies  of  a  Rodin?  Then 
let  him  rest  in  contemplation  of  a  carved  ushabti. 
Does  a  Strauss  drag  his  spirit  through  too  vio- 
lent a  progression  of  emotional  projections? 
Does  a  Masters  overburden  him  with  relevant 
facts?  A  Fletcher  fatigue  him  with  aesthetic 
subtleties  prolonged?  Let  him  concentrate  on  a 
gargoyle. 

This  method  in  the  writing  of  poetry  is  to  be 
seen  at  its  purest  in  the  Others  anthologies,  the 
second  of  which  Mr.  Alfred  Kreymborg  has 
now  edited,  apparently  undeterred  by  the  suc- 
cess of  the  first.  Nevertheless  it  is  a  variegated 
band  that  Mr.  Kreymborg  has  assembled,  and 
if  they  have  in  common  the  one  main  tenet — 
that  their  poetic  business  is  the  expression  of  a 
sensation  or  mood  as  briefly  and  pungently  (and 
oddly?)  as  possible,  with  or  without  the  aids  of 
rhyme,  metre,  syntax,  or  punctuation — they  are 
by  no  means  the  slaves  of  a  formula  and  present 
us  with  a  variety  that  is  amazing.  There  is 
much  here,  of  course,  that  is  merely  trivial,  and 
a  measurable  quantity  of  the  proudly  absurd  and 
naively  preposterous;  but  if  there  are  no  such 
outstandingly  good  things  here  as  "The  Portrait 
of  a  Lady"  by  T.  S.  Eliot  in  the  earlier  issue, 
or  Wallace  Stevens's  "Peter  Quince  at  the 
Clavier,"  or  John  Rodker's  "Marionettes,"  we 
can  pass  lightly  over  the  studiously  cerebral  ob- 
scurantism of  Marianne  Moore,  the  tentacular 
quiverings  of  Mina  Loy,  the  prattling  iterations 
of  Alfred  Kreymborg,  the  delicate  but  amor- 
phous self-consciousness  of  Jeanne  d'Orge,  Helen 
Hoyt,  and  Orrick  Johns,  and  pause  with  ad- 
miration and  delight  before  the  "Preludes"  and 
"Rhapsody  of  a  Windy  Night"  by  T.  S.  Eliot, 
and  "Thirteen  Ways  of  Looking  at  a  Black- 
bird" by  Wallace  Stevens.  It  is  not  that  one  is 
at  all  indifferent  to  the  frequent  charm  and  de- 
licious originality  (at  least  as  regards  sensibil- 
ity) of  the  other  poets,  but  that  one  finds  in  the 
two  last  mentioned  not  only  this  delicate  original- 
ity of  mind  but  also  a  clearer  sense  of  symmetry 
as  regards  both  form  and  ideas:  their  poems  are 
more  apparently,  and  more  really,  works  of  art. 
In  comparison,  most  of  the  other  work  in  this 
volume  looks  like  happy  improvisation.  It  is  sig- 
nificant in  this  connection  that  Mr.  Eliot  uses 
rhyme  and  metre,  a  telling  demonstration  that 
the  use  of  these  ingredients  may  add  power  and 
finish  and  speed  to  poetry  without  in  any  way 
dulling  the  poet's  tactile  organs  or  clouding  his 


consciousness — provided  he  has  the  requisite  skill. 
Mr.  Eliot's  "Preludes"  and  "Rhapsody"  are,  in 
a  very  minor  way,  masterpieces  of  black-and- 
white  impressionism.  Personality,  time,  and  en- 
vironment— three  attributes  of  the  dramatic — are 
set  sharply  before  us  by  means  of  a  rapid  and 
concise  report  of  the  seemingly  irrelevant  and 
tangential,  but  really  centrally  significant,  obser- 
vations of  a  shadowy  protagonist. 

From  Mr.  Eliot  to  M.  Jean  de  Bosschere, 
the  Flemish  poet  whose  volume  "The  Closed 
Door"  has  now  been  translated  into  English  by 
Mr.  F.  S.  Flint,  is  a  natural  and  easy  step.  It 
would  appear,  indeed,  that  Mr.  Eliot  has  learned 
much  from  M.  de  Bosschere;  certainly  he  is,  in 
English,  the  closest  parallel  to  him  that  we  have. 
It  is  a  kind  of  praise  to  say  that  in  all  likelihood 
Mr.  Eliot's  "Love  Song  of  J.  Alfred  Prufrock" 
would  not  have  been  the  remarkable  thing  it  is 
if  it  had  not  been  for  the  work  of  Jean  de 
Bosschere:  in  several  respects  de  Bosschere  seems 
like  a  maturer  and  more  powerful  Eliot.  What 
then  is  the  work  of  M.  de  Bosschere? 

To  begin  with,  and  without  regard  to  the 
matter  of  classification,  it  must  be  emphatically 
said  that  this  book  has  the  clear,  unforced,  and 
captivating  originality  of  genius.  Whether,  as 
Miss  Sinclair  questions  doubtfully  in  her  intro- 
duction, we  call  him  mystic  or  symbolist  or  deca- 
dent— and  all  these  terms  have  a  certain  aptness 
— is  after  all  a  secondary  matter.  These  poems, 
in  a  colloquial  but  rich  and  careful  free  verse, 
occasionally  using  rhyme  and  a  regular  ictus, 
very  frequently  employing  a  melodic  line  which 
borders  on  the  prosodic,  seem  at  first  glance  to 
be  half-whimsical  and  half-cerebral,  seem  to  be 
in  a  key  which  is  at  once  naif  and  gayly  pre- 
cious, with  overtones  of  caricature;  in  reality 
they  are  masterpieces  of  ironic  understatement 
and  reveal  upon  closer  scrutiny  a  series  of  pro- 
found spiritual  or  mental  tragedies.  The  method 
of  M.  de  Bosschere  might  be  called  symbolism 
if  one  were  careful  not  to  impute  to  him  any 
delving  into  the  esoteric;  his  themes  are  inva- 
riably very  simple.  One  might  call  him  a  mystic, 
also,  if  one  could  conceive  a  negative  mysticism 
of  disbelief  and  disenchantment,  a  mysticism 
without  vagueness,  a  mysticism  of  brilliantly 
colored  but  unsustaining  certainties.  But  per- 
haps it  would  be  more  exact  to  say  that  he  is 
merely  a  poet  who  happens  to  be  highly  devel- 
oped on  the  cerebral  side,  as  well  as  on  the  tactile, 
a  poet  for  whom  the  most  terrible  and  most 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


113 


beautiful  realities  are  in  the  last  analysis  ideas, 
who  sees  that  as  in  life  the  most  vivid  expression 
of  ideas  is  in  action,  so  in  speech  the  most  vivid 
expression  of  them  is  in  parables.  These  poems, 
therefore,  are  parables.  In  "Ulysse  Batit  Son 
Lit"  we  do  not  encounter  merely  the  deliciously 
and  fantastically  matter-of-fact  comedy,  naif  as 
a  fairy  story,  which  appears  on  the  surface;  we 
also  hear  in  the  midst  of  this  gay  cynicism  the 
muffled  crash  of  a  remote  disaster,  and  that  dis- 
aster arises  from  the  attitude  of  the  animally 
selfish  crowd  towards  the  man  of  outstanding 
achievement.  He  refuses  to  be  one  of  them,  so 
they  kill  him.  "They  roast  Ulysses,  for  he  is 
theirs."  Likewise,  in  "Gridale,"  we  do  not  wit- 
ness a  merely  personal  tragedy;  the  tragedy  is 
universal.  We  see  the  crucifixion  of  the  dis- 
illusioned questioner  by  the  unthinking  idolaters. 
In  "Doutes,"  under  a  surface  apparently  idiosyn- 
cratic in  its  narration  of  the  humorously  bitter 
discoveries  and  self-discoveries  of  a  child,  we  have 
really  an  autobiography  of  disillusionment  which 
is  cosmic  in  its  applicability. 

And  yet  he  still  believes, 

This  burlesque  of  a  man 

Who  has  given  himself  a  universe 

And   a  god   like  an  immense  conflagration 

Whose  smoke  he  smells ; 

And  indeed  it  is  perhaps  only  a  bonfire 

Made  with  the  green  tops  of  potatoes. 

Nevertheless  he  still  believes, 

Axe  in  hand,  this  burlesque  of  a  man  still  believes; 

He  will  cut  his  dream,  four-square,  in  the  hearts  of 


There  is  nothing  to   laugh  at,  nothing  to   object  to, 

We  are  not  animals 

Living  to  feed  our  seed. 

There  is  something  to  believe. 

All  men  are  not  made  of  pig's  flesh. 

There  is  something  to  believe. 

Who  said  that  I  am  a  poor  wretch, 

Mere  flotsam 

Separated  from  its  imaginary  god? 

Again,  in  "Homer  Marsh,"  we  make  the  ac- 
quaintance of  the  gentle  recluse  who  loves  and 
is  loved  by  his  house,  his  fire,  his  kettle,  his 
pipe  and  tobacco,  his  dog,  his  bees;  but  he  goes 
away  to  travel,  and  lends  his  house  to  his  friend 
Peter;  and  on  his  return  finds  to  his  bewilder- 
ment and  despair  that  all  these  beloved  things 
have  curiously  turned  their  affections  to  Peter. 
The  tone  is  lyric,  seductively  playful  and  simple ; 
the  overtone  is  tragic.  It  is  a  translation  into 
action  of  the  profound  fact  that  ideas,  no  mat- 
ter how  personal,  cannot  be  property;  that  they 
are  as  precious  and  peculiar  and  inevitable  in 


one  case  as  in  another,  a  natural  action  of  forces 
universally  at  work. 

It  would  be  rash,  however,  to  carry  too  far 
this  notion  of  parables.  Some  of  the  poems  in 
"The  Closed  Door"  are  so  sensitively  subjective, 
so  essentially  lyrical,  so  (confound  the  word!) 
naturally  mystic — in  the  sense  that  they  make  a 
clear  melody  of  the  sadness  of  the  finite  in  the 
presence  of  the  infinite,  of  the  conscious  in  the 
presence  of  the  unconscious — that  one  shrinks 
from  dropping  such  a  chain  upon  them.  All  one 
can  say  is  that  they  are  beautiful,  that  for  all 
their  cool  and  precise  and  colloquial  preciosity, 
their  sophisticated  primitivism,  they  conceal  an 
emotional  power  that  is  frightful,  not  to  say 
heartrending.  What  is  the  secret  of  this  amaz- 
ing magic?  It  is  not  verbal  merely,  nor  rhyth- 
mic; for  it  remains  in  translation.  It  springs 
from  the  ideas  themselves:  it  is  a  playing  of  ideas 
against  one  another  like  notes  in  a  harmony, 
ideas  presented  always  visually,  cool  images  in 
a  kind  of  solitude.  It  is  not  that  M.  de  Bos- 
schere  is  idiosyncratic  in  what  he  does,  that  he 
sees  qualities  that  others  do  not  see;  but  rather 
that  he  combines  them  unexpectedly,  that  he 
felicitously  marries  the  lyrical  to  the  matter-of- 
fact,  the  sad  to  the  ironic,  the  innocent  to  the 
secular — the  tender  to  the  outrageous.  He  sees 
that  truth  is  subtler  than  it  is  supposed  to  be,  and 
he  finds  new  images  for  it,  images  with  the  dew 
of  truth  still  on  them.  If  novelty  sometimes 
contributes  to  the  freshness  of  the  effect,  it  is  by 
no  means  novelty  alone:  these  novelties  have 
meanings,  unlike  many  of  those  factitiously 
achieved  by  some  members  of  the  Others  group. 
This  is  a  poet  whose  quaintness  and  whim  and 
fantasy  are  always  thought-wrinkled:  they  are 
hints  of  a  world  which  the  poet  has  found  to  be 
overwhelming  in  its  complexity.  Song  is  broken 
in  upon  by  a  doubting  voice;  flowers  conceal  a 
pit;  pleasure  serves  a  perhaps  vile  purpose; 
beauty  may  not  be  a  delusion,  but  is  it  a  snare? 
And  what  do  thought  and  memory  lead  to  ?  .  .  . 

Nevertheless  he  still  believes, 

Axe  in  hand,  this  burlesque  of  a  man  still  believes.  .   . 

Axe  in  hand!  It  is  precisely  such  bizarre  but 
significant  imaginings  that  constitute  the  charm 
of  this  poet.  And  it  is  a  part  of  his  genius  that, 
although  hyperaesthetic,  he  is  able  to  keep  clearly 
in  mind  the  objective  value  of  such  images,  and 
to  contrast  them  deliciously  with  the  sentimental, 
or  the  decorative,  or  the  impassioned. 

CONRAD  AIKEN. 


114 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


THE  ROMANCE  OF  THE  ROMANOFFS.  By 
Joseph  McCabe.  Dodd,  Mead ;  $2. 
Evidently  it  is  not  without  ironical  implica- 
tions that  Mr.  McCabe  entitles  his  tale  of 
tyranny  and  bloodshed,  of  licentiousness  and 
intrigue,  of  sordid  greed  and  revolting  cruelty, 
a  "romance."  "To  any  who  find  romance,"  he 
says  in  his  preface,  "in  such  behavior  as  kings 
and  nobles  were  permitted  to  flaunt  in  the  eyes  of 
their  people  in  earlier  ages  the  story  of  the 
Romanoffs  must  be  exceptionally  attractive." 
Being  the  story  of  a  dynasty,  not  the  chronicle 
of  an  empire,  the  narrative  concerns  itself  largely 
with  the  personal  peculiarities,  the  greater  or 
lesser  degrees  of  depravity,  the  pet  foibles  and 
dominant  vices,  historical  or  legendary,  of  the 
Peters  and  Catherines,  the  Ivans  and  Elizabeths, 
of  the  Romanoff  line.  And  a  most  wondrous 
wicked  lot  they  show  themselves  to  have  been. 
The  last  of  them  is  made  by  this  writer  to  outdo, 
voluntarily  or  involuntarily,  even  the  most  con- 
scienceless of  the  tyrants  that  had  preceded  him 
on  the  Russian  throne;  for  "his  reign  was  dis- 
graced by  a  more  bloody  and  cruel  coercion  than 
had  reddened  the  reign  of  any  of  his  predeces- 
sors." But  it  was,  of  course,  weakness  of 
character  rather  than  viciousness  of  disposition 
that  must  be  blamed  for  the  crimes  of  Nicholas 
the  Second's  reign.  He  never  could  have  con- 
ceived the  horrible  exploits,  such  as  soaking  his 
adversaries  in  brandy  and  setting  them  afire,  that 
gave  to  Ivan  the  Terrible  his  unique  fame.  Mr. 
McCabe's  book  would  be  more  useful,  and  the 
story  of  the  Romanoffs  could  be  followed  more 
easily  and  intelligently,  if  he  had  appended  a 
family  tree  of  this  not  too  familiar  line  of 
monarchs,  or  if  he  had  even  given  a  chronological 
list  of  the  Romanoff  czars. 

ASGARD  AND  THE  GODS.  Adapted  from  the 
work  of  Dr.  W.  Wagner  by  M.  W.  Mac- 
Dowall  and  edited  by  W.  S.  W.  Anson. 
Dutton;  $2. 

EPICS  AND  ROMANCES  OF  THE  MIDDLE 
AGES.  Adapted  from  the  work  of  Dr.  W. 
Wagner  by  M.  W.  MacDowall  and  ed- 
ited by  W.  S.  W.  Anson.  Dutton;  $2. 

In  1880  there  was  published  under  the  title 
of  "Asgard  and  the  Gods"  an  adaptation  from 
the  work  of  Dr.  Wagner  intended  to  supply  a 
need  not  previously  met — the  need  for  "a  com- 
plete and  popular  English  account  of  the  reli- 
gious beliefs  and  superstitious  customs  of  the  old 
Norsemen,  suited  to  our  younger  readers."  Two 
years  later,  when  the  second  edition  of  this  vol- 
ume was  brought  out,  the  decision  was  made  that 
it  should  be  supplemented  by  a  volume  devoted 


to  the  legendary  lore  of  our  northern  ancestors. 
The  new  volume  bore  the  title  "Epics  and 
Romances  of  the  Middle  Ages."  Both  works 
are  now  republished.  They  are  accompanied  by 
numerous  illustrations  which,  though  of  scant 
artistic  merit,  will  entice  youthful  readers. 

The  first  volume  gives  in  more  detail  than  is 
found  in  ordinary  handbooks  of  mythology  the 
stories  that  connect  themselves  with  Odin,  Loki, 
Thor,  Freya,  Baldur,  the  Norns,  the  Valkyries, 
Fenris  the  Wolf,  the  Midgard  Serpent,  the  tree 
Yggdrasil,  and  the  other  wonders  and  wonderful 
figures  of  those  stanch  and  primitive  times. 
These  conceptions  Wagner  philosophized  in  a 
way  that  sometimes  seems  arbitrary,  but  that 
the  conceptions  themselves  have  been  written  into 
the  life  of  our  people  may  be  seen  from  the  deri- 
vation of  the  names  for  our  days  of  the  week 
and  from  both  the  name  and  much  of  the  spirit 
of  our  Easter.  The  second  volume  consists  of  a 
retelling  in  prose  of  the  great  northern  hero  lays, 
supplemented  by  the  French  Carolingian  and  the 
British  Arthurian  cycles.  It  does  not  always  ad- 
here meticulously  to  the  details  of  the  epic  ac- 
counts, but  it  catches  their  spirit  admirably  and 
is  true  to  their  broader  facts.  In  short,  the  two 
volumes  bring  alive  for  us  the  pristine  era  of 
robust  heroism,  and  even  after  the  lapse  of  thirty- 
five  years  constitute  for  us  "a  fairly  complete 
treatment  of  the  mythical  and  traditional  lore  of 
the  Germanic  race." 

RlNCONETE  AND  CoRTADILLO.      By  Miguel 

de  Cervantes.  Translated,  with  an  intro- 
duction and  notes,  by  Mariano  J.  Lorente. 
With  a  preface  by  R.  B.  Cunninghame 
Graham.  Four  Seas;  $1.50. 
It  is  extremely  interesting  to  read  Cervantes' 
"exemplary"  tale  of  Spanish  thieves  in  an  unaca- 
demic  and  spirited  English  translation  by  a  coun- 
tryman of  the  great  novelist.  The  thief  is  an 
exciting  figure  in  literature  as  in  life,  but  com- 
paratively little  has  been  written  of  his  organi- 
zations— his  despotisms  and  hierarchies  (for 
thieving  seems  to  preclude  democracy) — and  this 
old  Spanish  classic  has  an  almost  contemporary 
interest  in  its  social  satire.  "The  little  master- 
piece," writes  Cunninghame  Graham,  in  a  pref- 
ace which  graces  the  new  translation,  "gives 
perhaps  the  best  sketch  of  Spanish  low  life  which 
has  come  down  to  us.  .  .  The  meeting  of  the 
two  vagrant  boys,  their  entering  into  the  confra- 
ternity of  thieves,  with  the  picture  of  the  house 
in  which  dwelt  Monipodio,  the  arch-thief  of 
Seville,  all  are  touched  in  as  only  Cervantes 
could  touch  in  such  scenes.  He  uses  but  few 
words  and  yet  in  the  short  sketch  there  are  a 
dozen  portraits  which  once  read  are  as  indelible 
in  the  mind's  eye  as  is  a  picture  of  El  Greco." 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


115 


About  half  the  present  volume  is  devoted  to 
illuminating  notes  and  introductions,  for  beside 
Cunninghame  Graham's  preface  there  is  Cer- 
vantes' prologue,  containing  the  writer's  full- 
length  lovable  portrait  of  himself,  and  a  long 
introduction  by  the  translator,  bristling  with 
controversial  points.  Cervantes  and  Cunning- 
hame Graham  wrote  genially,  for  they  had  not 
read  Mr.  Lorente's  introduction,  and  they  were 
not  concerned  with  translators.  Mr.  Graham, 
in  fact,  does  not  seem  to  care  how  often  or  how 
ill  "Rinconete  and  Cortadillo"  has  been  done 
into  English.  "An  idiomatic  translation  of  a 
classic  is  never  out  of  season,"  he  remarks  toler- 
antly, "and  there  are  intricacies  of  the  Spanish 
tongue  hard  to  present." 

Mr.  Lorente,  on  the  contrary,  has  a  cudgel  in 
hand  for  all  previous  translators,  attacking  them 
one  at  a  time  and  chronologically.  He  leaves 
very  little  of  their  pretensions  to  accuracy  or 
excellence.  Finally,  he  informs  us  that  it  was 
the  "mediocrity"  of  Norman  McCall's  version, 
made  intolerable  by  Fitzmaurice-Kelly's  "fan- 
tastic praise,"  which  moved  him  to  attempt  some- 
thing more  worthy  of  the  original.  Mr.  Lorente 
does  not  claim  infallibility,  only  superior  accu- 
racy, for  his  "Rinconete  and  Cortadillo."  It  is 
certainly  very  human  and  lively. 

"I  know  one  is  not  always  in  the  churches," 
wrote  Cervantes,  "nor  is  one  always  occupied 
with  business  .  .  .  there  are  hours  of  recreation 
in  which  the  afflicted  spirit  rests."  "Rinconete 
and  Cortadillo"  was  written  for  just  such  hours. 

A  PRIEST  OF  THE  IDEAL.  By  Stephen  Gra- 
ham. Macmillan;  $1.50. 
What  Stephen  Graham  calls  a  "novel"  will 
probably,  so  limited  are  our  definitions,  appear 
to  the  average  reader  anything  but  a  novel.  "A 
Priest  of  the  Ideal"  is  in  the  fullest  sense — the 
Russian  sense  and  the  spiritual  sense — a  novel. 
It  has  been  said  that  Mr.  Wells  is  the  thermome- 
ter of  current  opinion.  It  was  said  in  praise. 
Mr.  Graham  is,  rather,  barometric;  he  does  not 
tell  us  what  we  already  know  (and  consequently 
love  to  hear  well  said)  ;  he  interprets  for  us 
the  unseen  values  of  the  age,  and  predicts  the 
coming  changes.  He  makes  vivid  the  relation  of 
permanent  and  of  transitory  elements  in  the 
national  fabric;  he  makes  us  pause  in  our  un- 
thinking acceptance  of  modern  organized  life; 
he  points  out  the  things  that  England  is  proud 
of  in  her  past  and  by  implication  the  things 
that  she  could  very  well  do  without  today.  It 
is  always  the  "unseen  significance"  which  is  the 
most  significant,  only  the  "not  for  sale"  which  is 
imperishable.  But  it  is  true  that  this  quality 
may  rest  disregarded  until  someone  asks  its 
material  value  in  order  to  deprive  us  of  it.  It 


was  not  until  Washington  King,  the  rich  Ameri- 
can, began  his  altruistic  mission  of  exporting 
unnecessary  English  ruins  for  the  spiritual  en- 
richment of  his  native  country,  that  England 
looked  upon  them  with  seeing  eyes.  King's  fruit- 
less quest  is  Mr.  Graham's  concrete  expression 
for  the  ideal  that  his  lay  priest,  Richard  Hamp- 
den,  preached.  His  self-imposed  mission  was  the 
illumination  of  the  pages  of  history  by  mystic  and 
individual  interpretation.  Where  the  present 
was  concerned,  his  power  came  through  his  re- 
liance upon — hence  his  appeal  to — the  individual. 

"Dedicate  your  life  to  men  and  women,  to 
personal  relationships.  You  will  find  that  the 
causes  look  after  themselves,"  said  Hampden. 
"Causes  always  disappoint,  human  beings  seldom 
disappoint." 

In  Mr.  Graham,  there  is  a  voice  as  fearless 
if  not  as  exceptional  as  Tolstoy's.  His  book  is, 
in  fact,  a  review  of  England  through  Russian 
eyes,  in  Russian  terms.  Though  it  is  formless 
in  the  formalistic  sense,  yet  it  possesses  the  most 
enduring  form  of  all:  it  transfers  its  message 
into  the  fabric  of  human  imagination  and  mem- 
ory. Mr.  Graham  makes  the  reader  cooperate 
in  the  writing  of  his  book.  The  author  serves, 
that  is,  to  suggest,  to  point  here  and  there,  as 
might  the  perfect  guide,  and  to  illustrate  his 
meaning  through  his  characters,  who  are  not,  we 
must  admit,  vividly  real.  It  is  the  reader's  work 
to  follow  the  road  thus  suggested — rather,  per- 
haps, to  make  his  own  path.  There  is  no  hard 
brilliance  here,  no  cleverness,  no  mere  reflection 
of  the  current  temperature,  but  a  very  genuine, 
if  over-sober,  consideration  of  the  problems  con- 
fronting modern  England. 

MILITARISM.  By  Karl  Liebknecht.  Huebsch  ; 
$1. 

Liebknecht's  resistance  to  Prussianism  has 
stimulated  an  unusual  interest  in  his  book,  "Mil- 
itarism," written  ten  years  ago  and  now  trans- 
lated into  English.  It  is  but  fair  to  Liebknecht, 
however,  to  point  out  that  his  present  opposition 
to  German  militarism  is  not  based  upon  the  con- 
viction that  the  cause  of  the  allies  is  just.  His 
attitude  is  a  consistent  application  of  views 
expressed  in  1907.  He  is  an  international  social- 
ist of  the  Marxian  school. 

Militarism,  for  Liebknecht,  is  a  phenomenon, 
"deeply  rooted  in  the  very  nature  of  societies 
divided  in  classes,"  which  assumes  various  shapes 
"in  societies  of  equal  structure,  all  according  to 
the  physical,  political,  social,  and  economic  con- 
ditions of  states  and  territories."  At  all  times  it 
is  designed  to  perpetuate  the  control  of  capital- 
ism. It  does  this  in  two  ways:  (1)  it  serves  as 
an  instrument  of  aggression  or  protection  with 
reference  to  foreign  nations;  (2)  it  is  a  "pillar 


116 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


of  capitalism  and  all  reactionary  forces  in  the 
war  of  liberation  engaged  in  by  the  working 
classes." 

The  standing  army,  navalism,  and  the  colonial 
army  are  means  of  serving  the  first  purpose. 
England,  Germany,  and  the  United  States  have 
each  utilized  the  colonial  army  to  drive  "the  mis- 
erable natives  to  slave  in  the  bagnios  for  capital- 
ism, and  to  shoot  and  cut  them  down  and  starve 
them  without  pity  whenever  they  attempt  to  pro- 
tect their  country  against  foreign  conquerors  and 
extortioners."  Liebknecht  sees  nothing  but  injury 
to  the  proletariat  in  this  function  of  militarism. 
He  believes  it  perpetuates  a  ruthless  system  of 
capitalistic  exploitation  of  the  masses  and  leads 
to  international  complications  which  imperil  the 
existence  of  civilization.  He  would  point  to  the 
war  as  a  tragic  verification  of  his  words  written 
ten  years  ago.  The  duty  of  the  worker  is  clear. 
"There  is  only  one  real  enemy  of  the  proletariat 
of  every  country — the  capitalist  class  which 
oppresses  and  exploits  the  proletariat";  "the 
international  coalition  of  exploiters  and  oppres- 
sors must  be  opposed  by  the  international  coali- 
tion of  the  exploited  and  oppressed." 

In  confirmation  of  his  statement  that  the  sec- 
ond function  of  militarism  is  to  protect  capital- 
ism within  the  nation,  Liebknecht  describes  the 
army  organization  of  the  European  nations  and 
the  United  States.  He  particularly  condemns 
the  organization  of  the  Belgian  civic  guard  and 
the  employment  of  gunmen  by  American  capital- 
ists. While  not  strictly  a  part  of  the  American 
military  organization,  these  private  armies  are 
permitted  to  exist  under  state  laws  and  thus 
directly  assist  the  capitalist  in  his  war  against 
labor.  Liebknecht  maintains  that  in  all  coun- 
tries the  police  and  the  military  forces  stand 
ready  in  an  emergency  "to  preserve  order," 
while  in  Germany,  Hungary,  Roumania,  and 
even  France  soldiers  have  been  used  as  strike 
breakers. 

The  chapter  "Means  and  Effects  of  Militar- 
ism" discusses  the  methods  of  education  which 
create  a  military  spirit  in  the  army  and  the 
people.  Here  Liebknecht  deals  primarily  with 
the  Prussian  system  of  military  education.  The 
last  chapter  presents  what  he  believes  to  be  the 
fundamental  contradictions  in  militarism  which, 
in  obedience  to  Hegelian  dialectical  development, 
will  lead  to  its  ultimate  destruction.  He  does 
not  plead  for  an  international  organization  which 
shall  regulate  international  competition  and  thus 
control,  if  not  abolish,  militarism.  "Militarism," 
he  writes,  "is  one  of  the  original  sins  of  capital- 
ism which  may  be  susceptible  of  being  mitigated 
here  and  there,  but  of  which  it  will  be  purged 
only  in  the  purgatory  of  Socialism." 


PAIN    AND    PLEASURE.      By    Henry    T. 

Moore.     Moffat,  Yard;  $1.25. 

This  volume,  which  is  the  second  in  a  series 
of  ten  devoted  to  the  senses,  surveys  a  field  of 
peculiar  interest.  In  general,  the  sensations  on 
the  basis  of  which  we  lead  the  mental  life  are 
divided  between  the  special  senses,  which  bring 
us,  for  the  most  part,  the  things  from  without, 
and  the  organic  senses,  contributing  to  the  same 
end  within;  but  mingled  with  these,  and  over- 
lapping them,  are  the  general  feelings  of  pain 
and  pleasure  for  which  the  sensory  life  so  plainly 
stands.  The  contrast  between  the  epicurean, 
who  lives  in  the  pleasures  of  sense,  and  the  stoic, 
who  cultivates  an  indifference,  as  well  as  the 
ascetic,  who  deliberately  discards  every  comfort 
and  satisfaction,  lies  in  the  manner  of  accep- 
tance of  the  parts  of  pain  and  pleasure.  The  phy- 
siology of  this  process  has  only  recently  been 
intelligible,  though  the  peculiar  role  of  pain  in 
the  diagnosis  of  disease  has  always  been  recog- 
nized. Beginning  at  this  level,  pleasures  rise 
rapidly  to  the  aesthetic  field,  and  beyond  that 
there  is  always  a  penumbra  of  moral  value.  It 
is  this  field  that  Professor  Moore  surveys  in  a 
popular  and  systematic  fashion. 

THE  SENSE  OF  SIGHT.  By  Frank  N.  Spind- 

ler.     Moffat,  Yard;  $1.25. 

This,  the  third  volume  in  the  series  on  the 
senses  edited  by  Dr.  George  Dearborn,  is  in 
many  ways  the  most  important  of  the  ten  vol- 
umes which  together  are  to  survey  the  field  of 
sensation.  Sight  is  rightly  called  the  queen  of 
the  senses,  and  the  scope  and  direct  prominence 
of  its  contributions  are  unassailed.  So  far  as 
bare  requirements  go,  the  volume  considers  ac- 
ceptably the  structure  of  the  eye,  the  mode  of 
its  functioning,  the  character  of  the  sensations 
which  it  brings,  and  something  about  the  bear- 
ing of  vision  in  the  general  mental  field.  It 
rarely  rises  above  this  meagre  adequacy;  and  it 
is  in  a  measure  unfortunate  that  so  important 
a  subject  fails  of  any  distinctive  handling.  The 
presentation  is  rather  casual:  the  high  points  in 
the  field  of  vision  are  covered,  but  the  oppor- 
tunity of  such  a  volume  has  hardly  been  met. 
The  arrangement  of  the  chapters  is  admirable, 
passing  rapidly  from  the  study  of  process  to  the 
interpretation  of  the  work  of  sight  as  we  see  it, 
then  to  the  effect  of  our  eye-mindedness  upon 
our  general  psychology,  including  our  emotional 
nature.  A  practical  chapter  on  the  character  of 
vision  is  added.  It  takes  more,  however,  than  a 
proper  plan  and  an  acquaintance  with  the  data 
to  bring  to  the  reader  an  appreciation  of  the 
marvelous  sense  of  vision  and  the  manner  in 
which  the  eye  makes  the  mind. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


117 


NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 

Even  war,  as  certain  harassed  officials  at 
Washington  might  be  willing  to  testify,  cannot 
engulf  the  "woman  question."  The  roots  of  that 
question  are  too  deep  in  the  foundations  of  things 
to  be  swept  away,  as  less  relevant  issues  are  swept 
away,  by  the  current  that  seems,  sometimes,  to 
be  undermining  life.  War  has  proved  woman's 
ability  to  bear  her  share  of  the  burdens  of  society 
and  has  thus  substantiated  her  claim  to  be  con- 
sidered as  an  individual  entitled,  under  her  own 
right,  to  the  privileges  of  society  that  her  male 
protectors,  acting  vicariously,  formerly  enjoyed 
for  her.  There  are  however — beyond  doubt,  for 
the  Congressional  Record  reveals  them — certain 
purblind  people  who  are  unable  to  read  the  clear 
proof  that  the  hour  of  woman's  emancipation 
has  arrived.  It  was  for  them,  doubtless,  that 
"The  Sturdy  Oak"  (Holt;  $1.40)  was  assem- 
bled. 

"The  Sturdy  Oak"  is,  so  to  speak,  an  all-star 
novel,  written  by  fourteen  leading  American 
authors,  each  of  whom — after  the  fashion  of  the 
old  game  of  capping  verses — furnished  a  single 
chapter.  Though  it  is  obviously  a  tour  de  force, 
it  turns  out  to  be  no  worse,  if  no  better,  than 
dozens  of  novels  set  adrift  by  the  publishers  each 
season.  However,  the  personnel  of  its  authors — 
Mary  Austin,  Henry  Kitchell  Webster,  Kath- 
leen Norris,  Dorothy  Canfield,  Samuel  Merwin, 
Alice  Duer  Miller,  Harry  Leon  Wilson,  Fannie 
Hurst,  Marjorie  Benton  Cooke,  Leroy  Scott, 
William  Allen  White,  Mary  Heaton  Vorse, 
Ethel  Watts  Mumford,  and  Anne  O'Hagan — 
fortunately  releases  one  from  any  obligation  to 
regard  "The  Sturdy  Oak"  from  the  point  of 
view  of  literary  criticism;  for  there  is  probably 
not  a  writer  on  the  list  who  would  advance  any 
claim  to  literary  merit  for  the  book  as  a  whole 
or  for  his  share  in  it. 

"The  Sturdy  Oak"  is  propaganda  pure  and 
simple,  dedicated  to  the  cause  of  suffrage.  Its 
writers  have  received  no  recompense ;  its  publish- 
ers expect  no  profits;  the  entire  proceeds  from 
its  sale  are  to  be  devoted  to  the  achievement  of 
votes  for  women.  The  prospect  of  getting  four- 
teen leading  authors  for  the  price  of  one  should 
entice  the  public  into  making  the  propaganda 
profitable  from  a  pecuniary  point  of  view. 
Assuming  that  only  the  unintelligent  are  left  in 
the  ranks  of  the  unbelievers,  it  may  prove  to  be 
popular  also  from  the  point  of  view  of  morale. 

As  a  presentation  of  the  "woman  question," 
of  which  suffrage  of  course  is  only  a  phase,  "The 
Sturdy  Oak"  is  absurd,  even  though  it  advances 
all  the  stock  pros  and  demolishes  all  the  stock 
cons.  It  is  made  to  seem  the  more  absurd  by 
comparison  with  the  new  edition  of  "A  Woman 


of  Genius"  (Houghton  Mifflin;  $1.50)  by  Mary 
Austin,  the  writer  of  Chapter  XIII  of  "The 
Sturdy  Oak"  and  the  builder  of  its  plot.  "A 
Woman  of  Genius"  hammers  at  the  very  under- 
pinnings of  the  false  social  structure  that  makes 
a  woman  question  possible.  It  is  a  passionate 
protest  against  the  conditions  that  keep  women 
from  being  persons,  and  at  the  same  time  it  is  a 
decidedly  creditable  piece  of  work.  It  is  the 
kind  of  propaganda  that  will  succeed  with  intel- 
ligent people,  for  the  simple  reason  that  it  is  not 
propaganda  at  all.  Sound  advice  to  the  reading 
public  would  be:  Buy  "The  Sturdy  Oak"  for 
the  sake  of  the  cause  and  read  "A  Woman  of 
Genius"  to  find  out  what  it  is  all  about. 

In  "Missing"  (Dodd,  Mead;  $1.50)  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward  tells  the  story  of  a  pretty, 
clinging  Englishwoman,  who  learns  through  the 
war's  hard  lesson  the  essential  dishonesty  of 
clinging.  Work  brings  her  spiritual  freedom,  as 
it  has  brought  spiritual  freedom  to  hundreds  of 
women  since  the  beginning  of  the  war.  "Miss- 
ing" might  be  a  contribution  to  the  contemporary 
literature  about  woman,  as  vital  in  its  way  as 
"A  Woman  of  Genius,"  but,  like  most  of  Mrs. 
Ward's  work,  it  lacks  reality.  It  is  a  cleverly 
staged,  well-managed  drama  of  the  Pinero  type. 
You  look  on,  are  interested,  entertained,  but 
never  for  a  moment  carried  away.  It  is  all  a 
play.  It  might  have  happened,  you  are  willing 
to  admit,  but  that  these  very  clever  ladies  and 
gentlemen  are  living  it,  not  acting  it — that  is  too 
great  a  demand  upon  your  credulity.  Mrs.  Ward 
can  produce  polished  drama;  but  she  cannot 
reproduce  life. 

"The  Four  Corners  of  the  World"  hold  a 
number  of  bizarre  things  such  as  A.  E.  W. 
Mason,  the  author  of  a  collection  of  stories  by 
that  name,  loves  to  describe.  (Scribner's; 
$1.50.)  From  an  intriguing  robbery  at  the 
Semiramis  Hotel  in  London  his  imagination  flits 
to  Gibraltar  and  the  bomb  plots  of  the  miserable 
Peiffer;  from  the  story  of  "Green  Paint"  in  a 
Latin  Republic,  to  murder  and  suicide  in  an 
English  country  house.  But  though  his  imagina- 
tion has  range  and  facility,  it  has  little  depth.  He 
has  been  reading  Freud,  or  perhaps  a  book  review 
on  Freud,  and  to  the  varied  complexes  of  his 
personages  he  has  brought  his  own  excellent  short 
story  technique.  They  are  very  enjoyable,  these 
stories;  and  if  writers  like  Conrad,  Thomas 
Burke,  and  H.  G.  Dwight  had  not  projected 
into  the  short  story  a  quality  that  gives  it  vitality 
and  endurance,  we  should  perhaps  be  fully  con- 
tent with  the  temporary  satisfaction  to  be  got 
from  "The  Four  Corners."  According  to  the 
standard  created  by  these  writers,  Mr.  Mason's 
work  is  flat.  According  to  the  standard  of  the 
average,  it  is  most  excellently  good. 


118 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


IN  HIS  ANNUAL  REPORT  TO  THE  TRUSTEES  OF 

COLUMBIA  President  Butler  states  that  the 
academic  society  of  which  the  teacher  is  a  mem- 
ber owes  him  "protection  from  unfair  attack,  as 
well  as  from  all  avoidable  hamperings  and  em- 
barrassments in  the  prosecution  of  his  intellectual 
work."  Fair  words!  Yet  they  would  somehow 
have  a  more  genuine  ring  if  Dr.  Butler  had 
ever  attempted  to  protect  Professor  Charles  A. 
Beard  from  the  unfair  attacks  of  the  New  York 
press  when  the  notorious  "flag  incident"  took 
place;  if  trustee  inquisitions  had  never  occurred 
at  Columbia;  if  newspaper  accounts  of  the  ac- 
tivities of  Professors  Dana  and  Cattell  had  not 
been  accepted  at  their  face  value.  Dr.  Butler 
must  be  an  adept  in  casuistry  to  square  his  moral 
precepts  with  his  recent  conduct.  Or  is  the 
phrase  "academic  freedom,"  like  "freedom  of 
speech,"  merely  a  verbal  idol  to  be  adored  pub- 
licly by  those  who  in  private  expend  their  ef- 
forts on  its  destruction?  Probably  Dr.  Butler 
would  defend  himself  by  stressing  the  equivocal 
adjective  "avoidable" :  in  this  case  he  could  plead 
necessity  and  so  lay  claim  to  exemption  from  all 
the  consequences  of  the  phrase.  Does  not  this, 
however,  suggest  a  similar  ingenuity  exhibited  by 
a  recent  Chancellor  of  Germany?  Dr.  Michaelis, 
it  will  be  recalled,  gracefully  accepted  the  Reichs- 
tag resolution  of  July  19  respecting  "no  forcible 
annexations,"  and  so  on.  That  is,  he  accepted 
it  verbally.  But  he  repudiated  it  in  fact  by  a 
light  modifying  clause — "as  I  interpret  it." 
Thus  do  certain  distinguished  minds  exhibit  their 
basic  identity  of  method. 


A   MELANCHOLY  JAQUES   WRITES   US   in   iron- 

ical  mood  from  "an  Atlantic  port."  He  says: 
"We  here  are  in  the  dark,  and  the  more  numer- 
ous the  news  items  become,  the  sabler  grows 
the  night  which  everywhere  engulfs  us.  The 
news  keeps  arriving  from  the  four  corners  of  the 
earth:  'Copenhagen — Czar  Nicholas  escaped 
yesterday;  Stockholm — Lenine  is  said  to  have 
been  hanged  by  the  Cossacks ;  Rome — A  meeting 
has  been  arranged  by  persons  interested  in  a 
separate  peace  between  Turkey  and  the  Vatican ; 
Zurich — The  Kaiser  seemed  deeply  moved  by 
the  news  that  Russia  was  inclined  to  return  her 
German  prisoners.  Such  an  act  would  markedly 
complicate  the  food-problem  in  Germany.  .  .' 
When  I  was  a  kid,  I  was  passionately  interested 
in  the  mysteries  of  the  telegraph,  that  I  saw  only 
as  little  knobs  and  iron  wires.  I  used  to  wonder 
how  such  a  simple  arrangement  could  send  so 
far  the  important  news  entrusted  to  it.  I  used 
to  stop  on  the  road  to  listen  to  the  music  of  the 
wind  in  the  wires,  and  each  time  the  mysterious 


sound  was  repeated  I  used  to  tell  myself,  'There 
goes  a  telegram.'  After  a  bit  I  persuaded  my 
playmates,  finally  myself,  that  I  understood  the 
messages  in  those  sounds.  I  used  to  put  my  ear 
against  the  base  of  that  science-grown  tree,  the 
telegraph  pole,  and  announce  the  latest  news: 
'The  chief  of  the  secret  police  is  ordering  the 
arrest  of  a  murderer.  .  .  A  gentleman  is 
telegraphing  his  wife  that.  .  .  A  general  is 
ordering  .  .  .'  Later  I  studied  physics;  and 
for  a  few  months  I  was  a  journalist,  young, 
naive,  ardent,  and  I  had  new  illusions  about  the 
rectitude  of  the  telegraph.  The  war,  my  dear 
friend,  has  dissipated  whatever  remained  of 
them.  I  now  know  that  the  telegraph  is  just 
what  I  knew  it  for  in  my  small-boyhood.  I 
know  that  the  agencies  of  information  employ 
scholars  and  poets  who  just  seat  themselves  on 
the  grass  at  the  foot  of  telegraph  poles  and 
hearken  to  the  song  of  the  wind  in  the  wires: 
'Berlin — Kaiser  and  Crown  Prince  have  quar- 
reled. The  Kaiser  smacked  the  Crown  Prince; 
New  York — A  new  explosive,  of  unprecedented 
power.  .  .'  O  my  friend,  the  season's  greet- 
ings to  you.  And  my  best  New  Year's  wish  is 
that  your  serenity  remain  unshaken  by  the  song 
of  the  wind  in  the  telegraph  wires." 


IN    THE    DAYS    BEFORE    F.    P.    A.    DESCENDED 

from  his  "Conning  Tower"  in  the  New  York 
"Tribune"  to  take  a  hand  in  this  war,  he  was 
wont  to  keep  a  sharp,  but  withal  friendly,  eye 
upon  the  editing  of  the  "Bookman" — a  fact  re- 
called this  month,  with  graceful  acknowledgment, 
both  by  the  editor  of  that  magazine  and  by  a 
distinguished  contributor.  "How  we  all  miss 
him!"  exclaims  the  contributor,  William  Lyon 
Phelps.  And  indeed  the  month's  "Bookman" 
might  be  said  to  carry  internal  evidence  of  its 
loss.  For  a  correspondent  takes  Miss  Jessie  Rit- 
tenhouse  to  task  for  having  confused  her  pro- 
nouns in  the  preceding  issue.  Later  we  read 
that  "  'Richard  Mahoney'  will  be  called  a  dif- 
ferent book  to  'Maurice  Guest.'  "  And  then 
comes  Mr.  Phelps  himself  (a  professor  of  Eng- 
lish at  Yale)  mislaying  a  modifier:  "One  night, 
half-dead  with  fear,  the  giant  crane  swoops 
down  upon  him,  clutches  his  bed,  and  swings 
him,  bed  and  all,  above  the  sleeping  city,  among 
the  blazing  stars."  Professor  Phelps  is  not  re- 
porting a  thousand  and  second  tale;  the  crane  is 
not  a  fabulous  bird,  but  a  swinging  arm  of 
steel.  The  "Bookman's"  correspondent  added 
that  "other  examples  could  readily  be  cited,  for 
our  magazines  are  fairly  bristling."  As  a  mat- 
ter of  justice  then,  here  are  two  dangling  bristles 
plucked  from  other  esteemed  contemporaries: 
from  a  recent  "Nation" — "Situated  at  an  alti- 


1918] 


119 


tude  expected  to  provide  an  Alpine  climate  in 
summer,  it  is  not  strange  that  frozen  pipes  made 
it  impossible  to  fight  the  flames" ;  and  from  the 
January  "Atlantic" — "After  wishing  each  other 
good-night  and  a  Happy  New  Year,  I  climbed 
the  dark,  dirty  stairway  to  the  fourth  floor." 
(And  this  last  is  not  a  case  of  the  double  per- 
sonality that  afflicts  many  New  Yorkers  on  New 
Year's  Eve.)  .  .  .  Such  editorial  phenom- 
ena, occurring  in  such  high  places,  are  something 
more  than  casual  contributions  to  the  gayety  of 
"colyums";  they  are  symptomatic  of  a  relaxing 
disorder  in  English  speech.  While  the  rhetori- 
cians have  been  busy  elaborating  their  quaint 
jargon  of  faulty  reference,  solecism,  misplaced 
modifier,  cleft  infinitive,  and  dangling  participle, 
the  actual  users  of  our  tongue  have  somehow 
enjoyed  increasing  license  to  orphan  pronouns, 
outrage  idioms,  jostle  modifiers,  cleave  infinitives 
asunder,  and  hang  participles  to  any  incongruous 
peg.  While  the  experts  have  employed  them- 
selves compiling  manual  after  manual  of  mis- 
leading short-cuts  to  "correctness"  and  rules  of 
thumb  annulled  by  their  exceptions,  there  has 
grown  up  without  effective  let  a  "magazine  Eng- 
lish" only  less  licentious  and  much  more  in- 
sidious than  "newspaper  English."  Until  the 
young  student  of  the  mother  tongue,  utterly  be- 
wildered by  the  intricacies  of  an  hypothetical 
"correctness,"  remarks  the  gulf  that  stretches 
between  the  theory  of  the  classroom  and  the 
practice  of  the  world  and  wisely  concludes  that 
there  is  also  a  "Freshman  English,"  which  he 
must  contrive  to  hoodwink  in  college  and  ignore 
after  graduation.  And  indeed  the  silken  Eng- 
lish which  is  meticulously  woven  on  the  loom 
of  rhetorical  dogma  bears  as  faint  a  resemblance 
to  the  homespun  English  which  carries  the  day's 
thought,  as  the  classical  "correctness"  of  the 
rhetoricians  bears  to  any  pragmatic  correctness 
implicit  in  everyday  usage.  No  correctness, 
however,  will  help  a  writer  very  far:  the  im- 
portant difficulties  in  composition  are  not  mat- 
ters of  what  is  right  or  wrong,  but  of  what  is 
more  or  less  effective,  and  more  or  less  agree- 
able. Had  the  experts  been  writing  current 
English  instead  of  compiling  outworn  taboos,  they 
might  have  guided  a  living  technique,  they  might 
even  have  relieved  editors  from  the  thankless  task 
of  mooring  derelict  modifiers  in  manuscripts 
otherwise  effective  and  agreeable.  Lacking  such 
practical  guidance,  however,  and  staggered  by 
the  complicated  elegance  of  a  "correctness"  thrust 
at  them  in  toto,  young  writers  have  caught  the 
trick  of  evading  stylistic  issues.  This  habit  of 
evasion  is  chiefly  responsible  for  the  disappearance 
of  the  subjunctive  and  the  ascendancy  of  "would." 
It  leads  away  from  the  clarity  of  technical  assur- 
ance into  a  fog  where  participles  hover  without 
visible  means  of  support. 


EVERY  RIGHT-THINKING  MAN  MUST  HOPE 
that  F.  P.  A.  is  only  temporarily  absent  from  his 
watchtower.  Meanwhile  B.  L.  T.  remains  to 
light  the  matutinal  eye  of  him  who  runs  and 
reads  another  "Tribune."  And  in  his  "Line  o' 
Type  or  Two"  B.  L.  T.  sometimes  performs  for 
THE  DIAL  the  sharp,  but  withal  friendly,  office 
that  F.  P.  A.  performed  for  the  "Bookman." 
Nevertheless  our  faith  in  the  Mentor's  infalli- 
bility has  been  shaken.  Not  long  since,  Mr. 
Kenneth  Macgowan  used  the  word  "panderer" 
in  these  columns  and  unexpectedly  "made  the 
Line,"  where  it  was  announced  that  no  such 
word  exists.  Even  the  Collegiate  "Webster"  is 
more  hospitable;  it  not  only  admits  "panderer" 
but  with  a  magnificent  impartiality  opens  the 
door  to  "panderess"  as  well. 


THE    WAR    SERVICE    OF    THE    AMERICAN    Ll- 

BRARY  ASSOCIATION  has  now  a  fund  of  a  million 
and  a  half  dollars  for  erecting  library  buildings 
at  the  camps,  purchasing  books,  and  meeting  the 
expenses  of  administration  and  distribution. 
Thirty-four  such  libraries  are  built  or  building. 
In  addition,  three  or  four  hundred  branch  libra- 
ries are  reported  as  established  in  clubs,  etc. 
The  public  has  already  donated  more  than  a 
half  million  volumes  for  distribution,  and  the 
Service  has  bought  a  hundred  thousand  more, 
chiefly  non-fiction.  Indeed,  one  of  the  surprises 
in  the  work  has  been  the  demand  for  serious, 
and  especially  for  technical,  books  and  for  all 
kinds  of  advanced  reference  material;  the  libra- 
rians have  had  to  meet  thousands  of  these  special 
requests  by  purchase  and  inter-library  borrowing. 
At  Camp  Sherman  the  record  of  issues  on  a 
recent  Sunday  showed  46  fiction  as  against  67 
non-fiction.  The  former  ran  all  the  way  from 
Mr.  Henty  to  Lord  Dunsany,  from  Mr.  Cham- 
bers to  H.  G.  Wells;  the  latter,  from  "Magi- 
cians' Tricks"  to  "How  to  Judge  a  Picture," 
and  from  the  "Foolish  Dictionary"  to  Henry 
George's  "Law  of  Human  Progress."  But 
probably  some  40  of  the  issues  might  legiti- 
mately be  grouped  as  war  books  and  as  directly 
pertinent  to  the  work  in  hand,  the  rest  dividing 
between  entertainment  and  general  (or  often 
very  particular)  information.  Their  library  is 
to  accompany  these  men  to  France,  and  the  fact 
is  arresting.  Is  the  soldier's  leisure,  so  long 
devoted  to  the  romance  of  foraging  for  the  day's 
necessities  or  the  night's  violent  luxuries,  now 
to  be  dedicate  to  the  cultural  pursuits  of  peace? 
Time  was  when  no  army  was  complete  without 
its  train  of  loot  and  camp  followers;  is  the  time 
coming  when  no  army  will  be  complete  without 
its  library,  lecture  room,  concert  hall,  and  art 
gallery?  Is  the  phrase  "civilized  warfare"  to 
take  on  yet  another  overtone  of  irony? 


120 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


BRIEFER  MENTION 


The  avalanche  of  war  literature  increases.  We 
are  told  a  great  deal  these  days  about  bombs  and 
mud  and  cigarettes,  and  yet  we  continue  to  read 
about  them  with  avidity.  "Best  o'  Luck"  by 
Alexander  McClintock  (Doran;  $1.)  is  a  sort  of 
technical  primer  of  explosives  and  other  weapons, 
their  use  and  dangers,  told  naively  in  purest  Ameri- 
can. Mr.  McClintock  declined  a  lieutenancy  in 
the  Canadian  Grenadier  Guards,  in  which  he  had 
served  as  sergeant  during  some  of  the  hardest 
fighting  of  the  war,  to  enlist  in  the  American 
army.  "It's  the  army  of  Uncle  Sam  for  mine," 
says  Mr.  McClintock,  "It's  up  to  us  to  save  the 
issue  where  it's  mostly  right  on  one  side  and  all 
wrong  on  the  other — and  I'm  glad  we're  in."  "The 
First  Canadians  in  France"  by  Colonel  F.  McKel- 
vey  Bell  (Doran;  $1.35)  is  a  random  set  of  reminis- 
cences, a  trifle  wordy,  but  sincere,  of  the  first 
Canadian  hospital  unit  in  France.  It  is  another 
answer  to  the  question,  "What  is  it  like,  over 
there?" 

Written  in  the  form  of  a  diary,  Agnes  Edwards's 
"A  Garden  Rosary"  (Houghton  Mifflin;  $1.25)  is 
a  record  of  her  garden,  which  calls  forth  imagistic 
reactions  and  philosophical  musings  on  the  part 
of  the  author.  The  rush-and-tumble  coming  up 
of  the  tulips  hastily  "flung  in  at  the  last  moment," 
she  compares  to  women  pulling  on  their  gloves 
as  they  hurry  down  the  street;  the  soullessness  of 
the  columbine,  she  likens  to  the  same  quality  in  a 
certain  little  Japanese  manservant;  the  lily  of  the 
valley  evokes  reflections  upon  virginity.  And  so 
it  happens  that  there  is  much  in  these  pages  which 
might  find  its  way  into  free  verse.  It  should  be 
added  that  a  genuine  and  delightful  tenderness 
obtains  throughout  for  the  memory  of  the  author's 
mother,  to  whom  the  "Rosary"  is  dedicated. 

E.  F.  Borst-Smith's  "Mandarin  and  Missionary 
in  Cathay"  (Button;  $1.75)  is  a  "story  of  twelve 
years'  strenuous  missionary  work  during  stirring 
times  mainly  spent  in  Yenanfu,  a  prefectural  city 
of  Shensi,  North  China,  with  a  review  of  its  his- 
tory from  the  earliest  date."  The  writer  was  a 
pioneer  in  the  district  he  describes,  being  the  first 
English  resident  in  North  Shensi,  while  his  wife 
was  the  first  European  woman  ever  seen  there,  and 
his  little  girl  the  first  non-Chinese  baby  ever  born 
there.  Of  this  he  assures  us  after  a  careful 
scrutiny  of  North  Shensi  annals  for  the  past  four 
thousand  years  and  more.  His  twelve  years'  ex- 
perience was  evidently  not  lacking  in  variety,  and 
it  occasionally  had  its  thrilling  episodes.  Life  in  a 
country  undergoing  the  pains  of  transition  from 
monarchy  to  republic  is  not  likely  to  be  without 
excitement,  including  the  element  of  danger  to  life 
and  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  Thus  the 
pages  of  this  book  offer  rather  more  of  varied 
interest  than  is  commonly  to  be  found  in  a  mis- 
sionary chronicle. 

A  series  of  experiments  and  observations  on 
health  control  on  estates  and  plantations  in  the 
tropics  is  presented  in  a  lucid  and  pleasing  manner 
in  Dr.  Watson's  "Rural  Sanitation  in  the  Tropics" 
(Dutton).  The  author  has  had  much  practical 


experience  on  rubber,  tea,  and  rice  plantations  in 
the  Straits  Settlements,  in  the  Federated  Malay 
States,  and  in  British  Guiana,  has  visited  Sumatra 
and  Hongkong,  and  has  made  an  exhaustive  in- 
quiry into  the  American  methods  and  accomplish- 
ments in  sanitation  at  Panama.  Of  especial  interest 
to  every  American  is  the  high  tribute  paid  by  the 
writer  to  work  at  Panama  and  to  the  men  who 
have  accomplished  the  conquest  of  disease  in  that 
infamous  sink-hole  of  fever  and  death.  He  notes 
the  singularly  happy  spirit  in  the  Panama  Sanitary 
Department,  the  spirit  of  cooperation,  the  esprit 
de  corps,  and  regards  it  as  one  of  the  greatest 
privileges  of  his  life  that  he  saw  the  department 
at  work.  He  urges  the  complete  publication  of 
the  accumulated  records  of  the  work  and  of  the 
investigations  connected  therewith,  believing  that 
"in  these  records  we  have  observations  and  truths 
of  infinite  value  to  all  tropical  countries  and  that 
their  publication  in  full  would  be  a  lasting  benefit 
to  mankind."  Colonel  Gorgas  has  done  far  more 
than  assist  in  the  construction  of  a  great  canal, 
"he  has  conducted  a  school  of  Applied  Sanitation 
whose  lesson  will  benefit  the  world — I  say  with 
confidence — for  all  time."  Wherever  large  num- 
bers of  laborers  are  employed  in  the  tropics,  the 
appalling  mortality  of  the  past  need  not  recur. 
The  book  deals  mainly  with  the  practical  measures 
for  the  prevention  of  malaria  and  its  extermination 
in  isolated  country  districts  under  tropical  condi- 
tions. The  breadth  of  vision  and  penetrating  crit- 
icism of  the  writer  combine  with  his  wide 
experience  to  make  this  work  one  of  unusual  sug- 
gestiveness  and  value  to  all  who  deal  with  prob- 
lems of  sanitation  and  preventive  medicine. 

In  "A  Green  Tent  in  Flanders"  (Doubleday, 
Page;  $1.25)  Miss  Maud  Mortimer,  an  Ameri- 
can nurse,  describes  her  experiences  in  a  hospital 
five  miles  back  of  the  British  line  in  Belgium.  The 
story  moves  along  with  much  spirit  and  no  little 
humor;  and  it  is  entertaining,  cheerful,  human, 
and  natural,  like  a  clever  woman's  letters  home. 
The  wounded  soldiers  who  pass  under  Miss  Mor- 
timer's care  are  portrayed  with  graphic,  sympa- 
thetic touch,  and  the  numerous  anecdotes  could 
only  have  been  told  by  an  acute  observer  with  a 
sense  for  the  picturesque.  Altogether  the  book  is 
pleasant  company  for  an  evening. 

In  "Green  Trails  and  Upland  Pastures" 
(Doubleday,  Page;  $1.60)  Walter  Prichard  Eaton 
shows  once  more  that  he  can  write  with  ease  and 
first-hand  knowledge  of  the  whole  outdoors,  from 
maple  seeds  to  the  Grinnell  Glacier,  from  song 
sparrows  to  sky  lines.  He  talks  of  weather,  trees, 
snow,  stone  walls,  rural  free  delivery,  gardening, 
wild  flowers,  bridges,  and  mountain  peaks  with 
impartial  and  quiet  enthusiasm.  His  spirit  is  as 
much  at  home  on  the  wind-swept  heights  of  the 
Rockies  as  amid  the  soft  contours  of  the  Berk- 
shires.  But  the  shining  merit  of  these  nineteen 
essays  is  the  fact  that  their  author  treats  nature 
simply;  there  is  little  or  none  of  the  extravagant 
rhapsody  and  the  tiresome  homily  that  mar  many 
"nature  books,"  early  and  late. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


121 


In  "The  Hilltop  on  the  Marne"  Mildred  Aid- 
rich  had  something  to  say  and  said  it  well.  In 
"On  the  Edge  of  the  War  Zone"  (Small,  Maynard; 
$1.25)  she  appears  to  have  nothing  of  much  mo- 
ment to  write  of  and  she  only  succeeds  in  being 
tiresome.  One  suspects  that  the  success  of  the 
earlier  work  led  to  a  call  for  more  "copy,"  with 
an  unhappy  result.  The  hilltop  is  now  back  of 
the  French  line  and  little  seems  to  happen  there 
except  as  soldiers  pass  to  and  fro  along  the  road. 
The  days  go  by  in  comparative  monotony,  and  the 
intimate  details  of  household  affairs  fill  up  many 
weary  pages.  With  so  many  interesting  stories  of 
war  to  be  told  one  can  only  regret  this  long-drawn- 
out,  gossipy  chronicle  of  small  happenings. 

That  Starr  King,  "Saint  of  the  Pacific  Coast," 
was  a  good  deal  more  than  a  mere  pulpit-pounder 
was  long  ago  made  clear,  and  is  again  demonstrated 
in  Mr.  William  Day  Simonds's  study  of  that  re- 
markable man's  services  to  the  Union  and  free- 
dom—"Starr  King  in  California"  (Elder;  $1.25). 
A  short  opening  chapter  devoted  to  King's  early 
life  in  New  England  is  followed  by  two  longer 
ones  on  California  in  the  early  sixties  and  King's 
part  in  helping  to  turn  that  state  to  the  side  of 
the  North  in  those  critical  times;  then  comes  a 
review  of  his  work  as  philanthropist  and  preacher, 
and  finally  a  brief  retrospect  of  his  career  as  a 
whole.  Contemporary  sources  of  information  have 
been  diligently  sought  out  and  judiciously  drawn 
upon,  a  few  of  King's  old  friends  and  acquaintances 
being  still  alive  to  contribute  their  testimony  and 
reminiscences.  The  book  is  a  scholarly  and  con- 
clusive estimate  of  the  part  played  by  the  great 
preacher  and  orator  in  saving  his  adoptive  state 
from  joining  the  Confederacy  or,  perhaps,  from 
proclaiming  a  Pacific  republic  of  its  own. 


COMMUNICATIONS 


"LA  MALQUERIDA" 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

Reading  Mr.  Padraic  Colum's  review  of  Mr. 
Underbill's  translation  of  Benavente's  plays,  I  was 
struck  by  the  justness  of  the  criticism  of  "La  Mal- 
querida,"  which  Mr.  Colum  declares  ".  .  .  has  dis- 
tinction by  reason  of  a  strange  reserve  that  goes 
through  it  all."  I  have  heard  "La  Malquerida" 
acted  in  Spanish  and  I  have  heard  Mimi  Agulia 
in  "La  Lupa,"  and  as  the  plots  are  very  much 
alike  I  can,  I  believe,  contrast  "fury  out-topping 
fury"  with  the  "strange  reserve"  through  which, 
Mr.  Colum  adds,  "we  are  made  to  feel  the  gravity 
and  the  dignity  of  the  Spanish  character  all  through 
the  play." 

"La  Malquerida"  won  phenomenal  praise  in 
Madrid,  a  well-known  critic  going  so  far  as  to  de- 
clare that  it  is  in  line  with  the  great  tragedies  of 
the  Greek  stage  and  dramas  such  as  "Hamlet" 
and  "Othello,"  and  that  as  a  national  work  it 
ranks  with  Calderon's  "El  Alcalde  de  Zalamea," 
with  Lope  de  Vega's  "La  Fuente  Ovejuna,"  and 
so  on,  and  so  on,  ad  libitum.  But  the  author  would 
certainly  be  more  pleased  to  read  Mr.  Colum's 


appreciation  with  its  penetrating  phrase  about  "the 
strange  reserve"  than  to  hear  such  meaningless  and 
bombastic  comparisons. 

When  Mr.  Colum  tells  us  of  "La  Malquerida" 
I  regret  that  he  does  not  mention  the  scene  be- 
tween the  husband  and  the  outraged  wife,  for  it 
is  inseparable  from  one's  memory  of  the  play  as 
an  unequaled  example  of  the  conflict  of  simul- 
taneous emotions.  The  wife,  raging  at  her  hus- 
band as  she  gives  him  a  glass  of  water,  is  angry 
to  the  point  of  cursing  the  water,  that  it  may 
poison  him,  and  yet  at  the  moment  he  is  to  gulp 
it  down,  her  habit  of  wifely  solicitude  gets  the 
better  of  her  and  she  warns  him  not  to  drink 
while  he  is  hot  and  perspiring. 

I  agree  with  Mr.  Colum  that  "La  Malquerida" 
should  be  given  a  hearing  on  the  American  stage: 
aside  from  the  value  of  the  play  itself,  it  would 
prepare  the  taste  of  the  public  for  the  Spanish 
theatre  with  its  rich  inheritance  of  fine  plays. 

J.  GARCIA  PIMENTEL. 

New  York. 


AN  UNPUBLISHED  POEM  BY  POE 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 
Students  of  Poe  may  be  interested  to  learn  that 
a  file  of  the  "Baltimore  Saturday  Visiter"  for 
1833,  no  copy  of  which  was  supposed  by  Poe 
editors  to  be  in  existence,  has  been  preserved  by 
descendants  of  the  proprietors.  I  have  been  per- 
mitted to  examine  the  volume  and  have  found  in 
it,  besides  interesting  information  about  the  prize 
contest  which  proved  so  momentous  in  the  poet's 
literary  life,  a  hitherto  unpublished  poem  by  Poe. 
I  hope  shortly  to  give  some  account  of  the  "Visi- 
ter" and  its  relation  to  Poe.  The  poem  is  of  such 
immediate  interest  that  it  seems  desirable  to  make 
it  available  at  once.  It  was  printed  in  the  issue 
of  April  20,  1833,  as  follows: 

SERENADE. — BY  E.  A.  POE. 
So  sweet  the  hour,  so  calm  the  time, 
I  feel  it  more  than  half  a  crime, 
When  Nature  sleeps  and  stars  are  mute, 
To  mar  the  silence  ev'n  with  lute. 
At  rest  on  ocean's  brilliant  dies 
An  image  of  Elysium  lies: 
Seven  Pleiades  entranced  in  Heaven, 
Form  in  the  deep  another  seven: 
Endymion  nodding  from  above 
Sees  in  the  sea  another  love. 
Within  the  valleys  dim  and  brown, 
And  on  the  spectral  mountain's  crown, 
The  wearied  light  is  dying  down, 
And  earth,  and  stars,  and  sea,  and  sky 
Are  redolent  of  sleep,  as  I 
Am  redolent  of  thee  and  thine 
Enthralling  love,  my  Adeline. 
But  list,  O  list, — so  soft  and  low 
Thy  lover's  voice  to  night  shall  flow, 
That  scarce  awake  thy  soul  shall  deem 
My  words  the  music  of  a  dream. 
Thus,  while  no  single  sound  too  rude, 
Upon  thy  slumber  shall  intrude, 
Our  thoughts,  our  souls — O  God  above! 
In  every  deed  shall  mingle,  love. 

JOHN  C.  FRENCH. 
Johns  Hopkins   University. 


122 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


NOTES  AND  NEWS 


Laurence  Binyon,  who  writes  in  this  issue  of 
THE  DIAL  about  the  effect  of  the  war  upon  art, 
is  an  English  poet  and  critic,  the  author  of  a  dozen 
volumes  of  verse,  who  is  perhaps  best  known  to 
Americans  by  his  drama  "Attila."  He  won  the 
Newdigate  prize  in  1890.  Mr.  Binyon  is  in  the 
Department  of  Prints  and  Drawings  in  the  British 
Museum  and  has  been  a  frequent  contributor  to 
periodicals  of  the  fine  arts. 

Elsie  Clews  Parsons,  who  contributes  to  this 
issue  a  refreshingly  unconventional  discussion  of  an 
immigrant's  point  of  view,  has  long  since  made  her- 
self known  to  the  public  as  an  original  and  keen 
critic  of  social  problems,  and  especially  of  the 
status  of  women.  She  is  the  author  of  "The  Fam- 
ily," "Fear  and  Conventionality,"  "The  Old 
Fashioned  Woman,"  "Social  Freedom,"  "Social 
Rule,"  and  many  magazine  articles. 

On  January  17  the  University  of  Chicago  Press 
published  "The  Millennial  Hope :  A  Phase  of  War- 
time Thinking,"  by  Dr.  Shirley  Jackson  Chase. 

The  Page  Co.  have  just  published  a  detective 
story  by  George  Barton,  "The  Mystery  of  the 
Red  Flame." 

Harry  Butters,  a  California  boy  who  fell  at  the 
Somme  and  whose  letters  were  recently  issued  by 
John  Lane  Co.,  was  the  great-grandson  of  Samuel 
Woodworth,  author  of  "The  Old  Oaken  Bucket." 

The   Macmillan  Co.   announces   a  new  book  by 

Edgar  Lee  Masters,  "Toward  the  Gulf."    Among 

•their  January  publications  were   "Hill-Track,"  by 

Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson,   and  "Per  dmica  Silentia 

Lunae,"  by  William  Butler  Yeats. 

James  Lane  Allen  has  written  a  companion  novel 
to  "A  Kentucky  Cardinal"  in  "The  Kentucky 
Warbler,"  a  story  of  a  boy's  first  awakening  to 
nature.  It  was  published  last  week  by  Double- 
day,  Page  &  Co. 

In  this  month's  Scribner  issues  are:  "Credit  of 
the  Nations,"  by  J.  Laurence  Laughlin  of  Chicago 
University;  "The  Desert:  Further  Studies  in 
Natural  Appearance,"  by  John  C.  Van  Dyke;  and 
"American  Democracy  and  Asiatic  Citizenship," 
by  Sidney  L.  Gulick. 

The  Boston  Museum  of  Fine  Arts  has  announced 
that  publication  of  the  "Print  Collector's  Quar- 
terly" must  be  suspended  for  the  duration  of  the 
war.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  are  preparing  a  cumu- 
lative index  of  the  seven  volumes  that  have  been 
issued,  1911-1917. 

An  article  on  Coleridge  as  a  great  talker,  by 
Coventry  Patmore,  which  had  not  been  reprinted 
since  1886,  when  it  appeared  anonymously,  is  in- 
cluded in  a  new  volume  in  the  Oxford  Standard 
Authors  (Oxford  University  Press)  which  will 
contain  "Table  Talk,"  "Omniana,"  and  H.  N. 
Coleridge's  preface. 

The  following  fiction  was  issued  on  January  12 
by  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.:  "Nine  Tales,"  by  Hugh  de 
Selincourt;  "Under  the  Hermes,"  by  Richard 
Dehan;  and  "South  Wind,"  by  Norman  Douglas. 
On  the  same  day  they  published  a  translation  of 
Benjamin  Vallotton's  "Potterat  and  the  War." 


Harper  &  Brothers  have  lately  printed  for  pri- 
vate distribution  "The  Harper  Centennial:  1817- 
1917,"  an  attractive  volume  containing  a  selection 
from  the  messages  of  congratulation  received  by 
them  during  their  centennial  year.  The  frontispiece 
is  a  facsimile  of  the  title-page  of  the  first  book  to 
bear  the  Harper  imprint. 

The  Newark  Public  Library  is  making  a  collec- 
tion of  "journals  and  bulletins  published  by  the 
soldiers  at  the  front,  also  engravings  and  pictures 
and  souvenirs  of  all  kinds,  letters  from  soldiers 
to  their  friends,  and  so  on."  The  plan  is  to  exhibit 
the  collection  in  the  library  gallery  with  the  purpose 
of  making  the  war  as  real  as  possible  to  relatives 
and  friends  of  departing  American  soldiers. 

The  January  issue  of  "The  Piper,"  the  folder 
in  which  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  chat  with  pros- 
pective customers,  promises  that  there  will  shortly 
appear  the  first  number  of  a  monthly  brochure  to 
be  called  "Pen  Pricks  from  the  Piper"  and  to  be 
devoted  to  thumb  nail  descriptions  of  worthy  books. 
It  is  primarily  intended  for  "those  who  sell  books," 
but  upon  application  it  will  be  sent  free  to  the 
interested  buyer  or  reader  of  books. 

George  H.  Doran  Co.  have  recently  removed 
from  38  West  32nd  Street,  New  York,  to  244 
Madison  Avenue,  at  38th  Street,  where  they  occupy 
the  sixth  floor  of  a  new  building  at  the  top  of 
Murray  Hill.  Among  their  recent  publications 
connected  with  the  war  are:  "Naval  Power  in  the 
Great  War,"  by  Charles'  Clifford  Gill;  "The  Great 
Crime  and  Its  Moral,"  by  J.  Selden  Willmore; 
"In  Mesopotamia,"  by  Martin  Swayne;  "The 
Brown  Brethren,"  further  studies  of  the  London 
Irish  in  France,  by  Patrick  MacGill;  and  "World 
Peace,"  a  written  debate  between  Mr.  Taft  and 
Mr.  Bryan. 

Before  the  Russian  Revolution  Leon  Trotzky, 
now  Foreign  Minister  in  the  Bolshevik  govern- 
ment, wrote  "The  Bolsheviki  and  World  Peace," 
which  has  just  been  published  by  Boni  &  Liveright. 

A  first  prize  of  $500  and  a  second  prize  of  $300 
are  offered  by  the  Publishing  Committee  of  the 
American  Tract  Society  for  manuscripts  "of  a 
religious  character  with  a  strong  Christian  motive. 
The  manuscripts  desired  are  a  story  for  children, 
a  story  for  young  people,  a  story  for  adults,  and  a 
manuscript  setting  forth  the  necessity  of  the  con- 
servation of  the  moral  and  spiritual  forces  of  our 
nation.  Manuscripts  of  biographies  and  missionary 
achievements,  also  other  manuscripts  carrying  a 
strong  Christian  message  will  be  eligible."  The 
manuscripts  must  be  suitable  for  publication  in 
book  form,  but  must  not  exceed  75,000  words. 
In  addition  to  the  prizes,  the  customary  book  royal- 
ties will  be  paid  the  successful  authors.  Manu- 
scripts which  fail  to  receive  prizes,  but  are  accepted 
by  the  Committee,  will  be  published  upon  a  royalty 
basis  by  mutual  agreement.  The  prize  books  will 
be  published  under  the  imprint  of  the  Meridian 
Press  and  are  to  become  the  property  of  the  So- 
ciety. Manuscripts  must  be  typewritten,  on  one 
side  of  the  sheet,  and  must  be  received  not  later 
than  May  15,  1918  by  Rev.  Judson  Swift,  D.D., 
General  Secretary,  Park  Avenue  and  40th  Street, 
New  York  City. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


123 


OF  NEW  BOOKS 


[The  following  list,  containing  117  titles,  includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.] 

FICTION. 

The  U.  P.  Trail.  By  Zane  Grey.  With  frontispiece, 
12mo,  409  pages.  Harper  &  Bros.  $1.50. 

The  Kentucky  "Warbler.  By  James  Lane  Allen. 
With  frontispiece,  12mo,  195  pages.  Doubleday, 
Page  &  Co.  $1.25. 

Just  Outside.  By  Stacy  Aumonier.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  344  pages.  The  Century  Co.  $1.35. 

Comrades.  By  Mary  Dillon.  Illustrated,  12mo,  396 
pages.  The  Century  Co.  $1.40. 

Teepee  Neighbors.  By  Grace  Coolidge.  12mo,  225 
pages.  Four  Seas  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Land  Where  the  Sunsets  Go.  By  Orville  H. 
Leonard.  12mo,  209  pages.  Sherman,  French 
&  Co.  $1.35. 

The  Flamingo's  Nest.  By  Roger  Sprague.  12mo, 
369  pages.  Lederer,  Street  &  Zeus.  Berkeley, 
Cal.  $1.35. 

The  Call  of  the  "Wild.  By  Jack  London.  Edited  by 
Theodore  C.  Mitchell.  With  frontispiece,  16mo, 
132  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  25  cts. 

WAR. 

The  Commonwealth  at  War.  By  A.  F.  Pollard. 
8vo,  256  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  $2.25. 

The  "Ways  of  War.  By  Prof.  T.  M.  Kettle.  With  a 
Memoir  by  his  wife.  With  frontispiece,  12mo, 
246  pages.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  $1.50. 

The  Nemesis  of  Mediocrity.  By  Ralph  Adams 
Cram.  8vo,  52  pages.  Marshall  Jones  Co.  $1. 

Naval  Power  in  the  War.  By  Charles  Gifford  Gill, 
U.  S.  N.  Illustrated,  12mo,  224  pages.  George 
H.  Doran  Co.  $1.25. 

The  United  States  and  Pangermanla.  By  Andre 
Cheradame.  Illustrated,  12mo,  170  pages.  Charles 
Scribner's  Sons.  $1.25. 

The  Willy-Nicky  Correspondence.  Being  the  Secret 
and  Intimate  Telegrams  Exchanged  Between  the 
Kaiser  and  the  Tsar.  By  Herman  Bernstein. 
With  a  foreword  by  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  158  pages.  Alfred  A.  Knopf.  $1. 

A  Crusader  of  France.  The  Letters  of  Capt.  Ferdi- 
nand Belmont.  Translated  from  the  French 
by  G.  Frederick  Lees.  With  a  foreword  by 
Henry  Bordeaux.  With  frontispiece,  12mo,  366 
pages.  E.  P.  Button  &  Co.  $1.50. 

A  Yankee  In  the  Trenches.  By  Corp.  R.  Derby 
Holmes.  Illustrated,  12mo,  214  pages.  Little, 
Brown  &  Co.  Paper.  $1.35. 

The  Invisible  Guide.  By  C.  Lewis  Hind.  12mo,  208 
pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1. 

The  High  Call.  By  Ernest  M.  Stires.  12mo,  180 
pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Defenders  of  Democracy.  Edited  by  the  Gift 
Book  Committee  of  the  Militia  of  Mercy.  Illus- 
trated, 8vo,  324  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $2.50. 

The  Cantonment  Manual.  By  Major  W.  G.  Kilner 
and  Lieut.  A.  J.  MacEltoy.  16mo,  307  pages. 
D.  Appleton  &  Co.  $1. 

We  of  Italy.  By  Mrs.  K.  R.  Steege.  12mo,  269 
pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 

In  the  National  Army  Hopper.  By  Draftee  No. 
357.  16mo.  54  pages.  J.  B.  Lippincott  Co. 

Small  Arms  Instructors'  Manual.  Compiled  by  the 
small  arms  instruction  corps.  Illustrated,  16mo, 
184  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  60  cts. 

The  Undying  Spirit  of  France.  By  Maurice  Barres. 
Translated  by  Margaret  W.  B.  Corwin.  16mo, 
58  pages.  Yale  University  Press.  80  cts. 

Alsace-Lorraine.  By  Daniel  Blumenthal.  12mo, 
60  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  75  cts. 

Don  Hale  In  the  "War  Zone.  By  W.  Crispin  Shep- 
pard.  Illustrated,  12mo,  312  pages.  Penn  Pub- 
lishing Co.  60  cts. 

French  for  Soldiers.  By  Arthur  W.  Whittem  and 
Percy  W.  Long.  16mo,  130  pages.  Harvard 
University  Press. 

The  Attack  In  Trench  Warfare.  By  Captain  Andr6 
Laffargue.  Illustrated,  16mo,  82  pages.  D.  Van 
Nostrand  Co.  50  cts. 

For  the  Boys  at  the  Front.  Fifteen  war  tracts. 
Presbyterian  Board  of  Publication.  Per  set, 
25  cts. 


"The  Most  Sensational  Book 
of  the  War'1 

HI  BOLSHEVIKI 

AND 

WORLD  PEACE 

By  LEON 

TROTZKV 

opening  the  eyes  of  the 

world  to  the  fact 

that  the 

Bolsheviki  are  really 
Anti-Hohenzollern 

As  remarkable  and  unexpected 

as  the  man  who 

wrote  it 


Six  months  ago  he  lived  in 

a  Bronx  Tenement — 

Today 

He  Is  Dictating  to 
the  Kaiser! 

Introduction  by  Lincoln  Steffens, 
the  man  who  knows  him 


$1.50  Net.    Wherever  books  are  sold 


BONI  &  UVERIGHT 

105  West  Fort*  ^  St.,  New  York  City 

\ 


124 


THE    DIAL 


[January  31 


"I  visited  with  a  natural  rapture  the 
largest  bookstore  in  the  world." 

See  the  chapter  on  Chicago,  page  43,  "Your 
United  States,"  by  Arnold  Bennett 

It  is  recognized  throughout  the  country 
that  we  earned  this  reputation  because  we 
have  on  hand  at  all  times  a  more  complete 
assortment  of  the  books  of  all  publishers  than 
can  be  found  on  the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
dealer  in  the  entire  United  States.  It  is  of 
interest  and  importance  to  all  bookbuyers  to 
know  that  the  books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  procured  from  us  with 
the  least  possible  delay.  We  invite  you  to 
visit  our  store  when  in  Chicago,  to  avail  your- 
self of  the  opportunity  of  looking  over  the 
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book  wants. 

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Retail   Store.   218   to   224   South    Wabash   Avenue 

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330  to  352  East  Ohio  Street 

Chicago 


POETRY  AND  DRAMA. 

Nocturne  of  Remembered  Spring,  and  Other  Poems. 

By  Conrad  Aiken.     12mo,  140  pagres.     Four  Seas 

Co.     $1.25. 
Gardens   Overseas,    and   Other  Poems.      By  Thomas 

Walsh.     12mo,  155  pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1.25. 
Songs    of    the    Celtic    Past.      By    Norreys    Jephson 

O'Conor.      With    frontispiece,    12mo,    171    pages. 

$1.25. 
The    Potter's    Clay.      By    Marie    Tudor.       12mo,     80 

pages.     G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  $1.50. 
Muffle's    Prophecy.       By    William    Wallace     Muffle. 

12mo,  134  pages.     Oxford  University  Press. 
The   Old  Huntsman.     By   Siegfried  Sassoon.      12mo, 

109  pages.     E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.     $2. 
The    Soul    of    America.      By    Robert    M,    Wernaer. 

12mo,  98  pages.     Pour  Seas  Co.     $1.25. 
To-morrow  and   Other  Poems.     By  Innes  Stitt   and 

Leo  Ward.     With  a  foreword  by  Canon  H.  Scott 

Holland.     12mo,   59  pages.     Longmans,  Green  & 

Co.     $1. 
Pawns   of   War.      By   Bosworth   Crocker.      12mo,    85 

pages.     Little,  Brown  &  Co.     $1.25. 
Efficiency.     By  Robert   H.   Davis  and   Perley  Poore 

Sheehan.      12mo,    40    pages.      George    H.    Doran 

Co.     75   cts. 
The  Moods  of  Ginger  Mick.     By  C.  J.  Dennis,     16mo, 

150  pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1. 
A  Father  of  "Women,  and   Other  Poems.     By  Alice 

Meynell.      8vo,    30    pages.      Burns   &   Gates   Ltd. 

London.     Paper.     2s. 
Lee.      An    Epic.      By    Flora    E.    Stevens.      12mo,    80 

pages.     Burton  Publishing  Co. 

GENERAL   LITERATURE. 

Rlnconete  and  Cortadillo.  By  Miguel  de  Cervantes. 
Translated  with  an  introduction  and  notes  by 
Mariano  J.  Lorente.  With  a  preface  by  R.  B. 
Cunninghame  Graham.  Illustrated,  12mo,  152 
pages.  The  Four  Seas  Co.  $1.50. 

Edmund  Spenser,  A  Critical  Study  by  Herbert  Ells- 
worth Cory.  Vol.  5  of  the  University  of  Cali- 
fornia Publications  in  Modern  Philology.  8vo, 
478  pages.  University  of  California  Press.  $3.50. 

Jonathan  Swift.  The  Leslie  Stephen  Lecture.  By 
Charles  Whibley.  12mo,  45  pages.  G.  P.  Put- 
nam's Sons. 

A  Bookman's  Budget.  Composed  and  compiled  by 
Austin  Dobson.  Illustrated,  12mo,  201  pages. 
Oxford  University  Press.  $1.50. 

The  "Wings  of  the  Morning:.  By  Arthur  Grant. 
12mo,  290  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $2. 

Wander-Ships.  By  Wilbur  Bassett.  With  frontis- 
piece, 8vo,  136  pages.  Open  Court  Publishing 
Co. 

Aeneas  at  the  Site  of  Rome.  By  W.  Warde  Fowler. 
12mo,  129  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  $1.50. 

Maxims  of  Le  Due  de  La  Rochefoucauld.  Trans- 
lated by  John  Heard,  Jr.  With  frontispiece, 
16mo,  110  pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  Boxed. 
$4.  Limited  edition. 

Twenty-two  Goblins.  Translated  from  the  Sans- 
krit by  Arthur  W.  Ryder.  Illustrated,  8vo,  220 
pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $3. 

BIOGRAPHY   AND   REMINISCENCE. 

Latest  Light  on  Abraham  Lincoln,  and  War-time 
Memories.  By  Ervin  Chapman.  Illustrated,  2 
volumes,  8vo,  275-295  pages.  Fleming  H.  Revell 
Co.  Boxed.  $5. 

Life  and  Letters  of  Thomas  Hodgkin.  By  Louise 
Creighton.  Illustrated,  8vo,  445  pages.  Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co.  $4.50. 

Memories  of  Eton  Sixty  Years  Ago.  By  Arthur 
Campbell  Ainger.  With  contributions  from  Ne- 
ville Gerald  Lyttelton  and  John  Murray.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  354  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 
$3.50. 

Political  Portraits.  By  Charles  Whibley.  12mo, 
327  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $2.50. 

TRAVEL  AND   DESCRIPTION. 

On  the  Eaves  of  the  "World.     By  Reginald  Farrer. 

2     volumes.       Illustrated,     8vo,     311-328     pages. 

Longmans,  Green  &  Co.     $9. 
Chicago.      By   H.    C.    Chatfleld-Taylor.      Illustrated, 

8vo,  129  pages.     Houghton  Mifflin  Co.     $8. 
The   Book    of    New   York.      By    Robert    Shackleton. 

Illustrated,    12mo,   377   pages.     Penn   Publishing 

Co.     Boxed.     $2.50. 


1918] 


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125 


Our  Hawaii.  By  Charmlan  Kittredge  London.  Il- 
lustrated, 12mo,  345  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co. 
$2.25. 

Highways  and  Byways  In  Wiltshire.  By  Edward 
Hutton.  Illustrated  by  Nelly  Erichsen.  12mo. 
463  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $2. 

Intimate  Prussia.  By  A.  Raymond.  12mo,  286 
pages.  B.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $2. 

THE  ARTS. 

A   History   of   Art.     By   William    Henry   Goodyear. 

Illustrated,  8vo,  394  pages.     A.  S.  Barnes  Co. 
An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Landscape  Design. 

By  Henry  Vincent  Hubbard  and  Theodora  Kim- 
ball.  Illustrated,  4to,  406  pages.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.  Boxed.  $6. 

Furniture  of  the  Olden  Time.  By  Frances  Clary 
Morse.  Illustrated,  8vo,  470  pages.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.  $6. 

Early  English  Portrait  Miniatures.  In  the  Col- 
lection of  the  Duke  of  Buccleuch.  By  H.  A. 
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plates.  John  Lane  Co. 

Ivultur  In  Cartoons.  By  Louis  Raeinaekers.  4to, 
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Modern  Water-Color.  By  Romilly  Pedden.  Illus- 
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52. 

Landscape  and  Figure  Painters  of  America.  By 
Frederick  Fairchild  Sherman.  Illustrated,  8vo, 
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One  Hundred  Songs  by  Ten  Masters.  Edited  by 
Henry  T.  Finck.  2  volumes.  4to,  189-186  pages. 
Oliver  Ditson  Co.  Paper.  $1.50.  Cloth.  $2.50. 

Sword  and  Scissors  or  Napoleon  Caught  Napping. 
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The  Sleeping  Beauty.  Cantata  for  Women's  Voices. 
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NATURE  AND   OUTDOOR  LIFE. 

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"Wood  and  Water  Friends.  By  Clarence  Hawkes. 
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The  Spring  of  Joy.  By  Mary  Webb.  12mo,  136 
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The  Human  Side  of  Birds.  By  Royal  Dixon.  Illus- 
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Our  Backdoor  Neighbors.  By  Frank  C.  Pellett. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  209  pages.  The  Abiiigdon 
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Messages  of  Flowers.  With  frontispiece,  16mo,  144 
pages.  George  H.  O'Neill.  $1. 

The  Story  of  Some  French  Refugees  and  their 
"Azilum."  By  Louise  Welles  Murray.  Second 
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Mordecal  M.  Noah.  By  A.  B.  Makover.  16mo,  96 
pages.  Bloch  Publishing  Co.  Paper.  75  cts. 

Happy  Days.  By  Oliver  Herford  and  John  Cecil 
Clay.  Illustrated,  16mo.  Mitchell  Kennerley. 

Reed  Voices.  By  James  B.  Kenyon.  12mo,  122 
pages.  James  T.  White  &  Co. 

HISTORY. 

The  Fall  of  the  Romanoffs.  By  the  author  of  "Rus- 
sian Court  Memoirs."  Illustrated,  8vo,  312 
pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $5. 

Guide  to  the  Study  of  Medieval  History.  By  Louis 
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California  Press. 

The  Land  of  the  Two  Rivers.  By  Edwyn  Bevan. 
12mo,  126  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  $1. 

Illinois  in  the  Fifties  or  A  Decade  of  Development, 
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The  Formation  of  the  State  of  Oklahoma,  1803-1006. 
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bert. Illustrated,  12mo,  90  pages.  Paul  B. 
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EDUCATION. 

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Motion  Picture  Education.  By  Ernest  A.  Dench. 
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A  Handbook  on  Story  Writing.  By  Blanche  Colton 
Williams.  12mo,  356  pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 
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cock. Illustrated,  12mo,  575  pages.  Henry  Holt 
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Hans  Blinker  or  the  Silver  Skates.  By  Mary  Mapes 
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Jackanapes,  and  Other  Stories.  By  Julia  Horatia 
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Personal  Accounts  Record.  By  Stephen  Gilman. 
Tables,  4to,  20  pages.  La  Salle  Extension  Uni- 
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REFERENCE. 

Bibliography   of  Wood  row   Wilson  I     1910-1917.      By 

George  Dobbin  Brown.  8vo,  52  pages.  The 
Library  of  Princeton  University,  Paper.  75  cts. 
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1918] 


THE   DIAL 


127 


Strangling  the  Periodicals 

Congress  at  its  last  session  passed  a  hasty  postal  law  increasing  the  postage 
on  periodicals  from  FIFTY  TO  NINE  HUNDRED  PER  CENT. 

Some  periodicals  will  be  killed — all  will  be  restricted  in  circulation  and 
crippled.  There  will  be  fewer  readers,  and  the  habit  of  reading  curtailed.  The 
great  function  of  periodicals  is  to  assist  in  the  spread  of  ideas — by  printing  the 
achievements  in  the  world  of  thought,  culture,  and  science. 

Thus  to  shut  out  farm  journals — as  these  zone  rates  will — will  lessen  the 
productive  power  of  our  country  by  millions  of  dollars  through  loss  of  better 
methods.  Shut  off  trade  journals  and  you  decrease  the  manufacturing  power  by 
more  millions.  Shut  off  the  religious  papers  and  there  are  shut  off  channels  that 
have  raised  millions  of  dollars  for  distressed  humanity.  Shut  off  the  great  peri- 
odicals of  the  home  and  there  is  throttled  an  avenue  that  has  given  expert  in- 
struction to  hundreds  of  thousands  of  mothers  and  saved  their  babies  to  health 
and  citizenship. 

These  national  periodicals  are  printed  in  the  big  cities — and  the  first  zone, 
the  cheapest  zone,  is  in  or  near  those  cities;  there  are  many  educational  oppor- 
tunities near  cities,  and  the  cities  will  read  anyway.  Small  towns  and  distant 
districts  depend  to  a  large  extent  upon  periodicals;  thus  this  law  increasing  peri- 
odical postage  where  it  is  most  needed  shuts  off  opportunity  where  needed.  It 
penalizes  periodical  readers. 

It  is  not  a  War  Tax.     It  is  postal  legislation,  pure  and  simple. 

Repeal  this  law.  Repeal  this  FIFTY  TO  NINE  HUNDRED  PER  CENT 
periodical  postage  increase.  Sign  the  petition  below  and  mail  it.  Put  a  cross 
mark  in  the  square — save  the  periodicals  and  the  work  that  they  have  done  and 
are  doing  for  national  education  and  patriotism. 


SIGN  BELOW 


CUT  OUT.     MAIL  TO  CHARLES  JOHNSON  POST,  Room  1417.  200  FIFTH  AVENUE,  NEW  YORK  CITY. 

PETITION  TO  CONGRESS— Sign  Here! 

The  spread  of  education,  of  culture,  of  scientific  knowledge  and  advancement,  and  of  our  vast  internal  mer- 
chandising: and  manufacturing  has  been,  and  always  is,  vitally  dependent  upon  the  freest  and  cheapest  circulation 
of  periodicals.  The  penalties  resulting  from  any  restriction  on  the  freest  possible  circulation  of  periodicals  will 
be  destructive  of  the  best  interests  of  our  economic  life  and  the  opportunities  of  developing  our  best  citizenship. 

The  postal  amendment  passed  by  the  last  Congress  increasing  the  postage  on  periodicals  from  FIFTY  TO 
NINE  HUNDRED  PER  CENT  will  throttle  or  destroy  our  periodicals  at  a  time  when  the  widest  and  most 
extensive  circulation  of  publications  is  essential  to  the  patriotism,  education,  and  upbuilding  of  our  country. 

Therefore,  I,  the  undersigned,  do  most  earnestly  demand  the  repeal  of  this  burdensome  periodical  postage  amend- 
ment. 


Name. 


City    or    County. 


Street    Address. 


State. 


Periodicals  mean  much  in  your  life.     If  you  will  help   by  a  few  arguments    with  your   acauaintances   and  an 
occasional  letter  in  a  spare  moment,  put  a  cross  mark  here. 


Will  you  help  in  securing  the  repeal  of  this  iniquitous  law?    [ 
Cut  Out.    Mail  to  CHARLES  J  OHNSON  POST,  Room  1417,  200  FIFTH  AVENUE,  NEW  YORK  CITY 


When  writing  to  advertisers  please  mention  THE  DIAL. 


128 


THE   DIAL 


[January  31,  1918 


CAMION  LETTERS 

FROM  AMERICAN  COLLEGE  MEN 
VOLUNTEER  DRIVERS 

OF  THE 

AMERICAN  FIELD  SERVICE  IN  FRANCE,  1917 

"...  Duty,  and  the  bit  more  which  counted.   .   ." 

Fine-spirited  boyish  letters  from  young  Americans  driving  motor  transports  for  the 
French  Army.  The  splendid  ambulance  work  of  the  American  Field  Service  is  well  known, 
but  the  recent  undertaking  of  munition  transport  has  not  yet  come  into  the  general  public's 
notice.  The  young  camionneurs  tell  in  these  spontaneous  letters  the  story  of  their  day's 
work,  with  no  worry  over  its  drudgery  and  no  solicitude  for  its  dangers.  The  volume  is 
one  more  evidence  of  the  growth  of  American  youth  into  American  manhood. 

(Just  ready,  $1.00  net.} 


FOR  COURSES  IN  PHYSIOGRAPHY,  GEOGRAPHY,  MAP  READ- 
ING, HISTORY  OF  THE  WAR,  OR  A  GIFT  TO  SOLDIERS 

TOPOGRAPHY  AND  STRATEGY  IN  THE  WAR 

By  DOUGLAS  W.  JOHNSON 

Associate  Professor  of  Physiography,  Columbia  University 

20  special  maps,  numerous  half-tones,  STO.    $1.75  net. 
Professor   W.  M.  DAVIS,  Professor  Emeritus  in  Harvard  University: 

"Johnson's  'Topography  and  Strategy  of  the  War'  pleases  me  greatly  because  of  the  clear 
statement  that  it  makes  of  the  importance  of  geographical  features  in  affecting  military  move- 
ments. Current  newspaper  reports  are  very  deficient  in  this  respect.  Summary  statements  of  prog- 
ress in  the  various  campaigns  are  too  often  little  better,  apparently  because  their  authors  have 
small  knowledge  or  appreciation  of  the  topography  on  the  different  fronts.  Johnson  is,  on  the 
other  hand,  exceptionally  competent  as  a  geographer;  from  the  beginning  of  the  war  he  has  given 
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Professor  WALLACE  W.  ATWOOD  of  Harvard  University: 

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Fortnightly  Journal  of 

CRITICISM  AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


No  7.60  CHICAGO,  FEBRUARY  14,  1918 

IN  THIS  ISSUE 

Unromantic  War 

By  ROBERT  HERRICK 

Trotzky,  A  Doubtful  Ally 

By  HAROLD  STEARNS 


Just  Published 

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THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


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THE^DIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  760 


FEBRUARY  14,  1918 


CONTENTS 


Robert  Her  rick 
Edward  Garnett 
H.  M.  Kallen  . 
Babette  Deutsch 
Robert  Dell     . 
Harold  Stearns 


133 
135 
137 
140 

141 
143 


UNROMANTIC  WAR ,i    . 

EDWARD  THOMAS ["';•'. 

THE  STRUCTURE  OF  LASTING  PEACE    . 
DISTANCE    ....     Verse     .     .     . 

OUR  PARIS  LETTER  .     .     .     .     ... 

TROTZKY,  A  DOUBTFUL  ALLY    .     1   . 

WHY  A  POET  SHOULD  NEVER  BE  EDU- 
CATED      v.     . 

LINCOLN  IN  BIOGRAPHY  AND  LETTERS 

QUADRANGLES  PAVED  WITH  GOOD  IN- 
TENTIONS      •    . 

"LABOR,  RIGHT  OR  WRONG"  '  ;     .     . 

A  NOVEL  WITH  A  PLOT Myron  R.  Williams  . 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 155 

Trivia. — Rookie  Rhymes. — Reclaiming  the  Arid  West. — Adventures  and  Letters 
of  Richard  Harding  Davis. — My  Story. — The  Cruise  of  the  Corwin. — The  Na- 
tional Budget  System  and  American  Finance. — Chatham's  Colonial  Policy. — Co- 
operative Marketing. — The  Book  of  the  West  Indies. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 158 

COMMUNICATION 160 

A   Literary  Middle   English   Reader. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 161 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  163 


Louis  Untermeyer 
L.  E.  Robinson     . 

Randolph  Bourne 
Charles  A.  Beard  . 


145 
148 

151 
152 
153 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


CONRAD  AIKEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 
Contributing  Editort 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

HENRY  B.  FULLER  JOHN  E.  ROBINSON 

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132 


THE   DIAL 


[February   14,   1918 


(NEW  THIRD  EDITION) 


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Si  jFortniff&tty  Journal  of  Criticism  ann  2Di0cu00ion  of  Hftrtature  anto 


Unromantic  War 


When  I  first  read  Barbusse's  "Le  Feu," 
now  more  than  a  year  ago,  I  knew  it  for 
what  it  is — the  most  searching,  the  most 
revealing  statement  of  what  modern  war 
means  both  morally  and  physically.  The 
book  has  all  those  intimate  signs  of  truth 
that  carry  immediate  conviction  even  to 
him  who  has  had  no  personal  experience 
with  which  to  corroborate  its  record  (as 
all  vital  literature  convinces — as  Dostoev- 
sky  or  Gorky  convince  millions  who  know 
nothing  personally  about  Russia  and  Rus- 
sians). I  have  read  many  books,  private 
as  well  as  published  diaries,  which  attempt 
to  reveal  what  men  suffer  and  endure  in 
this  most  hateful  of  all  wars.  Not  one  of 
them — and  there  are  many  honest  revela- 
tions, unaffected,  simple,  and  sincere  ef- 
forts to  put  into  words  the  meaning  of 
this  monstrous  calamity — has  approached 
"Le  Feu"  in  perception,  in  sheer  capacity 
for  truth.  Nothing  since  heard  or  read 
has  effaced  its  stinging  impression.  Others 
deal  with  familiar  surfaces,  with  personal 
and  incomplete  reactions,  often  noble  and 
sensitive,  humorous  and  philosophical;  but 
Barbusse  gives  the  thing  itself — War. 

I  sent  the  book  to  soldier  friends,  asked 
many  others,  "What  do  you  think  of  'Le 
Feu'?"  The  invariable  answer  was, 
"That's  it— War!  He's  got  it  all  in." 
Grimly,  taciturnly,  as  soldiers  speak  of  the 
bitter  mystery  into  which  fate  has  plunged 
them.  The  book  began  to  go,  enormously, 
among  soldiers,  also  among  civilians.  It 
soon  ran  into  the  tens  of  thousands  in 
the  French  editions  before  the  attention 
of  Americans  was  gained  for  it  by  an 
English  translation,  supplanting  in  popu- 
larity such  journalistic  triviality  as  "Gas- 
pard."  Civilian  comment  on  Barbusse's 
book  was  less  direct,  often  given  with  a 
reserve,  almost  a  resentment,  even  where 
the  praise  was  loud  enough  for  its  extraor- 
dinary "literary  strength" — as  if  its 
author  should  be  punished  for  violating 


the  decencies  and  reticencies  of  our  civi- 
lization. So  I  came  to  regard  a  man's 
judgment  upon  this  single  book  as  a  kind 
of  test  of  his  soul,  especially  of  the  civilian 
soul — of  its  ability  and  its  willingness  to 
face  the  truth,  to  understand  War.  I 
put  my  question  to  every  sort  of  French- 
man whom  I  met,  in  order  to  sound  the 
civilian  temper  en  derriere,  for  that  after 
all  must  ultimately  determine  the  destiny 
of  the  terrific  conflict.  The  sentimental- 
ist, I  found — the  incorrigible  middle  class 
romanticist,  who  can  never  swallow  life 
without  some  sugar  coating — condemns 
Barbusse  because  he  has  sternly  torn  away 
the  last  shreds  of  illusion  from  the  horrid 
business.  "It  is  not  fine,"  the  literary  per- 
son complained.  (I  am  thinking  of  a  cul- 
tivated French  professor.)  "It  is  not 
Art,"  he  said.  (O  sacred  Art,  how  many 
petty  cowardices  shelter  beneath  thy  mys- 
tic robe!)  "It  is  like  Zola — all  dirt  and 
horrors,  no  'relief  .  .  .  Not  the  whole 
truth  .  .  .  Without  that  elevation  of 
spirit  which  art  requires  .  .  .  Without  the 
sense  of  beauty  .  .  ."  And  so  on  accord- 
ing to  the  chatter  of  the  pretty-pretty 
school  of  literature.  The  raw  truths 
which  we  moderns  must  face  do  not  fit 
these  politer  canons  of  the  old  world.  We 
are  creating  new  ones  to  hold  a  new  wine. 
What  the  literary  person  thinks  counts 
for  little.  There  is  another  sort  of  objec- 
tion to  "Le  Feu,"  which  carries  more 
weight.  "The  book  does  not  show  a  good 
spirit" — this  from  a  serious  minded,  patri- 
otic Frenchman  engaged  in  the  work  of 
propaganda.  His  is  a  political,  a  patri- 
otic, a  moral  condemnation  of  the  picture 
of  War  as  presented  in  "Le  Feu."  Bar- 
busse has  shown  us  soldiers,  not  only 
as  dirty  and  unidealistic,  degraded  by  the 
occupation  to  which  they  are  condemned, 
but  also  as  too  obviously  the  blind  sport 
of  life — human  sacrifices  of  human  soci- 
ety, killing  and  being  killed  in  a  war  that 


134 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


is  insanity,  whose  origin  and  conclusion 
they  cannot  affect.  A  recent  letter  in  the 
New  York  "Times"  contains  the  same 
objection  to  the  book.  Barbusse,  the 
correspondent  charges,  is  a  pacifist  in 
disguise,  preaching  an  "insidious  propa- 
ganda" against  War !  He  has  failed  to  pre- 
sent the  stereotyped  poilus  dying  with  "La 
France"  on  their  lips,  a  smile  on  their 
faces.  Instead  he  has  shown  that  unfor- 
gettable company  of  civilian  soldiers 
awaiting  quietly  in  the  gray  morning  the 
order  to  attack,  each  one  fully  conscious 
of  what  lies  beyond  the  parapet:  "These 
are  men,  not  heroes,"  he  says  of  them. 
Which  is  the  higher  heroism? 

Of  course  Barbusse  is  a  "pacifist,"  if 
that  wretched  word  means  anything  after 
all  the  mishandling  it  has  received  by 
patriots.  If  a  disgust  for  the  insanity 
and  the  inhumanity  of  War,  a  steady  per- 
ception of  its  futilities  and  its  crimes, 
means  "pacifism,"  I  think  there  must  be 
some  millions  of  such  "pacifists"  on  the 
European  battle  fronts.  All  the  intelli- 
gent soldiers  and  officers  whom  I  have  met 
are  pacifists  in  this  sense — heroic  and  mili- 
tant pacifists — and  it  is  from  them  that 
hope  for  the  world  must  be  born  again. 
For  they  know  War,  and  knowing  it  they 
hate  it.  They  know  how  War  is  con- 
ducted, the  full  stupidity  of  it.  They  sus- 
pect how  wars  are  bred  and  do  not  believe 
in  their  inevitability.  It  is  the  warriors 
en  derriere — some  of  them  women — who 
have  any  illusions  about  the  glory  of  mass 
slaughter,  and  some  of  the  journalists, 
statesmen,  business  men,  who  run  the  war 
machine  from  behind  and  often  run  it 
very  badly.  Those  who  know  best  what 
it  is  like  abhor  its  every  aspect:  many  of 
them  are  fighting  with  the  splendid  faith 
that  they  are  giving  their  lives  to  end 
War,  not  just  this  war.  And  others  are 
dying  with  splendid  resignation,  in  the 
hope  that  somehow  their  sacrifice  may 
serve  against  the  evil  of  the  world.  They 
are  fighting  pacifists,  if  you  like — than 
whom  there  can  be  no  braver  fighters. 

Indeed,  what  Barbusse  believes  and 
what  the  person  who  thinks  in  terms  of 
newspaper  and  politician  formulae  cannot 
see,  is  that  War  is  most  of  all  an  awful 
process  of  religious  conversion  through 


which  the  minds  of  all  men  will  be  awak- 
ened to  the  recognition  of  supreme  sin.  It 
must  drag  on  its  dreary,  blood-stained 
course  until  all  whose  selfish,  thoughtless 
conduct  in  times  of  peace,  all  grasping  and 
power-loving  statesmen,  journalists,  busi- 
ness men,  indifferents,  have  received  suffi- 
cient vision  to  recognize  their  errors, 
which  cause  wars.  Until,  as  Prince  Lvoff 
so  nobly  and  sadly  said,  "Europe — and 
the  world — has  accomplished  a  new  soul." 

That  new  soul  will  hardly  be  achieved 
while  we  lie  to  ourselves  about  War,  even 
from  the  highest  literary  or  patriotic 
motives.  What  the  French  novelist  has 
courageously  perceived,  all  of  us  must  be 
brought  to  see  and  accept.  Humanity 
is  on  the  way — there  are  sure  signs  even 
in  Germany — to  this  great  realization. 
Those  who  for  self-interest  or  cowardice 
or  mistaken  zeal  would  conceal  or  disguise 
any  least  particle  of  essential  truth  about 
the  War  are  hindering  the  coming  of  the 
day  of  our  final  release.  The  most  lament- 
able immediate  effect  of  War  upon  human 
psychology  is  the  tendency  to  cover  up, 
conceal,  distort  the  truth,  for  one  or  an- 
other of  innumerable  specious  reasons.  To 
the  stupidity  of  military  censorship,  which 
is  fit  subject  only  for  opera  bouffe,  we  add 
the  misguided  zeal  of  propagandists  and 
self-appointed  guardians  of  national  mo- 
rale, who  serve  out  the  Truth  to  the  public 
in  homeopathic  doses,  tardily,  and  agree- 
ably disguised.  To  this  fatal  tendency 
toward  obscurantism  must  be  attributed, 
among  other  things,  the  slow  awakening 
of  our  own  country  to  the  crisis  upon  us. 

Why  Prussianize  our  minds?  With  the 
fatal  example  of  Germany  before  us,  of  a 
people  in  blinders  to  whom  after  three  and 
a  half  years  of  War  the  first  gleams  of 
truth  are  slowly  penetrating,  why  do  we 
imitate  the  very  vice  that  we  are  combat- 
ing in  our  foes?  Why  do  we  admit  that 
"there  are  things  which  must  not  be  said" 
in  public?  Barbusse's  soldiers — filthy,  des- 
perate, subjected  to  infamous  degrada- 
tions— suffer  without  seeking  to  evade 
their  fate,  for  a  cause  in  which  every  one 
of  us  has  his  personal  responsibility. 
Why,  then,  can  we  not  look  steadily  at  the 
truth  about  War? 

ROBERT  HERRICK. 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


135 


Edward  Thomas 


In  the  war,  we  have  lost,  among  thou- 
sands of  young  men  of  high  intellectual 
gifts,  a  few  whose  literary  talent  has 
been  recognized  to  the  full,  as  Rupert 
Brooke's;  but  the  sorest  loss  to  English 
literature  is  that  of  Edward  Thomas,  poet 
and  critic,  born  March  3,  1878,  killed  in 
the  Battle  of  Arras  April  9,  1917.  The 
general  public  has,  I  believe,  heard  of 
"The  South  Country"  (1909),  "Rest  and 
Unrest"  (1910),  "Light  and  Twilight" 
(1911),  the  "Life  of  Richard  Jefferies" 
(1909),  "The  Happy-Go-Lucky  Mor- 
gans" (1913),  the  five  books  most  steeped 
in  Thomas's  beautiful  characteristic  qual- 
ity. Thomas  wrote  many  books,  for,  mar- 
rying early,  he  had  to  support  his  young 
family  by  miscellaneous  literary  work  and 
constant  reviewing.  In  youth  he  was  fas- 
cinated by  the  work  of  Richard  Jefferies, 
our  great  nature  writer,  whose  essays  and 
romances,  abounding  in  the  joy  of  life, 
are  saturated  with  passionate  feeling  for 
the  magic  and  abundance  of  nature;  and 
some  years  before  he  died  Thomas  repaid 
his  debt  by  the  "Life  of  Richard  Jeffer- 
ies," one  of  the  most  perfect  biographies 
in  the  language.  In  the  first  chapter,  a 
preliminary  survey  of  the  Wiltshire  down 
lands,  Jefferies's  native  place,  Thomas 
shows  that  he  himself  is  a  poet  richly  dow- 
ered with  observation  and  imaginative 
insight  into  the  great  pageant  of  rural  life 
under  the  open  sky.  It  has  been  said  that 
Thomas  was  not  sufficiently  himself  in  his 
nature  books,  and  this  is  true  of  such  early 
work  as  "The  Woodland  Life"  (1897) 
and  "The  Heart  of  England"  (1912),  but 
the  few  passages  in  "The  South  Country" 
which  recall  Jefferies's  example  one  would 
not  alter.  The  writer  has  perfected  his 
own  manner  of  recording  what  he  sees  and 
feels,  and  his  discipleship  is  now  bearing 
its  spiritual  fruit. 

Thomas's  rare  individuality,  however, 
found  its  most  perfect  expression  in  his 
exquisite  prose  sketches,  "Rest  and 
Unrest"  (1910)  and  "Light  and  Twi- 
light" (1911),  and  I  believe  that  his 
claim  to  high,  permanent  rank  rests  on 
these  little  books.  ("Rose-Acre  Papers" — 
1910 — a  reprint  from  some  early  essays, 


is  too  self-consciously  "literary"  in  style 
to  rank  with  them.) 

We  have  heard  a  good  deal  about 
Celtic  magic  in  literature  since  Matthew 
Arnold's  famous  article  appeared,  but 
without  denying  the  claims  of  other  men, 
I  think  Edward  Thomas  a  finer  example 
of  the  Celtic  sense  of  beauty  than  any  of 
the  young  Irish  school.  Thomas,  though 
born  and  reared  in  England,  was  of  Welsh 
blood  on  the  paternal  side,  and  in  his  spir- 
itual affinities  he  harked  back  to  the  old 
ruling  caste  which  speaks  to  us  in  litera- 
ture through  the  "Mabinogion"  and  the 
poems  of  Daveth  Ab-Gwylliam.  Ex- 
tremely fastidious,  diffident,  and  proud, 
Thomas  by  his  reticence  and  fine  reserva- 
tions of  feeling  rather  chilled  the  com- 
mon man.  His  sensitive  self-consciousness 
did  him  no  good  with  editors,  who,  busy 
mortals,  were  as  incapable  as  their  public 
of  appreciating  the  unique  quality  of  his 
imaginative  sketches.  To  his  intimates 
Thomas's  quiet,  cool  irony,  his  proud  del- 
icacy of  feeling,  his  shy  hauteur  wafted  an 
atmosphere  as  refreshing  as  a  mountain 
stream's  or  a  spring  birch  grove's  in  the 
Welsh  mountains.  A  fresh  chastity  of 
spirit,  a  nobility  of  strain  (he  had  a  touch 
of  Spanish  blood),  an  aloofness  from 
everything  mediocre  in  human  affairs,  pre- 
served his  nature  from  the  least  touch  of 
worldliness.  Poet  and  scholar,  however,  as 
Thomas  was,  he  had  a  keen  eye  for  men 
and  manners  and  when  he  wished  he  could 
get  into  touch  with  homely  people  and 
enjoy,  none  better,  whatever  is  racily 
human.  His  noble  head,  his  tall  figure, 
and  sensitive  bearing  often  attracted  peo- 
ple's eyes,  but  of  this  he  was  unconscious. 
His  temperamental  melancholy  and  a 
touch  of  hypochondria  he  combated  by 
long,  solitary  walking-tours  in  the  south 
of  England  and  Wales,  where  he  found 
fresh  material  for  his  nature  books  and 
prose  sketches. 

But  how  is  one  to  depict  the  spiritual 
essence  of  Thomas's  work?  I  shall  not 
speak  here  of  his  critical  studies  of  Swin- 
burne, Pater,  Maeterlinck,  and  George 
Borrow,  which,  highly  individual  in 
insight,  are  perhaps  sometimes  marked  bv 


136 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


judgments  of  too  fastidious  severity.  As 
a  critic  of  poetry  Thomas  particularly 
excelled,  and  I  may  mention  here  that  a 
posthumous  volume  of  his  poems  is  shortly 
to  appear.  Some  remarkable  specimens 
given  in  "An  Annual  of  New  Poetry" 
(1917)  are  as  new  a  departure  in  English 
verse  as  was  Mr.  Robert  Frost's  "North 
of  Boston"  in  American  verse.  But  what- 
ever may  be  the  verdict  on  his  poetry, 
Thomas  was  essentially  a  poet,  thinly  dis- 
guised, in  his  imaginative  prose  sketches, 
as  in  "The  Flower  Gatherer,"  "Home," 
"Mothers  and  Sons,"  "Olwen,"  and, 
indeed,  in  the  scores  of  others  that  make 
up  "Rest  and  Unrest"  and  "Light  and 
Twilight."  In  these  little  volumes  he 
shows  he  is  master  of  English,  pure,  lim- 
pid, delicate  and  for  clear  beauty  of 
imagery  and  sensitive  grace  of  contour  he 
rivals  even  W.  H.  Hudson. 

To  Thomas,  a  poet,  a  thing  betrays  its 
spiritual  origins.  And  his  descriptions 
relate  a  thing  seen  to  the  main  stream  of 
human  activities,  to  which  it  is  as  a  drop 
in  a  sentient  ocean.  Thus  "A  Group  of 
Statuary" — a  haunting  description  of  a 
group  of  broken  men  with  heads  bowed  in 
weary  apathy,  seated  in  a  hot,  dusty  Lon- 
don Square — contrasts  this  human  wast- 
age, cast  aside  by  industrialism's  hurrying 
wheels,  with  the  dull  indifference  of  the 
passers-by,  to  whom  this  sight  brings 
neither  wonder  nor  pity.  The  civi- 
lization that  bears  an  abundance  of 
such  malformed  fruit  is  indicted  by 
the  writer's  grave  detachment.  But  the 
shades  of  Thomas's  reflective  irony  here 
are  too  fine  for  more  than  one  in  twenty 
readers  to  grasp  their  deep  import.  This 
sketch,  "A  Group  of  Statuary,"  came  to 
my  memory  the  other  day  on  a  journey 
by  train  which  carried  me  through  the 
six-mile  breadth  of  mean  streets,  huge  fac- 
tories, dirty  tenements,  wharves,  ware- 
houses, and  workshops  of  East  London, 
lying  under  their  dreary  pall  of  dusty 
smoke.  I  reflected  that  probably  not  a 
score  of  people  among  these  millions  of 
workers  had  ever  heard  of  Thomas  or 
read  a  line  of  his  writings.  Yet  "Light 
and  Twilight"  and  "Rest  and  Unrest"  will 
be  read  as  classics  when  all  this  mass  of 
dirty  brick  and  mortar  and  frowning  stone 


and  iron  has  passed  away  to  the  scrap 
heap.  So  powerful  is  the  written  word 
and  the  spirit  of  beauty !  And  to  Thomas 
beauty  was  no  cult  of  sestheticism  cloistered 
or  divorced  from  reality,  but  the  simple 
love  of  whatever  is  gracious,  pure,  precious 
in  human  feeling,  and  of  all  that  purges  the 
spirit  and  awakens  it  to  joy  in  the  earth 
and  in  nature's  activities.  His  finest  prose 
sprang  from  direct  contemplation  of  the 
old-world  hills  and  valleys,  the  coasts  and 
streams,  the  woods  and  fields  and  pastures 
from  which  the  inhabitants  of  the  mon- 
strous modern  towns  have,  in  one  genera- 
tion or  another,  severed  themselves.  And 
this  strange,  incongruous  spectacle  of  the 
new  and  the  old  life  in  the  country  and 
the  towns,  pushing  from  roots  interlaced 
in  our  British  soil,  arrested  Thomas's 
imagination.  With  what  perfection 
Thomas  captured  the  essential  character 
of  a  landscape  and  its  inhabitants  is  shown 
in  "Mothers  and  Sons,"  a  sketch,  cunningly 
exact,  of  a  South  Wales  mining  village 
where  all  the  horrors  of  raw  industrialism, 
crude,  glaring,  and  greedy,  are  seen  at 
work,  swallowing  up  the  quiet  simplicity 
of  an  old-world  parish  with  its  three  or 
four  farms,  watermills,  the  chapel  in  the 
ancient  oak  wood,  and  scattered  cottages 
in  the  brambly  lanes.  And  Thomas  was 
no  sentimentalist.  The  realities  of  the  old 
life  and  the  new  are  shown  in  the  chat  of 
wise  Mrs.  Morgan  and  Mrs.  Owen,  and 
the  virtues  of  the  mining  folk  shine  forth 
in  this  picture  of  a  Welsh  family's  hospital- 
ity and  homely  kindliness.  In  a  companion 
sketch,  "A  Cottage  Door,"  Thomas  sums 
up,  in  his  poetic  apostrophe,  the  contradic- 
tions in  this  "demon  of  humanity"  which 
is  "hideous  and  beautiful,  cruel  in  igno- 
rance, recking  not  what  it  is  making,  as  it 
squats  there  upon  the  earth.  It  is  old  but 
it  is  a  babe.  It  would  be  noble  but  it 
must  be  vile."  "Home,"  this  beautiful 
vision  of  the  Welsh  countryside,  conveys  a 
truer  sense  of  the  wild  character,  the 
strange  beauty  of  Wales  in  her  fierceness 
and  her  antique  melancholy,  than  any  other 
passage  I  have  met  in  literature.  For  a 
study  of  character,  read  "Sunday  After- 
noon," where  the  spirit  of  a  narrow- 
minded,  exacting,  steely-natured  woman, 
Mrs.  Wilkins,  dreadful  in  her  hard  virtue 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


137 


and  intense  unimaginativeness,  is  explored. 
We  give  unstinted  praise  to  the  great  Rus- 
sian realists  for  the  spiritual  truth  of  their 
pictures  of  life;  but  the  sketches  I  have 
cited,  and  others,  such  as  "Olwen,"  "The 
Attempt,"  "The  First  of  Spring,"  vie  in 
delicacy  of  perception  and  poetic  in- 
sight with  Turgenev's  "A  Sportsman's 
Sketches."  Thomas,  too,  shows  that  he 
has  grasped  with  unerring  intuition  the 
evasive  secrets  of  human  life.  Thomas, 
however,  rarely  treats  a  man's  character 
at  full  length.  He  is  too  subjective, 
too  introspective  a  writer  to  do  more 
than  sketch  the  figures  of  men  and 
women  seen  in  their  appropriate  atmos- 
phere. As  a  poet  he  is  more  intent  on 
observing  and  recording  the  beauty  of  life 
as  it  mirrors  itself  in  the  calm  glass  of  his 
imagination.  "July,"  the  description  of 
two  lovers  lost  in  the  stream  of  their 
mutual  joy  as  they  wander  hand  in  hand 
through  the  forest,  is  very  characteristic 
of  the  brooding  depth  of  his  thought — 
human  joy  is  shown  here  in  the  waning 
light  of  nature's  mutability.  As  "poetical," 
but  more  characteristically  Welsh  in 


romantic  feeling,  are  the  beautiful  "Win- 
ter Music,"  "The  Castle  of  Lostormel- 
lyn,"  "Snow  and  Sand,"  "The  Queen  of 
the  Waste  Lands,"  and  "Maiden's  Wood." 
The  extreme  subtlety  of  Thomas's  thought, 
his  apprehension  of  the  finest  shades  of 
those  mysterious  sensations  which  declare 
the  unity  of  all  life  and  the  oneness  of 
time  and  eternity,  is  expressed  with  con- 
summate felicity  in  "The  Fountain,"  "The 
Queen  of  the  Waste  Lands,"  and  "Winter 
Music."  That  such  perfect  poems  in  prose 
are  so  little  known  to  our  public  is  a  reflec- 
tion on  the  intelligence  of  our  critics.  I 
did  not  myself,  I  fear,  ever  fully  express 
to  Thomas  my  appreciation  of  these 
exquisite  achievements.  Now  he  lies  in 
his  grave  in  France  and  his  own  epitaph 
he  has  written  in  one  of  these  sketches : 

In  that  company  I  had  learned  that  I  am  some- 
thing which  no  fortune  can  touch,  whether  I  be 
soon  to  die  or  long  years  away.  Things  will  hap- 
pen which  will  trample  and  pierce,  but  I  shall  go 
on,  something  that  is  here  and  there  like  the  wind, 
something  unconquerable,  something  not  to  be  sep- 
arated from  the  dark  earth  and  the  light  sky,  a 
strong  citizen  of  infinity  and  eternity.  I  knew 
that  I  could  not  do  without  the  Infinite,  nor  the 
Infinite  without  me.  £DWARD  GARNETT. 


The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 

IX. 

THE  FEDERALIZATION  OF  SOVEREIGN  STATES:  A  PRECEDENT  NOT  ACCORDING  TO  INTERNATIONAL  LAW 


The  thirteen  original  British  colonies  in 
America,  united  against  the  aggressive 
exploitation  of  the  British  government, 
differed  in  one  fundamental  respect  from 
the  free  states  today  in  alliance  against 
Germany:  they  had  no  "problems  of 
nationality."  By  and  large,  they  were  of 
one  blood,  one  language,  and  one  legal 
and  political  tradition.  That  this  did  not 
prevent  bitter  quarrels  and  even  warfare 
among  them  is  only  another  evidence  that 
nationality,  even  when  sovereign,  is  not 
the  antidote  to  warfare  its  contemporary 
protagonists  assert  it  is.  Men  go  to  war 
from  other  motives  as  well,  and  the  phe- 
nomenon of  two  states  of  the  same  nation- 
ality at  each  other's  throats  is  not  so 
infrequent  in  history  that  it  may  be 
ignored.  Members  of  the  thirteen  colon- 
ies were  at  each  other's  throats  for  a 


variety  of  reasons,  religious  and  economic, 
and  it  was  only  the  menace  of  a  common 
enemy  that  at  first  drew  and  held  them 
together.  They  came  together  as  "sov- 
ereign and  independent  states,"  reluctantly, 
strongly  suspicious  of  one  another  and 
inclined  to  act  each  in  its  own  behalf.  To 
meet  an  enemy  strong,  well  armed,  and 
well  supplied,  they  had  to  provide  an  army 
with  all  that  an  army  needs  for  effective 
effort  in  the  field.  And  they  had  to  create 
this  provision  out  of  practically  nothing 
at  all,  to  secure  the  very  finances  with 
which  to  create.  From  the  beginning  each 
state  held  to  its  right  to  perform  its  share 
of  this  work  for  itself  and  as  it  chose, 
without  regard  for,  or  any  attempt  at 
cooperation  with,  the  other  states.  From 
the  beginning  each  state  failed  to  do  its 
proper  share,  out  of  fear,  largely,  that  it 


138 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


might  be  doing  more  than  its  share;  and 
each  state,  correspondingly,  complained 
of  the  inefficiency  of  the  central  authority, 
the  Continental  Congress.  But  the  Con- 
gress was  in  effect  a  consulting  and  ad- 
visory body,  becoming  negligible  through 
inaction,  and  doomed  to  inaction  because 
it  was  without  real  power.  The  war,  in- 
deed, was  not  truly  one  war  but  many 
wars,  and  the  remoter  states  were  colder 
to  the  issues  and  conditions  of  the  conflict 
than  those  at  its  seat.  These  issues  and 
conditions  were  the  inevitable  ones  of 
finance,  of  the  control  of  the  food-supply, 
of  the  army  commissariat.  The  lack  of 
common  action  and  unified  authority  on 
these  points  caused  untold  suffering  to  the 
soldiers  and  indefinitely  prolonged  the 
struggle. 

To  secure  the  necessary  unity  the  Con- 
gress had  discussed  for  a  year  and  finally 
submitted  to  the  legislatures  of  the  states 
articles  of  a  confederation  without  which 
the  war  could  not  successfully  be  carried 
on.  These  articles  did  not  win  final  rati- 
fication till  1781.  They  were  accompanied 
by  a  circular  letter  the  following  extract 
from  which  is  relevant: 

The  business  [of  unification],  equally  intricate 
and  important,  has  in  its  progress  been  attended 
with  uncommon  embarrassments  and  delay,  which 
the  most  anxious  solicitude  and  persevering  dili- 
gence could  not  prevent.  To  form  a  permanent 
union,  accommodated  to  the  opinion  and  wishes  of 
the  delegates  of  so  many  states  differing  in  habits, 
produce,  commerce,  and  internal  police,  was  found 
to  be  a  work  with  which  nothing  but  time  and 
reflection,  conspiring  with  a  disposition  to  conciliate 
[italics  mine]  could  mature  and  accomplish. 

Hardly  is  it  to  be  expected  that  any  plan,  in  the 
variety  of  provisions  essential  to  our  union,  should 
exactly  correspond  with  the  maxims  and  political 
views  of  every  particular  state.  Let  it  be  re- 
marked that,  after  the  most  careful  inquiry  and 
the  fullest  information,  this  is  proposed  as  the  best 
which  could  be  adapted  to  the  circumstances  of  all, 
and  as  that  alone  which  affords  any  tolerable  pros- 
pect of  general  satisfaction. 

The  Articles  of  Confederation  were 
primarily  a  war  measure,  designed  to  make 
the  efforts  of  many  sovereign  states  effect- 
ive against  one  common  enemy.  They 
were  by  second  intention  an  instrument  of 
security  between  the  states  themselves, 
designed  to  maintain  lasting  peace  between 
them  and  to  strengthen  each  with  all  and 
all  with  each.  They  provided  therefore 
that  the  states  were  to  retain  all  un- 


delegated  sovereignty;  that  they  were 
to  constitute  an  absolute  military  unity 
against  the  enemy  assaulting  any  one  of 
them;  that  the  citizens  of  one,  moving  to 
another,  were  to  receive  equal  treatment 
with  the  citizens  of  that  other;  that  each 
should  have  equal  authority  with  the 
others,  large  or  small,  on  the  basis  of 
one  state,  one  vote;  that  no  state  might 
enter  into  special  relations  with  another, 
or  with  a  foreign  power,  except  by  general 
consent;  that  no  state  might  ordain  a  tariff 
at  cross-purposes  with  the  general  interest; 
that  Congress  alone,  representing  the 
general  interest,  might  determine  the 
armament  of  each  state;  that  no  state 
might  go  to  war  except  by  general  con- 
sent; that  hence  treaties,  alliances,  the 
making  of  war  and  peace  were  to  be  the 
functions  of  Congress;  that  Congress  was 
to  be  the  "last  resort  on  appeal  on  all  dif- 
ferences now  subsisting  or  that  hereafter 
may  arise  between  two  or  more  states  con- 
cerning boundary,  jurisdiction,  or  any 
other  cause  whatsoever."  Its  proceedings 
were  to  be  publicly  recorded  in  a  journal 
to  be  kept  for  that  purpose.  The  Articles 
provided,  please  observe,  for  all  the  con- 
tingencies that  liberal  opinion  finds  it 
desirable  to  guard  against  in  the  relations 
between  contemporary  states.  They  are 
a  programme  of  internationalism.  Under 
them  the  Revolutionary  War  dragged  out 
to  a  successful  conclusion.  But  with  the 
coming  of  peace  the  force  of  the  inter- 
national authority,  of  the  Congress  they 
provided  for,  lapsed  altogether.  The  states 
reverted  to  their  aboriginal  sovereignty, 
and  worse.  The  central  authority  carried 
an  enormous  burden  of  debt,  the  states 
were  destitute,  the  country  disorganized. 
Patriotism,  that  is,  local  loyalties  of  the 
peoples  to  their  different  state  govern- 
ments, was  intense. 

The  mutual  antipathies  and  clashing  interests 
of  the  Americans,  their  difference  of  governments, 
habitudes,  and  manners  [wrote  Josiah  Tucker] 
indicate  that  they  will  have  no  center  of  union  and 
no  common  interest!  They  can  never  be  united 
into  one  compact  empire  under  any  species  of 
government  whatever;  a  disunited  people  till  the 
end  of  time,  suspicious  and  distrustful  of  each 
other,  they  will  be  divided  and  subdivided  into 
little  commonwealths  or  principalities,  according  to 
natural  boundaries,  by  great  bays  of  the  sea,  and 
by  vast  rivers,  lakes,  and  ranges  of  mountains. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


139 


Add  dynastic  and  national  interests,  and 
the  description  absolutely  dots  the  present 
and  future  of  both  the  powers  within  the 
democratic  alliance  and  those  opposed 
to  it. 

But  the  Dean  of  Gloucester  was  mis- 
taken. The  situation  he  described,  the 
unnecessary  length  and  hardship  of  the 
war,  the  horrible  civil  blunders  never 
would  have  arisen  at  all  if  the  Articles 
of  Confederation  had  made  Congress 
truly  authoritative  and  had  provided  it 
with  power  to  enforce  its  ordinances.  Its 
power  unfortunately  was  like  that  of  the 
Hague  Tribunal,  purely  advisory:  "They 
may  declare  everything,"  wrote  Justice 
Story,  "but  can  do  nothing."  Only  the 
presence  of  the  common  enemy  kept  Con- 
gress in  force  during  the  war.  With  the 
coming  of  peace,  not  only  did  its  power 
tend  to  lapse;  it  was  scorned,  and  the 
several  states  treated  it  with  the  sus- 
picion due  an  encroaching  foreigner.  "The 
Confederation  was,"  according  to  J.  Q. 
Adams,  "perhaps  as  closely  knit  together 
as  it  was  possible  that  such  a  form  of  polity 
could  be  grappled;  but  it  was  matured 
by  the  State  Legislatures  without  consul- 
tation with  the  people  [the  italics  are  mine] 
and  the  jealousy  of  sectional  collisions  and 
the  distrust  of  all  delegation  of  power, 
stamped  every  feature  of  the  work  with 
inefficiency."  Mr.  Adams  hit  upon  the 
very  heart  of  the  difficulty.  The  Con- 
federation was  a  thing  made  by  statesmen 
and  diplomats.  Reputable  though  they 
were,  their  mere  authority  could  not  win 
for  it  the  allegiance  of  the  masses,  and 
without  that  it  could  have  no  force.  Had 
the  masses  been  instructed  by  discussion 
and  analysis,  and  had  public  opinion  been 
awakened  to  reenforce  the  obviously  wise 
programme,  the  history  of  these  United 
States  would  have  been  otherwise  written. 

Because  public  opinion  had  not  been 
roused,  the  removal  of  enemy  pressure 
was  followed  by  a  reversion  to  pre-war 
conditions,  aggravated  by  the  disabling 
consequences  of  the  war.  The  separate 
states  at  once  began  to  act  upon  the  tradi- 
tional principle  that  a  government's  safety 
depends  upon  its  own  strength  and  its 
neighbors'  weakness.  Tariff  war  began 
almost  immediately.  Various  ententes 


and  alliances  were  initiated.  Massachu- 
setts tried  to  detach  the  other  New  Eng- 
land states  into  a  separate  union.  New 
York  went  to  war  with  Vermont,  which 
had  declared  its  independence  of  New 
Hampshire,  over  the  strip  of  Vermont 
settled  by  New  Yorkers  and  paying  taxes 
to  New  York.  Maryland  and  Virginia 
organized  a  sort  of  zollverein  which  Dela- 
ware and  Pennsylvania  were  later  invited 
to  join.  It  did  seem  as  if  the  threatened 
distintegration  of  the  Confederation  were 
inevitable.  One  thing  held  it  together 
and  kept  for  Congress  such  authority  as 
remained  to  it.  This  was  the  public  do- 
main. Prior  to  the  confederation  the 
various  states  had  held  or  claimed  enor- 
mous reaches  of  territory,  stretching 
to  the  Mississippi  or  beyond.  (These 
territories  correspond  to  the  colonial 
possessions  of  today's  warring  states.) 
Maryland's  refusal  to  confederate  until 
all  the  holdings  of  the  states  should  be 
surrendered  to  the  common  authority 
compelled  the  pooling  of  these  lands, 
and  the  lands  pooled  thereupon  became 
the  national  domain.  The  domain  consti- 
tuted a  tangible  obvious  interstate  interest 
and  was  in  effect  the  cornerstone  of  the 
Union. 

At  the  same  time,  the  best  minds  in  all 
of  the  states — not  those  in  Congress  but 
those  that  had  the  respect  of  the  masses — 
were  agitated  by  the  difficulties  of  the 
situation.  The  problems  that  needed  ad- 
justment were  precisely  those  that  so 
largely  need  adjustment  today,  the  prob- 
lems of  international  commerce  and  fi- 
nance, of  the  common  highways  of  trade, 
of  tariffs,  of  undeveloped  territories. 
Their  solution,  it  was  recognized,  re- 
quired an  effective  easement  upon  the  ex- 
clusive sovereignty  of  each  state.  The 
initiation  of  the  Maryland-Virginia  zoll- 
verein was  an  attempt  at  such  an  easement 
with  respect  to  a  vital  matter,  analogous 
in  contemporary  Europe  to  the  inter- 
nationalization of  the  Danube.  The 
movement  to  include  all  the  states  in  an 
extension  of  this  arrangement  led  to  the 
Constitutional  Convention,  an  "assembly 
of  demigods"  that  owed  its  existence  as 
much  to  the  self-sacrifice  and  initiative  of 
the  non-administrative  leaders  of  political 


140                                                              THE  DIAL                                             [February  14 

thought  in  the  country  as  to  the  action  of  courageously    true    to    their    convictions, 

the    state    legislatures.       These    leaders  that  disaster  need  not  have  befallen  us. 

created  the  Constitution  and  with  it  the  But   with   respect   to    the    elimination   of 

United  States  of  America.  basic  causes  of  war  between  nations  the 

Now  there   are  many  strictures  to  be  Constitution  is  definitive, 

made   upon   the   Constitution.      It   is   un-  In  this  definitiveness  it  does  not,  how- 

doubtedly  the  instrument  of  the  conservers  ever,  surpass  the  Articles  of  Confedera- 

of  the  powers  and  privileges  of  property,  tion.     Those  delimit  more   precisely  the 

as  Charles  Beard  says  it  is.     And  it  is  possibilities  within  the  will  and  the  effective 

deserving  of  all  the  other  objections  that  reacn  of  mankind  today.    Add  to  them  the 

have  been  leveled  at  it.     Nevertheless,  it  necessary  power  to  enforce  this  common 

has  designated  for  the  states  that  have  put  will?  and  you  nave  provided,  not  absolute 

themselves  under  its  rule  the  structure  of  insurance  against  war,  but  a  structure  that 

lasting  peace.      That   it   did   not   do   so  win  pr0gressively  make  war  less  and  less 

absolutely  that  in  spite  of  it  we  underwent  ^      For   aU   beginnings   force   is   the 

a  Civil  War,  is  acknowledged.     Had  the  S£  ,    ,  . 

framers   of  the   Constitution  been  more  needtul  thmg'                 H.  M.  KALLEN. 


Distance 


Two  pale  old  men 

Sit  by  a  squalid  window  playing  chess. 

The  heavy  air  and  the  shrill  cries 

Beyond  the  sheltering  pane  are  less 

To  them  than  roof-blockaded  skies. 

Life  flowing  past  them: 

Women   with   gay  eyes, 

Resurgent  voices,  and  the  noise 

Of  peddlers  showing  urgent  wares, 

Leaves  their  dark  peace  unchanged. 

They  are  innocent 

Of  the  street  clamor  as  young  children  bent 

Absorbed  over  their  toys. 

The  old  heads  nod; 

A  parchment-colored  hand 

Hovers  above  the  intricate  dim  board. 

And  patient  schemes  are  woven,  where  they  sit 

So  still, 

And  ravelled,  and  reknit  with  reverent  skill. 

And  when  a  point  is  scored 

A  flickering  jest 

Brightens  their  eyes,   a  solemn  beard   is   raised 

A  moment,  and  then  sunk  on  the  thin  chest. 

Heedless  as  happy  children,  or  maybe 

Lovers  creating  their  own  solitude, 

Or  worn  philosophers,  content  to  brood 

On  an  intangible  reality. 

Shut  in  an  ideal  universe, 

Within  their  darkened  window-frame 

They  ponder  on  their  moves,  rehearse 

The  old  designs, 

Two  rusty  skull-caps  bowed 

Above  an  endless  game. 

BABETTE  DEUTSCH. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


141 


Our  "Paris  Letter 


(Special  Correspondence  of  THE  DIAL.) 
The  "Fait  de  la  Semaine"  (Grasset,  Paris)  is 
a  periodical  of  which  each  number  is  a  complete 
pamphlet  on  a  given  subject.  The  idea  is  an 
excellent  one  since  it  enables  an  important  ques- 
tion to  be  treated  much  more  fully  than  it  could 
be  treated  within  the  limits  of  a  review  article. 
Recently  the  subjects  have  often  been  not  only 
important  ones  but  also  ones  about  which  the 
public  is  least  informed.  Number  Three,  for 
instance,  was  entitled  "Ce  qu'un  Frangais  doit 
savoir  des  Etats-Unis"  and  was  the  joint  pro- 
duction of  four  authors:  MM.  Emile  Boutroux, 
Jules  Lepain,  Firmin-Roz,  and  Mr.  W.  Morton- 
Fullerton.  Most  people  in  France  know  very 
little  about  America;  the  only  type  of  American 
with  whom  they  have  come  into  contact  or  of 
whom  they  know  something  by  repute  is  the 
multi-millionaire — for  the  humbler  tourist  is 
known  chiefly  to  hotel-keepers — and  their  con- 
ception of  the  American  people  is  consequently 
not  very  accurate.  An  account  of  America,  its 
institutions,  its  people,  and  its  leading  character- 
istics, was  therefore  useful  and  timely.  Now 
that  Paris  and  certain  other  localities  in  France 
are  full  of  the  American  army  and  its  auxiliary 
services,  the  French  public  is  acquiring  a  per- 
sonal knowledge  even  more  valuable,  which 
cannot  but  strengthen  the  traditional  ties  of 
friendship  between  the  two  peoples. 

Another  country  about  which  we  talk  a  great 
deal  just  now,  but  of  which  most  of  us  know 
nothing,  is  Russia.  It  is  with  Russia  that  the 
issue  of  the  "Fait  de  la  Semaine"  of  December 
22  (Number  Nine)  deals.  Its  title  is  "Perdons- 
nous  la  Russie?"  and  its  author  is  M.  Marcel 
Sembat,  one  of  the  leading  members  of  the  Social- 
ist party  in  the  Chamber  of  Deputies,  who  with 
M.  Jules  Guesde  entered  the  first  war  Cabinet, 
formed  by  M.  Viviani  on  August  26,  1914  when 
von  Kluck  was  marching  on  Paris,  and  who  was 
also  a  member  of  the  first  Briand  Ministry, 
which  succeeded  to  the  Viviani  Ministry  on 
October  29,  1915  and  remained  in  office  for 
about  fourteen  months. 

M.  Sembat  remarks  that  it  is  very  difficult  for 
Frenchmen — and  that  is  equally  true  of  other 
foreigners  except  those  belonging  to  Slav  peoples 
— to  get  a  real  knowledge  of  Russia,  for  their 
ignorance  of  the  Russian  language  prevents 
them  from  coming  into  direct  and  intimate  con- 


tact with  the  Russian  people.  Nevertheless,  he 
says,  M.  Albert  Thomas,  M.  Emile  Vander- 
velde,  M.  Moutet,  M.  Laffon,  and  M.  Marcel 
Cachin,  who  have  all  visited  Russia  since  the 
revolution,  all  succeeded  in  penetrating  below 
the  surface  and  getting  into  touch  with  the  pro- 
letariat. M.  Cachin,  in  particular,  discovered 
why  the  Germans  gained  so  strong  a  hold  in 
Russia.  We  are  accustomed,  says  M.  Sembat, 
to  think  of  the  Germans  as  having  played  the 
parts  in  Russia  of  spies,  courtiers,  government 
officials,  and  even  generals;  but  it  was  not  their 
intervention  in  this  respect  that  gave  them  their 
influence  before  the  war.  As  M.  Cachin  dis- 
covered, the  secret  of  their  influence  was  that 
they  had  also  been  the  educators  of  the  Russians. 
At  Moscow  M.  Cachin  was  entertained  most 
hospitably  by  some  charming  Russians,  devoted 
to  France,  but  he  noticed  that  all  their  furniture 
was  in  the  Munich  style  and  he  could  not  help 
remarking  upon  it.  His  hosts,  after  a  moment's 
hesitation,  explained  that  whereas  the  French 
were  hardly  seen  in  Russia,  the  Germans  had 
been  the  constant  educators  of  the  Russians. 
There  was  a  French  colony  at  Moscow  of  from 
1,000  to  1,200,  but  the  German  colony  before 
the  war  numbered  about  100,000.  At  the  great 
Moscow  Coooperative,  which  has  millions  of 
members  all  over  the  country,  M.  Cachin  heard 
the  same  story.  It  was  the  German  cooperator, 
Muller  of  Hamburg,  who  came  to  start  the  insti- 
tution and  teach  the  Russians  how  to  run  it,  and 
the  first  managers  were  Germans.  "We  are  their 
pupils,"  said  the  Moscow  cooperators;  "how  can 
we  help  being  grateful  to  them?" 

This  discovery  made  a  profound  impression 
on  M.  Cachin  and,  as  M.  Sembat  says,  it  pro- 
vides matter  for  reflection;  the  preponderant 
German  influence  in  Italy  was,  he  adds,  due  to 
exactly  the  same  reasons.  I  myself  remember 
an  Italian  friend's  lamenting  to  me  some  five 
or  six  years  ago  that  it  was  almost  impossible 
to  attract  English  capital  into  Italy,  in  spite  of 
the  marvelous  openings  there.  We  prefer  the 
English  to  the  Germans,  he  said,  but  the  English 
will  neither  settle  in  Italy  for  business  purposes 
nor  invest  in  Italian  enterprises  and  the  Ger- 
mans do  both;  the  result  is  that  the  Germans 
control  a  large  proportion  of  Italian  commerce 
and  industry.  Instead  of  denouncing  the  Ger- 
mans for  their  industry  and  enterprise,  it  would 
have  been  wiser  on  our  part  to  imitate  them. 

The  success  of  the  Maximalists  is  attributed 


142 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


by  M.  Sembat  to  three  causes:  the  desire  of  the 
Russian  people  for  men  of  action,  their  fear  of 
the  restoration  of  the  Czardom  by  a  military 
coup  d'etat,  their  longing  for  peace.  Kerensky 
came  to  grief  because  he  did  not  act,  and  his 
government  ceased  to  have  any  support  in  the 
country;  it  fell  so  easily  because  nobody  cared 
to  defend  it.  The  Korniloff  attempt,  which  so 
large  a  proportion  of  the  French  and  English 
press  foolishly  supported,  aroused  the  fear  of  a 
Czarist  restoration;  Kerensky  was  more  or  less 
compromised  in  it  and  the  people  were  driven  into 
the  arms  of  the  extremists,  who  became  the 
saviors  of  the  revolution.  Above  all,  the  Maxi- 
malists triumphed  because  they  promised  peace. 
Not  that  the  Russian  people  had  the  least  desire 
to  make  a  separate  peace  or  to  desert  the  Allies; 
it  wished  to  go  on  defending  Russia  against  the 
invaders,  but  it  also  wished  that  there  should 
be  general  peace  negotiations  while  the  war  con- 
tinued. All  the  official  declarations  of  the  Soviets 
prove  that.  In  M.  Sembat's  opinion  it  is  the 
mistaken  policy  of  the  Allies  that  has  driven  the 
Russians  into  separate  negotiations  with  the  Cen- 
tral Empires.  Another  mistake  was  the  refusal 
to  permit  the  Stockholm  conference,  which 
would  have  had  the  immense  advantage  of  not 
compromising  the  governments,  since  the  Social- 
ists alone  would  have  taken  part  in  it,  at  their 
own  risk  and  peril,  and  they  could  subsequently 
have  been  disowned,  if  necessary,  by  their  respec- 
tive governments.  M.  Sembat  urges  that  the 
mistake  should  be  immediately  rectified  so  far  as 
it  can  be  at  the  eleventh  hour.  The  only  hope 
of  keeping  Russia  in  the  Alliance  is  to  get  into 
contact  at  once  with  the  men  that  have  the 
power  in  Russia,  and  only  Socialists  can  do  that 
with  any  hope  of  success.  The  French  govern- 
ment has  made  use  of  Catholics  in  Spain,  very 
rightly  since  it  was  the  Catholic  party  in  that 
country  that  was  Pro-German;  why  should  it 
not  make  use  of  Socialists  in  Russia?  If  the 
objection  is  the  fear  of  increasing  the  importance 
of  the  Socialist  party,  it  is  a  very  petty  one. 
Perhaps  the  recent  courageous  attitude  of  the 
British  Labor  Party  has  somewhat  mitigated  that 
objection. 

This  extremely  able  and  interesting  pamphlet 
comes  at  an  opportune  moment,  for  the  Russian 
situation  occupies  much  of  our  attention.  Nat- 
urally, popular  feeling  in  France  is  very  strong 
against  the  Russians.  France  was  dragged  into 
the  war  by  fidelity  to  the  Russian  alliance  and  it 
is  felt  to  be  very  hard  that  Russia  should  now 


leave  France  in  the  lurch.  Natural  as  that  feel- 
ing is,  it  is  not  altogether  just  and  M.  Sembat's 
wise  remarks  may  help  to  modify  it.  He  treats 
his  serious  and  thorny  subject  with  that  light- 
ness of  touch  that  is  characteristic  of  him;  the 
pamphlet  is  full  of  wit  and  of  tact.  His  dex- 
terity in  skating  over  thin  ice  is  marvelous.  This 
apparently  almost  frivolous  way  of  dealing  with 
a  grave  question  does  not  in  the  least  detract 
from  the  value  of  the  pamphlet ;  on  the  contrary, 
it  merely  makes  it  eminently  readable.  There 
is  a  certain  intellectual  affinity  between  M.  Sem- 
bat and  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw;  dull  people  think 
that  neither  of  them  is  serious  and  complain  of 
their  tendency  to  paradox,  as  if  the  most  pro- 
found truths  were  not  expressed  in  paradox.  One 
of  the  greatest  of  living  Frenchmen  once  said  to 
me  that  he  could  not  stand  anybody  that  had  not 
a  touch  of  the  paradoxical. 

It  is  a  long  time  since  we  had  a  new  play  by 
M.  de  Porto-Riche,  one  of  the  most  accomplished 
and  interesting  of  contemporary  French  drama- 
tists, and  we  had  pleasant  anticipations  of  "Le 
Marchand  d'Estampes,"  recently  produced  at  the 
Athenee  theatre.  But  the  reality  was  rather  a 
disappointment,  for  the  play  is  not  equal  to  its 
author's  best  work.  Of  course,  it  is  admirably 
written,  for  M.  de  Porto-Riche  could  not  write 
otherwise  than  well ;  it  is  also  undoubtedly  inter- 
esting, but  it  is  not  entirely  convincing.  It  is  the 
story  of  a  print-dealer,  who  has  been  wounded 
at  the  front  and  whose  nervous  system  has  been 
so  shaken  that  it  has  suffered  permanently.  He 
comes  home,  discharged  from  the  army,  to  a  wife 
whom  he  has  adored  and  who  has  returned  his 
devotion ;  but  he  has  fallen  in  love  with  another 
woman.  The  latter  refuses  his  advances  and  he 
is  reduced  to  a  state  of  helpless  depression,  while 
his  wife  bravely  continues  to  run  the  shop  and 
bear  her  trouble.  When  at  last  the  other  woman 
consents  to  become  his  mistress  and  they  are 
about  to  go  away  together,  he  cannot  bring  him- 
self to  leave  his  wife;  he  confesses  to  her  the 
step  that  he  contemplates  and  they  agree  to  die 
together,  since  happiness  is  henceforth  impossible 
for  them  both.  Considering  the  mental  condi- 
tion of  the  man,  this  conclusion  is  quite  possi- 
ble and  natural  on  his  part;  he  might  well  have 
committed  suicide  in  such  circumstances.  But 
given  the  character  of  the  wife  as  M.  de  Porto- 
Riche  depicts  her  throughout  the  play,  it  is  not 
natural  and  hardly  possible  on  her  part.  And 
it  is  here  that  the  play  fails  to  convince.  Such 
a  woman  might  have  been  capable  of  sacrificing 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


143 


herself  and  abandoning  her  husband  to  the  other 
woman  to  secure  his  happiness;  she  might  have 
proposed  to  her  husband  to  give  up  their  shop 
and  leave  Paris  to  try  a  new  life  elsewhere; 
there  are  many  solutions  possible.  But  never 
would  she  have  consented  to  commit  suicide. 
Nevertheless,  the  play  is  a  welcome  contrast  to 
most  of  those  that  we  have  been  given  since  the 
war  and  even  for  some  years  before  it.  What- 
ever its  faults,  it  remains  the  work  of  a  great 
dramatist  and,  with  the  exception  of  M.  Ger- 
aldy's  "Noces  d'Argent,"  it  is  the  only  new  play 
worth  serious  notice  that  has  been  produced  since 
the  war.  Let  us  hope  that  now  that  M.  de  Porto- 
Riche  has  broken  his  long  silence — we  had  had 
nothing  from  him  for  several  years  before  the  war 
— he  will  not  again  desert  the  theatre. 


ROBERT  DELL. 


Paris,  January  4,  iQi8. 


Trotzky,  A  Doubtful  Ally 

THE  BOLSHEVIKI  AND  WORLD  PEACE.  By  Leon 
Trotzky.  With  an  introduction  by  Lincoln  Stef- 
fens.  Boni  and  Liveright;  $1.50. 

Suppose  the  war  were  to  end  tomorrow — 
where  would  the  historian  look  for  his  Car- 
lylean  hero?  Even  the  most  churlish  Prussian 
would  scarcely  begrudge  admission  that  France's 
levee  en  masse  was  as  thrilling  as  anything  we 
have  seen  since  nationalism  became  a  political 
reality.  But  France's  spiritual  energy  seemed 
well-nigh  exhausted  in  the  achievement.  Cer- 
tainly she  has  not  yet  brought  forth  leaders  who 
are  the  complete  inheritors  of  her  glorious  tra- 
ditions. Can  Clemenceau  or  Joffre  or  Poincare 
fill  the  bill?  The  pettifogging  deputies  of  the 
Chamber?  Hardly.  Nor  has  England  done 
much  more  than  reveal  the  enduring  virtues  of 
her  liberal  and  laborite  leaders,  like  Asquith  and 
Henderson,  when  contrasted  with  the  stark  reac- 
tionism  of  the  Tories.  Her  present  leader,  Lloyd 
George,  cannot  stir  us.  Many  of  his  own  coun- 
trymen regard  him  as  the  apotheosis  of  middle- 
class  mediocrity,  energy  disguising  itself  as  in- 
sight, an  early  Chauvinism  and  braggadocio  modi- 
fied into  a  later  temperateness  by  the  unrelenting 
casualty  lists  from  Flanders.  Germany  then? 
Surely  not  the  Kaiser,  with  his  childish  vanity 
and  love  of  a  bright  uniform;  the  Kaiser,  who 
in  the  words  "Vorwarts"  employed  to  describe 
Bethmann-Hollweg  "means  well — feebly."  Not 
an  emperor  who  is  the  football  of  his  Genera] 


Staff;  who  is  too  weak  to  decide  whether  or  not 
to  chance  his  dynasty  on  the  stopping  of  a  war, 
which,  begun  to  enhance  his  prestige,  will  unless 
soon  ended  destroy  him  utterly.  Not  a  sovereign 
who  cowers  before  a  possible  military  dictator- 
ship, yet  lacks  the  courage  to  lead  his  people  from 
the  morass  of  misery  and  shame  into  which  their 
Hindenburgs  and  Hoffmanns  and  Ludendorffs 
and  von  Steins  have  led  them.  The  little  kinglets 
and  petty  tyrants  of  the  Balkans,  or  even  young 
Charles,  protesting  his  innocence  and  good  inten- 
tions loudly  to  heaven,  with  an  uneasy  glance 
backward  towards  Berlin?  All,  all  are  gone, 
even  Enver  Pasha. 

America,  you  say.  Yes,  but  we  have  only  one 
leader — Wilson — and  he  has  himself  repudiated 
the  laurel  of  leadership.  He  prefers  to  regard 
himself  as  an  "interpreter."  Nor  is  it  likely  that 
the  future  historian's  estimate  will  disagree  with 
his  own.  In  contrast  to  most  teachers  who  have 
come  into  power,  Wilson  has  exhibited  an  ex- 
traordinary flexibility  of  mind  before  actual 
events.  He  has  been  able  to  learn  as  well  as 
teach;  he  has  imbibed  knowledge  as  well  as  im- 
parted it.  In  other  words,  he  has  not  been  stub- 
born before  the  logic  of  circumstances.  When 
he  could  not  control,  he  has  chosen  the  path  of 
wisdom  and  adopted  as  his  own — as  in  the  case 
of  Russia.  This,  according  to  the  modern  doc- 
trine, is  "interpretation,"  and  it  is  soundly 
pragmatic.  It  means  that  one  learns,  but  not 
necessarily  that  one  leads. 

Of  course  it  may  be  that  the  "hero" — in  the 
Carlylean  sense — is  only  one  more  of  the  many 
myths  that  the  war  has  subjected  to  the  barrage 
fire  of  everyday  reality.  Leadership  of  the 
grandiose,  old-fashioned  sort  becomes  rather  ar- 
chaic in  a  world  of  machines,  "coordination,"  and 
technical  experts.  It  is  unquestionably  risky. 
Today  the  powerful  man  appears  not  so  much 
as  the  fountainhead  of  moral  forces  as  the  skilful 
juggler  of  parliamentary  majorities,  the  com- 
promiser and  astute  trimmer  among  the  winds 
of  unreason,  greed,  and  flickering  nobility,  the 
adjuster  and  adapter  of  circumstances.  Every 
intelligent  man  seems  fascinated  with  the  "in- 
strumental" theory  by  which  the  grapes  of  "pri- 
ority" and  "centralized  control"  are  cheerfully 
plucked  from  the  bloody  thistles  of  the  trenches. 
Forces  grow  up  imperceptibly  to  be  "directed." 
It  is  sheer  arrogance  to  become  a  force  oneself. 
To  be  downright,  consistent,  clear,  uncomprom- 
ising— all  that,  we  were  told,  is  merely  for  the 
doctrinaire  and  the  ineffectual,  the  declasse  who 


144 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


hover  jealously  on  the  fringes  of  authority.  So 
ran  the  song  of  the  day. 

Until  Trotzky  appeared.  By  all  the  rules  of 
the  game,  as  heretofore  played,  he  should  not 
have  counted.  He  lacked  birth  and  manners 
and  taste.  He  was  a  fanatic,  an  obsolete  Marx- 
ian who  clung  pertinaciously  to  a  theory  of  the 
class  war  which  up-to-date  thinkers  regarded  as 
outworn.  He  had  been  exiled  from  one  country 
to  another,  landing  finally  in  the  East  Side,  New 
York.  There  he  lived  the  obscure  and  hand-to- 
mouth  existence  of  the  Socialist  orator  and 
feuilletonist — according  to  well-fed  radicals,  a 
pathetically  unimportant  figure.  Even  on  his 
return  to  Russia,  after  a  few  weeks'  detainment, 
he  was  regarded  as  only  mildly  dangerous  and 
on  the  protest  of  the  Kerensky  government  per- 
mitted to  continue  his  journey.  When  his  name 
began  to  appear  more  frequently  in  the  Allied 
and  neutral  press,  the  ostrich  game  of  belittling 
his  importance  went  cheerfully  on.  He  was 
merely  one  of  the  crazy  "reds"  then  leading  Rus- 
sia on  to  her  dance  of  death,  a  wild-eyed,  long- 
haired anarchist  to  be  laughed  at  as  long  as  he 
was  out  of  power  and  roundly  cursed  as  a  traitor 
to  the  Allied  cause  when  he  came  into  power. 

All  this,  of  course,  was  absurd — how  absurd 
his  book,  written  before  the  Russian  Revolution, 
now  shows.  Does  he  repudiate  the  idea  of  na- 
tionality? Not  at  all:  his  choicest  epithets  are 
reserved  for  the  archaic  and  feudal  Austro-Hun- 
garian  government.  Nothing  would  please  him 
more  than  to  see  the  Dual  Monarchy  smashed 
and  the  "suppressed"  nationalities  given  their 
own  language,  schools,  government.  He  argues 
with  great  force  for  something  less  mild  than 
federation  as  a  solution  of  the  Southeastern  Euro- 
pean question.  Provided  the  curse  of  imperial 
jealousy  and  economic  aggrandizement — to  him, 
an  inevitable  consequence  of  the  present  capital- 
istic system — can  be  overcome  by  revolution  of 
the  proletariat  everywhere,  it  is  merely  a  matter 
of  taste,  "self-determination,"  how  many  national 
states  are  in  existence.  In  the  new  world  of 
proletarian  control,  according  to  Trotzky,  na- 
tional states  will  lose  their  menace.  When  the 
workers  of  the  world  are  united,  they  will  save 
their  machine  guns  only  for  the  bourgeoisie — 
everywhere.  You  will  be  a  worker  before  you 
are  a  Russian  or  German  or  American.  Does  he 
excuse  Germany  for  starting  this  war?  On 
the  contrary,  no  bitterer  indictment  of  Ger- 
many's guilt  has  ever  been  written  than  Trotzky's 
analysis  of  the  Germans'  claim  of  a  war  of  self- 


defense.  Has  he  brotherly  words  for  the  meek 
German  Socialists?  Listen  to  what  he  has  to 
say  of  "Vorwarts's"  exhortation  to  the  German 
workers  "to  hold  out  until  the  decisive  victory 
is  ours": 

Of  course  we  must  not  look  for  ideas,  logic,  and 
truth  where  they  do  not  exist.  This  is  simply  a  case  of 
an  ulcer  of  slavish  sentiments  bursting  open  and  foul 
pus  crawling  over  the  pages  of  the  workingman's 
press.  It  is  clear  that  the  oppressed  class  which  pro- 
ceeds too  slowly  and  inertly  on  its  way  toward  free- 
dom must  in  the  final  hour  drag  all  its  hopes  and 
promises  through  mire  and  blood,  before  there  arises 
in  its  soul  the  pure,  unimpeachable  voice — the  voice 
of  revolutionary  honor. 

He  condemns  the  German  Socialist  Party  for  too 
tender  regard  for  their  party  organization,  too 
much  "minimalism,"  too  solicitous  an  eye  for 
their  prestige  and  power.  In  tying  itself  to  the 
chariot  wheels  of  the  imperialistic  state,  the  party 
lost  its  own  soul.  It  developed  the  "machine," 
which  for  its  continued  existence  was  as  de- 
pendent as  any  other  political  "machine"  in 
Germany  upon  the  government's  success  in  the 
war.  Thus  developed,  as  a  by-product  of  op- 
portunism, the  frightful  spectacle  of  working- 
class  imperialism.  Trotzky  has  full  realization 
of  the  danger  of  a  German  victory. 

Why  then  does  he  want  immediate  peace? 
Because  on  its  military  side  he  believes  the  war 
has  reached  a  deadlock,  and  its  continued  pro- 
longation means  the  mutual  exhaustion  of  the 
fighting  spirit  in  the  working-class.  He  wants 
the  war  to  end  before  the  belligerency  of  the 
proletariat  is  sucked  dry  in  what  he  regards  as 
this  irrelevant  conflict.  Enough  force  must  re- 
main in  the  proletariat  to  overthrow  their  gov- 
ernments and  to  conduct  a  first-class  revolution, 
Russian  style.  With  the  disillusion  which  will 
inevitably  follow  peace  negotiations,  he  feels  that 
events  can  be  so  maneuvred  that  revolution  will 
result  in  almost  every  country — but  especially  in 
Germany  and  Austria.  And  he  warns  all  and 
sundry  governments  that  when  the  revolutions 
do  start,  the  working-class  will  have  learned  a 
lesson  from  this  war  which  it  will  not  speedily 
forget — the  lesson  that  necessity  knows  no  law. 
Bourgeois  legalism  will  not  frighten  workingmen 
who  have  lain  in  the  mud  and  shot  their  brothers. 

Had  the  average  good  citizen  read  this  book 
a  few  months  ago,  he  would  probably  have  re- 
flected: "Well,  this  fellow  is  certainly  a  devil, 
and  if  he  ever  gets  loose  nobody's  property  will 
be  safe.  Whatever  else  he  may  be,  he's  certainly 
not  Pro-German.  He's  a'  clear  and  vigorous 
thinker,  a  dangerous  revolutionist.  But  there's 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


145 


one  consolation.  If  he  ever  does  get  into  power 
in  Russia,  he  won't  be  able  to  put  his  ideas  across. 
On  the  other  hand,  he's  a  real  menace  to  the 
Allies.  With  all  his  fine  talk,  an  agitation  for 
an  immediate  peace  will  only,  as  a  matter  of 
cold  fact,  result  in  an  advantage  to  Germany. 
The  Russian  army  is  already  gone;  its  morale 
is  broken.  The  people  want  peace  at  any  price. 
Trotzky  will  be  in  no  position  to  be  impudent 
to  Germany.  He  will  have  to  truckle.  He  may 
have  words,  but  the  Germans  have  guns.  Let 
us  get  together  and  call  him  a  Pro-German  any- 
way and  discredit  him.  Then  he  can  keep  his 
theories  to  himself,  and  not  sell  Russia  out  to 
Germany  in  the  name  of  the  holy  Revolution." 

Such,  at  any  rate,  seemed  to  be  the  tactics  of 
the  reactionary  press  in  England  and  America 
and  France.  They  were  content  to  remain  in 
the  intellectual  twilight  of  opinion  which  has 
characterized  them  since  the  war  began.  They 
exhausted  the  vocabulary  of  mud  on  Trotzky: 
his  pockets  bulged  with  German  gold  (as  per- 
haps they  did,  for  the  Junkers  believed,  on  Allied 
authority,  they  had  found  an  easy  mark)  ;  he  was 
a  traitor  for  whom  hanging  was  too  good.  In 
this  strain  the  abuse  continued — until  Brest- 
Litovsk.  Then  something  happened,  which  sur- 
prised the  Germans  no  less  than  the  Allies. 
Trotzky  didn't  truckle.  He  was  impudent, 
truthful.  Armed  with  his  idea  and  his  honesty 
of  purpose,  he  snapped  his  fingers  at  the  entire 
German  army  and  told  them  to  come  on,  what 
good  would  it  do  them?  Did  the  diplomatists 
dare  to  go  back  home  and  tell  their  proletariat 
that  they  didn't  want  a  democratic  peace? 
British  Labor  responded  almost  immediately  to 
this  amazing  spectacle ;  so  did  Wilson  in  a  speech 
which  was  his  finest  accomplishment.  Of  course 
it  had  always  been  plain  what  Trotzky  would 
do,  plain,  that  is,  to  anybody  who  knew  how 
religiously  our  newspapers  misinterpret,  plain 
to  those  who  had  ever  seen  or  talked  to  Trotzky. 
Today  it  is  plain  to  the  world.  The  Russian 
delegates  at  Brest-Litovsk  have  the  public,  open 
approval  of  our  President. 

Today,  with  the  news  of  Russia's  exit  from 
the  war,  the  situation  remains  a  puzzle.  Has 
Trotzky  sold  out  to  the  Germans?  On  the 
surface  it  looks  like  it.  For  it  is  one  thing  to 
take  control  of  a  nation  which  has  gone  to  pieces, 
which  has  lost  its  army,  and  to  try  to  make  cap- 
ital out  of  this  very  weakness  as  Trotzky  did  at 
Brest-Litovsk.  It  is  quite  another  thing  to  throw 
open  the  economic  resources  of  a  country  to  the 


enemy,  even  while  you  refuse  to  sign  a  "formal 
peace  treaty."  Yet  it  is  impossible  to  read  his 
book  without  searching  for  a  more  complex  ex- 
planation. No  man  could  be  such  a  consummate 
liar,  so  shameless  a  betrayer  of  his  own  prin- 
ciples. No:  Trotzy  is  risking  everything  on  an 
ultimate  revolution  in  Germany,  brought  about 
by  passive  and  moral  resistance,  propaganda, 
words.  It  is  a  terrible  chance  to  take,  and  may 
result  in  handing  Russia  over  to  German  dom- 
ination for  a  century.  What  lesson  is  there  in 
this  tragedy  of  Russia  for  the  Allies?  How  can 
it  be  stopped?  What  chance  have  we  now  to 
make  Germany  revolt?  It  is  too  late  to  retrieve 
our  former  blunders  and  diplomatic  stupidity. 
All  we  can  do  is  to  make  sure  that  the  much- 
heralded  German  "drive,"  if  it  comes,  is  blocked. 
When  that  fails — as  it  must  fail — the  arrogant 
Junkers  will  not  have  a  single  card  left  to  play. 
Then  in  truth  the  revolt  may  come  in  Germany. 
What  irony  if  the  democratic  peace  Trotzky 
preaches  shall  be  won  for  him  on  the  fields  of 
Flanders  by  the  blood  of  those  he  has,  in  his  skep- 
ticism, repudiated !  if  those  whom  today  he  ques- 
tions should  tomorrow  prove  his  doubts  groundless ! 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


a  Poet  Should  Never  Be 
Educated 


FIRST  OFFERING.     By  Samuel  Roth.     Lyric  Pub- 
lishing Co. ;  $1. 

RENASCENCE,    and    Other   Poems.      By   Edna    St. 
Vincent  Millay.    Kennerley;  $1.50. 
FIRST  POEMS.     By  Edwin  Curran.     Published  by 
the  author,  Zanesville,  Ohio;  35  cts. 

These  three  first  volumes,  with  their  curious 
kinship  and  even  more  curious  contrasts,  furnish 
a  variety  of  themes.  They  offer  material  for 
several  essays:  on  "What  Constitutes  Rap- 
ture"; on  "The  Desire  of  the  Moth  for  the 
Star" ;  on  "The  Growing  Tendency  among  Cer- 
tain Publishers  to  Ask  One  Dollar  and  Fifty 
Cents  for  Seventy  Pages  of  Verse";  on  "A  Bill 
for  the  Conservation  of  Conservative  Poetry"; 
on  "Life,  Literature,  and  the  Last  Analysis"; 
on  "Why  a  Poet  Should  Never  be  Educated." 
One  cannot  deal  with  all  these  fascinating  con- 
siderations, but  I  hope  to  suggest  the  crippling 
effect  the  college  usually  has  on  the  embryonic 
poet;  how  imagination  is  slurred  over  and 
form  is  magnified;  how  rhapsody  is  tuned  down 
to  rhetoric  and  regularity;  how  poetry,  in  short, 


146 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


emerges  not  as  an  experiment,  a  record  of  varied 
days,  meditations,  and  adventures,  but  as  an 
orderly  procession  of  standard  thoughts,  a  codi- 
fied treatise,  a  course  in  pattern-making.  Take 
these  three  books,  for  instance.  Mr.  Roth  has 
been  brought  up  at  a  university,  and  its  formal 
stamp  is  over  all  his  pages.  Miss  Millay  wrote 
two  of  the  most  fresh  and  beautiful  lyrics  which 
contemporary  American  poetry  can  boast — before 
she  went  to  Vassar.  Since  that  time  she  has  pro- 
duced nothing  that  has  more  than  a  trace  of 
her  initial  spontaneous  quality;  her  subsequent 
poems  strain  to  make  up  in  intellectual  concepts 
what  they  have  lost  in  naivete.  Edwin  Curran 
is  a  railroad  telegrapher,  a  beginner,  ignorant  of 
the  laws  of  prosody,  of  scansion,  even  of  gram- 
mar ;  he  would  not  recognize  a  chant  royal  or  an 
amphibrach  even  if  it  were  introduced  to  him. 
And  yet  there  is  more  vitality  and  vision  in  these 
paper-bound  and  undiscriminating  twenty-seven 
pages  than  in  a  score  of  more  elegant  and  more 
erudite  volumes. 

It  is  impossible  to  tell  how  far  the  universities 
are  (from  a  literary  point  of  view)  responsible 
for  so  many  sudden  blossomings  and  so  many 
early  deaths.  But  everyone  can  name  at  least 
half  a  dozen  examples.  Was  it  not  less  precocity 
than  the  hot-house  atmosphere  of  Harvard  which 
made  John  Hall  Wheelock  bloom  too  quickly — 
a  forced  growth  that  almost  sapped  him  for  a 
sturdier  flowering?  And,  at  the  other  extreme, 
(to  change  the  metaphor)  was  it  not  the  uni- 
versities that  almost  succeeded  in  extinguishing 
Robert  Frost's  guarded  flame  with  their  damp 
disapproval?  Perhaps  it  was  not  so  much  dis- 
approval that  they  exhibited  as,  what  was  worse, 
a  ponderous  indifference  to  what  did  not  conform 
to  the  curriculum  of  prescribed  beauty.  It  was 
this  placid  unconcern  which  made  Frost  realize 
that  these  halls  of  learning  (he  attended  and  left 
two  of  them)  were  built  not  to  prepare  the 
future  but  to  perpetuate  the  past.  The  list  of 
ruined  or  rejected  originators  might  be  extended 
to  the  back  cover  of  this  magazine ;  every  reader 
might  add  his  own  quota.  But  catalogues  are 
tiresome  and  unsatisfactory  as  evidence.  I  shall 
return  to  my  trio  and  particularize. 

Mr.  Roth's  volume  contains  thirty-three  son- 
nets, half  a  dozen  lyrics,  a  few  efforts  in  vers 
libre;  all  of  them  pleasant,  precise,  undistin- 
guished. There  is  grace  in  them,  an  echo  if  not 
an  evocation  of  beauty,  and  sparks  from  what, 
in  other  circumstances,  may  have  burned  with 
an  authentic  flame.  But  the  cold  compress  of 


formalism  has  smothered  all  originality  out  of 
the  lines.  For  example: 

Lo,  I  have  touched  the  waters  of  the  tides 
Of  many  days,  who  through  dim  vision  spun 
Of  sheltered  deeds  now  catch  the  glow  of  Sun 

As  o'er  grey  waters  ploughed  by  Morn  he  rides, 

Waving  aflame  the  reckless  flag  of  dawn, 

Breaking  the  doors  of  caves  where  darkness  hides, 
And  having  freed  the  world,  loftily  glides 

The  blue  resplendent  mountain  peaks  upon. 

It  is  no  single  teacher,  no  one  influence  that  has 
shaped  these  lines  with  such  academic  accents; 
it  is  something  more  institutional  which  places 
its  determined  or  half-conscious  emphasis  on  tra- 
dition— an  emphasis  that  makes  the  student  bend 
and  conform  or,  if  he  is  made  of  tougher  fibre, 
react  with  a  violent  desire  to  shock.  Both  of 
these  impulses  are  thwarting  and  inhibitive,  for 
neither  of  them  is  the  result  of  natural  and  free 
creation.  And  so  what  here  should  have  been 
flexible,  young,  and  frankly  experimental  has 
been  hardened  in  a  tough  and  time-eaten  mold. 
Turning  to  the  second  volume  is  like  opening 
a  window  in  a  musty  class-room.  Here  is  air 
and  motion,  sunlight  and  the  reflection  of  cloud- 
driven  skies — even  though  the  shadows  are  some- 
times seen  upon  charted  walls.  For  the  greater 
part,  these  pages  vibrate  with  an  untutored  sin- 
cerity, a  direct  and  often  dramatic  power  that 
few  of  our  most  expert  craftsmen  can  equal. 
Turn,  for  instance,  to  the  opening  poem  that 
begins  like  a  child's  thoughtless  rhyme  or  a  scrap 
of  nonsense  verse: 

All  I  could  see  from  where  I  stood 
Was  three  long  mountains  and  a  wood ; 
I  turned  and  looked  another  way, 
And  saw  three  islands  in  a  bay. 
So  with  my  eyes  I  traced  the  line 
Of  the  horizon,  thin  and  fine, 
Straight  around  till  I  was  come 
Back  to  where  I'd  started  from; 
And  all  I  saw  from  where  I  stood 
Was  three  long  mountains  and   a  wood. 

An  almost  inconsequential  opening,  but  as  the 
poem  proceeds,  one  with  a  haunting  and  cumu- 
lative effect. 

Over  these  things  I  could  not  see 
These  were  the  things  that  bounded  me, 

it  goes  on.  And  then  without  ever  losing  the 
simplicity  of  the  couplets,  it  begins  to  mount. 
There  is  an  exquisite  idyllic  passage  beginning: 

The  grass,  a-tiptoe  at  my  ear, 
Whispering  to  me  I  could  hear; 
I  felt  the  rain's  cool  finger-tips 
Brushed  tenderly  across  my  lips, 
Laid  gently  on  my  sealed  sight, 
And  all  at  once  the  heavy  night 
Fell  from  my  eyes  and  I  could  see — 
A  drenched  and  dripping  apple-tree, 
A  last  long  line  of  silver  rain, 

and   suddenly,  beneath   the   descriptive   rapture, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


147 


one  is  confronted  with  a  greater  revelation.  It 
is  as  if  a  child  playing  about  the  room  had,  in 
the  midst  of  prattling,  uttered  some  shining  and 
terrific  truth.  This  remarkable  poem  is,  in  parts, 
a  trifle  repetitious,  but  what  it  repeats  is  said  so 
poignantly  that  one  thinks  of  scarcely  any  lesser 
poet  than  Blake  when  one  begins  the  ascending 
climax : 

I  know  the  path  that  tells  Thy  way 
Through  the  cool  eve  of  every  day; 
God,  I  can  push  the  grass  apart 
And  lay  my  finger  on  Thy  heart! 

Or  witness  the  first  of  the  unnamed  sonnets,  that 
has  a  similar  mixture  of  world  sadness  and  a 
painful  hunger  for  beauty,  a  hunger  so  great  that 
no  delight  is  great  enough  to  give  her  peace: 

Thou  art  not  lovelier  than  lilacs — no 

Nor  honeysuckle;   thou   art  not  more  fair 
Than  small  white  single  poppies — I  can  bear 

Thy  beauty;  though  I  bend  before  thee,  though 

From  left  to  right,  not  knowing  where  to  go, 
I  turn  my  troubled  eyes,  nor  here  nor  there 
Find  any  refuge  from  thee,  yet  I  swear 

So  has  it  been  with  mist — with  moonlight  so. 

Elsewhere  (as  in  "The  Suicide")  the  tone  is 
more  sophisticated.  The  results  of  reading  begin 
to  show.  In  "Interim"  we  see  the  intrusion  of 
foreign  accents;  echoes  of  other  dramatic  mono- 
logues disturb  us  as  the  poem  wanders  off  into 
periods  of  reflection  and  rhetoric.  And  there 
are  pages  where  all  that  was  fresh  and  native 
to  this  young  poet  seems  to  have  turned  to  mere 
prettiness  and  imitation.  "Ashes  of  Life"  might 
have  been  written  by  Sara  Teasdale  in  a  weak 
moment;  "The  Little  Ghost"  lisps  sweetly  after 
Margaret  Widdemer.  After  the  preceding  exhib- 
its such  lapses  are  doubly  distressing.  The  inclu- 
sion of  these  merely  pleasant  pieces  is  all  the  more 
surprising  when  one  notes  the  inexplicable  omis- 
sion of  "Journey"  from  this  volume — a  youthful 
poem,  but  sharpened  and  illuminated  with  a  suc- 
cession of  original  touches.  Here  is  a  part  of  it: 

Cat-birds  call 

Through  the  long  afternoon,  and  creeks  at  dusk 
Are   guttural.     Whip-poor-wills  wake   and  cry, 
Drawing  the  twilight  close  about  their  throats; 
Only  my  heart  makes  answer.     Eager  vines 
Go  up  the  rocks  and  wait;  flushed  apple-trees 
Pause  in  their  dance  and  break  the  ring  for  me.     .     . 
Round-faced  roses,  pink  and   petulant, 
Look  back  and  beckon  ere  they  disappear. 

Edwin  Curran's  work  has  no  trace  of  "lit- 
erary" temper  or  tradition,  no  polite  echoes  of  an 
echo.  Nothing  more  than  the  most  elementary 
schooling  can  be  found  in  his  unpretentious  and 
almost  ungrammatical  pages.  Published  by  him- 
self with  the  assurance  that  "any  help  in  dis- 
tribution will  be  appreciated"  and  the  tentative 
promise  that  "if  this  volume  meets  expenses, 


another,  possibly  better,  will  be  issued,"  the  thin 
booklet  is  free  of  both  poetic  cant  and  critical 
selectiveness.  Lines  of  startling  beauty  precede 
sentences  of  childish  bombast;  exquisite  and  dar- 
ing conceptions  rise  from  the  most  tawdry  and 
sentimental  of  themes;  vivid  images  leap  to  the 
astonished  eye  and  are  followed  by  passages  of 
the  most  mawkish  emotionalism.  Magic  takes 
this  poet  and  does  with  him  whatever  it  wishes. 
He  has  little  or  no  control  over  the  music;  it 
controls  him.  See,  for  examples,  the  quietly 
ecstatic  poem  "To  Future  Generations,"  the 
related  love  songs  scattered  without  title  through 
the  booklet,  the  blend  of  flatness  and  magnifi- 
cence in  "Christ"  with  its  sudden  climax: 

Sentinel,  where  is  morning  on  the  world? 
Break  the  night  for  night  has  slept  too  long. 
Where  is  the  dawn?     Is  her  rose  still  uncurled? 
Unburst  it!     Let  us  have  a  harp  and  song! 

Turn  to  the  sonnet  "Autumn,"  where  even 
"by  the  ruins  of  the  painted  hills"  this  new  singer 
can  find  none  of  the  proverbial  end-of-the-year 
melancholy,  but  only  the  "earth  stripped  to  grap- 
ple with  the  winter  year  .  .  .  her  gnarled  hills 
planned  for  victories." 

I  love  the  earth  who  goes  to  battle  now, 
To  struggle  with  the  wintry  whipping  storm 
And  bring  the  glorious  spring  out  from  the  night. 
I   see   earth's  muscles  bared,   her  battle   brow, 
And  am  not  sad,  but  feel  her  marvelous  charm 
As  splendidly  she  plunges  in  the  fight. 

Everywhere  this  individuality  of  utterance  is 
manifest.  It  shines  even  out  of  sentimental 
poems  like  the  one  on  the  statue  of  "George 
Washington  in  Wall  Street"  with  passages  like: 

He  is  not  dead  ;  some  blood  still  courses  thru  him  warm, 

Some  light  still  burns  behind  those  marble  eyes, 

A  pulse  knocks  thru  the  darkness  of  that  form, 

And  this  man  here  still  knows  and  is  aware; 

His  heart  is  broken  with  the  world's  sad  cries 

And  he  longs  to  throw  away  his  sleep  and  charm — 

Slip  off  the  stone  as  some  cold  cloak  of  air. 

or  like  "The  Sailing  of  Columbus"  that  begins: 

The  wind  ran  out  across  the  golden  sea, 
Chained  to  our  snowy  shrouds,  pulling  our  ships ; 
A  slave  who  creaked  the  beams  and  dragged  the  hulls 
Like  plows  across  the  waves  in  creams  of  foam. 
On  down  the  watery  field,  that  hill  of  rain, 
We  stumbled  on  the  wind,  leaning  on  the  sky, 
Running  into  eternity  and  blue  space, 
Trying  to  touch  that  azure  wall  ahead.     .     . 

It  is  these  flashes  of  brilliance  that  make  one 
anxious  for  Edwin  Curran  when  he  will  begin 
to  become  "cultured"  and  sophisticated.  And  it 
is  such  an  unknown  bit  of  fire,  springing  from 
so  apparently  uninspiring  a  centre  as  Zanesville, 
Ohio,  that  makes  one  surer  of  the  vigorous  poetic 
renascence  in  these  scattered  but  somehow  united 

states-  Louis  UNTERMEYER. 


148 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


Lincoln  in  Biography  and  Letters 

THE  LIFE  OF  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN.     By  Ida  M. 
Tarbell.     Macmillan;   $5. 

HONEST  ABE.     By  Alonzo   Rothschild.     Hough- 
ton  Mifflin;  $2- 

UNCOLLECTED    LETTERS    OF    ABRAHAM    LINCOLN. 
By  Gilbert  A.  Tracy.     Houghton  Mifflin;  $2.50. 

As  a  product  of  American  democracy,  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  bids  fair  to  be  of  perennial  interest. 
We  preserve  every  scrap  of  his  writing,  trivial  or 
important,  and  perpetuate  every  tale  or  tradition 
that  promises  to  add  to  our  memorial  of  the  man 
and  his  achievements.  For  many,  his  utterances 
on  public  questions  have  become  as  touchstones 
of  political  wisdom.  Those  who  study  his  per- 
sonality discover  in  it  much  that  is  highly  cheer- 
ing and  spiritual.  The  historian,  interpreting  his 
service  to  the  republic,  has  estimated  him  high 
in  the  conception  of  greatness.  The  feeling  is 
general  that  his  life  contains  a  validity  and  charm 
worthy  to  be  bequeathed  to  succeeding  genera- 
tions of  our  people,  native  and  foreign  born. 

In  the  literature  that  Lincoln  has  left  us  there 
is  very  little  that  directly  bespeaks  a  philosophy 
of  government,  though  much  is  implicit.  Not 
often  do  we  read  his  works  in  the  spirit  of  polit- 
ical exegesis.  The  time  may  come  when  this  will 
be  their  dominant  interest.  But  we  have  found 
that  he  could  bestow  upon  a  political  concept  a 
powerful  application  of  ideas  provoked  by  the 
disposition  of  his  time.  The  Declaration  and  the 
Constitution  stimulated  in  his  brain  many  pro- 
found observations  of  great  consequence  in  form- 
ing public  opinion  upon  the  issues  confronting 
his  mature  mind.  There  may  be  some  basis  for 
assent  to  the  assertion  of  an  able  student  of  his 
legal  history  that  Lincoln  was  a  great  constitu- 
tional lawyer.  He  at  least  possessed  a  clear  grasp 
of  the  leading  principles  governing  the  meaning 
of  the  Constitution.  His  ethics  was  personal 
rather  than  platonic.  We  revere  him  first  of  all 
as  an  exemplar,  as  "a  gentle,  good,  and  great 
man."  His  character  was  such  as  the  Greek 
dramatists  found  for  praise  in  Pericles :  "Persua- 
sion sat  upon  his  lips,  such  was  his  charm."  The 
qualities  Plutarch  ascribes  to  the  Athenian  states- 
man fit  our  mental  portrait  of  Lincoln's  person- 
ality and  power:  "He  was  indeed  a  character 
deserving  our  admiration  not  only  for  his  equita- 
ble and  mild  temper,  which  ...  in  the  many 
affairs  of  his  life  and  the  great  animosities  he 
incurred,  he  constantly  maintained;  but  also  for 
his  high  spirit  and  feeling,"  whereby  "he  never 
gratified  an  envy  or  passion,  nor  ever  treated  an 
enemy  as  irreconcilably  opposed  to  him." 


Biographically,  Lincoln  has  been  scanned  from 
many  angles.  Only  the  emergence  of  new  facts 
or  a  more  radiant  exposition  of  his  temperament 
and  experience,  his  environment,  and  the  spirit 
of  the  age  which  fashioned  his  fortunes,  would 
appear  to  justify  further  attempts  to  explain  him. 
During  the  last  decade  a  sufficient  body  of  such 
new  matter  has  accumulated  to  sanction  the  new 
edition  of  Miss  Tarbell's  "Life,"  first  given  to 
the  public  in  1900.  Her  work  at  that  time 
embodied  the  important  results  of  an  extended 
investigation  of  sources  of  information  unappro- 
priated by  Nicolay  and  Hay.  She  took  prac- 
tically the  last  opportunity  to  gather  up  a  large 
body  of  facts  and  impressions,  corroborative  and 
new,  held  in  solution  among  numerous  survivors 
from  Lincoln's  own  generation.  Much  of  what 
she  so  competently  reported  in  her  two  volumes 
would  have  perished  in  a  few  years  or  survived 
in  uncertain  and  confusing  tradition.  Among  the 
spolia  opima  which  she  contributed  was  "The 
Lost  Speech,"  delivered  at  Bloomington  in  1856, 
and  regarded  by  Herndon  as  "the  grand  effort" 
of  Lincoln's  life.  This  most  notable  of  Lincoln's 
unreported  speeches  Miss  Tarbell  recovered  as 
we  have  it  through  H.  C.  Whitney,  who  made 
notes  on  the  address  during  its  delivery  and  at 
Miss  Tarbell's  request  expanded  his  notes  me- 
moriter. 

Miss  Tarbell  presented  also  a  better  impres- 
sion of  Lincoln's  father,  the  much  disparaged 
Thomas.  With  all  his  "backwoodsiness,"  he  was 
fairly  representative  of  his  community.  He  was 
a  landowner  at  twenty-five,  possessed  credit  at 
the  village  store,  and  Miss  Tarbell  furnished 
documentary  evidence  that  he  enjoyed  the  local 
distinction  of  appointment  as  road-surveyor,  or 
overseer.  She  was  able  also  to  clear  up  several 
contradictory  traditions  about  his  ancestry,  edu- 
cation, and  other  matters,  as  well  as  to  give  fuller 
outline  to  the  prevailing  meagre  impression  of 
his  professional  life.  This  aspect  of  his  career, 
however,  has  been  in  large  measure  restored  to 
us  by  the  researches  of  F.  T.  Hill  and  Mr.  John 
T.  Richards.  The  latter's  important  work, 
among  others,  was  reviewed  in  THE  DIAL,  Octo- 
ber 19,  1916.  Although  Miss  Tarbell  exhibited 
the  greater  problems  which  Lincoln  encountered 
in  the  presidency  and  his  manner  of  meeting 
them,  it  was  not  her  purpose  to  lead  her  readers 
into  the  plexus  of  events  making  up  the  history 
of  his  administration  or  the  story  of  the  Civil 
War.  Instead,  she  pictured  the  personal  aspects 
of  his  life  and  character  in  terms  of  the  large 
amount  of  fresh  testimony  which  she  brought 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


149 


together  from  so  many  sources  to  supplement  the 
old.  Her  primary  purpose  was  to  exhibit  "Lin- 
coln the  man,"  yet  her  researches  enabled  her 
to  add  nearly  200  pages  of  Lincoln  letters  and 
speeches  not  included  in  any  preceding  work. 

The  new  edition  of  Miss  Tarbell's  "Life" 
amends  the  old  by  means  of  a  review  of  the  most 
important  of  the  materials  bearing  on  Lincoln's 
life  made  accessible  since  1900.  These  materials 
consist  in  the  main  of  the  "Diary"  of  Gideon 
Welles,  Secretary  of  the  Navy  under  Lincoln 
and  Johnson;  the  "Reminiscences"  of  Carl 
Schurz;  the  "Diary"  and  letters  of  John  Hay; 
and  the  "Personal  Recollections  of  Abraham  Lin- 
coln," by  Henry  B.  Rankin,  whose  fortune  it 
was  to  be  associated  with  the  firm  of  Lincoln  and 
Herndon  for  the  ten  years  preceding  Lincoln's 
election  to  the  presidency.  The  new  section,  con- 
tributed as  a  second  preface,  makes  reference  to 
Welles's  dislike  of  Seward's  bumptious  manner 
of  impressing  others  with  his  primacy  in  the 
administration.  By  many  of  those,  in  and  out 
of  Congress,  who  shared  Welles's  irritation,  Lin- 
coln's forbearance  with  his  Secretary  of  State  was 
interpreted  as  weakness ;  even  Welles  thought  his 
chief  was  being  managed  by  one  inferior  to  him. 
At  the  time,  Miss  Tarbell  shows,  none  appeared 
to  know  that  Lincoln  fully  understood  the  pro- 
pensities of  Mr.  Seward,  and  that  with  "shrewd 
calculation"  he  was  suffering  himself  to  be  mis- 
judged in  order  to  put  through  his  great  task. 
Both  Seward  and  Chase,  through  self-assertive 
and  muddling  ambition,  were  vexatious;  yet  the 
President's  high  aims  and  fine  tact  led  him  to 
esteem  the  abilities  of  the  secretaries  in  spite  of 
the  discreditable  annoyance  they  engendered. 

In  evidence  of  the  President's  attitude,  Miss 
Tarbell  reminds  us  of  his  refusal  to  publish  his 
correspondence  with  Greeley  in  connection  with 
the  peace  fiasco  at  Niagara  Falls,  in  July,  1864. 
Greeley  had  emotionally  urged  a  peace  confer- 
ence between  representatives  of  the  two  warring 
sections  upon  what  he  asserted  was  competent 
assurance  that  the  South  was  ready  for  such  a 
move.  The  President  tactfully  appointed  Gree- 
ley to  exploit  his  own  futile  suggestion.  The 
latter's  severe  reproach  of  the  President  for  the 
failure  of  the  conference  was  left  unheeded,  even 
though  the  publication  of  the  letters  that  passed 
between  them  "would  have  shown  that  Greeley 
had  lied."  Mr.  Lincoln  chose  to  bear  the  blame 
which  the  editor  threw  upon  him  in  order  that 
the  cause  he  represented  might  continue  to  com- 
mand the  powerful  influence  of  the  "Tribune." 
The  self-effacing  temper  of  Mr.  Lincoln  is  further 


illustrated  by  his  keeping  "so  carefully  from  his 
colleagues  the  preposterous  suggestions  of  Mr. 
Seward  in  April,  1861,  to  invite  a  general  Euro- 
pean War  and  to  take  over  the  government." 
When  Seward  learned  that  a  caucus  of  Repub- 
lican congressmen  had  voted  to  ask  the  President 
to  remove  him,  he  resigned.  Mr.  Lincoln 
regarded  the  action  of  the  congressmen  as  an 
interference  with  executive  authority.  At  this 
time,  also,  the  self-conceit  of  Chase,  whom  Lord 
Charnwood  regards  as  "unhappily  a  sneak,"  con- 
tributed greatly  to  the  cabinet  ferment.  Chase 
disingenuously  intimated  his  desire  to  resign, 
expecting  to  be  suppliantly  begged  to  remain. 
To  his  chagrin,  the  President  evinced  great  sat- 
isfaction that  the  "Gordian  knot"  was  cut  at  last. 
After  both  Seward  and  Chase  had  experienced 
some  perplexity  as  to  their  fate,  they  were  asked 
by  the  President  to  remain  at  their  posts. 

From  1860,  when  William  Dean  Howells  and 
John  L. -Hayes  published  "Lives  and  Speeches 
of  Abraham  Lincoln  and  Hannibal  Hamlin,"  to 
the  present,  the  lives  and  special  treatises  inspired 
by  the  career  of  the  great  President  have  been 
legion.  Nicolay  and  Hay  wrote  a  history  of  his 
time,  with  a  benevolent  eye  always  upon  their 
hero.  Herndon's  book  furnished  a  large  store 
of  personal,  if  sometimes  unauthenticated,  intel- 
ligence. Morse  followed  the  academically  trained 
paths  of  the  biographic  art.  Browne's  readable 
volume  is  less  critical  than  intimately  sympa- 
thetic and  personal.  Of  more  recent  lives  of  Lin- 
coln, that  by  Brand  Whitlock  is  the  best  example 
we  have  of  successful  condensation.  The  melange 
of  biographical  and  historical  matter  in  the  vol- 
ume by  Mr.  Ulrich  divaricates  between  personal 
reminiscence  and  an  array  of  documents  avail- 
able and  quite  useful  for  the  comparative  study 
of  modern  constitutional  history.  The  recent 
book  by  Alonzo  Rothschild  under  the  name  of 
"Honest  Abe"  has  a  purpose  single  and  conjoint. 

This  purpose  is  to  complement  the  author's 
well-known  "Lincoln,  Master  of  Men,"  pub- 
lished a  decade  ago.  In  "Honest  Abe"  we  have 
the  reduction  of  a  large  amount  of  matter  writ- 
ten about  Lincoln,  with  an  eye  single  to  the 
portraiture  of  his  fundamental  characteristic  of 
integrity.  The  former  book  was  a  study  of  the 
President's  personality  on  the  side  of  its  power 
to  envisage  and  manage  the  diversity  of  men  con- 
nected with  the  civil  and  military  branches  of 
the  government.  It  was  well  written,  and 
impressed  the  reader  with  the  greatness  of  the 
President's  task  in  his  relations  to  the  personnel 
of  his  administration  in  a  time  of  crisis.  The 


150 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


new  book  seeks  to  find  the  secret  of  Lincoln's 
success  in  his  "fidelity  to  truth."  Much  testi- 
mony of  a  well-known  character  is  collated  for 
this  purpose  around  the  subjects  of  "Pinching 
Times,"  "Professional  Ethics,"  "Honesty  in  Pol- 
itics," and  so  on.  Professionally,  "Lincoln  in 
court  was  truth  in  action."  Many  causes  in 
which  Lincoln  participated  as  a  lawyer  are  indi- 
cated to  illustrate  his  acumen  in  discerning  the 
"kernel"  of  a  suit  as  well  as  his  disposition  to 
concede  the  point  when  it  appeared  that  he  was 
in  the  wrong.  The  volume  closes  with  Lincoln's 
success  in  the  congressional  race  against  Cart- 
wright.  The  author's  death  prevented  his  car- 
rying his  study  over  the  highly  important  period 
of  the  Lincoln-Douglas  debates.  He  has  written 
with  sincere  purpose,  has  winnowed  his  material 
skilfully,  and  enriched  each  chapter  with  ample 
bibliographical  and  historical  notes.  The  style 
is  clear  and  elevated.  Yet  it  is  difficult  to  say 
that  the  book  adds  appreciably  to  our  impression 
of  Lincoln  on  that  side  of  his  character  which 
its  pages  are  intended  to  establish.  Its  thesis  is 
so  well  maintained  by  numerous  biographies,  so 
exactly  parallels  the  common  opinion  of  the  Great 
Emancipator,  that  one  could  wish  that  the  good 
style  and  conscientious  endeavor  of  the  author 
had  been  turned  toward  the  writing  of  a  life 
of  one  who  has  been  none  too  often,  nor  yet  with 
competent  artistry,  represented  as  a  classic  for  the 
youth. 

But  the  most  original  and  striking  contribu- 
tion to  Lincoln  literature  made  during  the  pres- 
ent year  is  Mr.  Gilbert  A.  Tracy's  "Uncollected 
Letters  of  Abraham  Lincoln."  The  volume  con- 
tains about  350  letters  not  included  in  a  previ- 
ously published  collection.  Only  a  small  number 
of  them  have  been  printed  in  any  form  before. 
Mr.  Tracy,  a  clerk  in  the  War  Department  dur- 
ing the  Civil  War  and  later  a  Connecticut 
farmer,  gave  many  years  to  the  collection  of 
these  letters,  found  singly  and  in  number  in  the 
possession  of  individuals  and  historical  societies, 
and  among  the  treasures  of  professional  collectors. 
After  the  publication  in  1906  of  the  Gettysburg 
edition  of  Lincoln's  works,  presumably  inclusive 
of  all  he  wrote,  it  is  surprising  that  the  editors 
should  have  been  able  to  give  us  so  large  a  com- 
pilation. Miss  Tarbell,  who  writes  an  intro- 
duction to  the  volume,  suggests  that  the  stream 
of  new  Lincoln  materials  has  not  yet  run  dry. 
Indeed,  Mr.  Tracy  indicates  the  existence  of 
certain  other  letters  whose  owners  are  as  yet 
unwilling  to  make  them  public  property.  Many 
of  the  letters  in  the  present  collection  are  of  little 


public  interest,  consisting  as  they  do  of  brief 
notes  on  law  cases,  brief  letters  of  acknowledg- 
ment, or  on  local  political  events.  A  number  are 
executive  orders  of  a  routine  nature.  Some  of 
them,  however,  are  of  biographical  or  historical 
rank,  though  they  contain  nothing  that  would 
modify  our  present  impression.  The  letters  to 
Lincoln's  confidential  friend,  Lyman  Trumbull, 
are  full  of  observations  upon  political  matters 
and  contain  numerous  references  to  Douglas  and 
the  Kansas-Nebraska  propaganda.  One  of  these 
letters  protests  his  firm  opposition  to  any  "com- 
promise on  the  question  of  extending  slavery." 
The  same  position  is  averred  in  a  letter  to  Owen 
Lovejoy,  but  in  terms  combining  political  caution 
with  the  courage  of  sincere  conviction.  After  his 
defeat  by  Douglas  for  the  Senate  he  writes  to 
General  Eleazar  Paine  admitting  his  defeat  and 
prophetically  affirming  that  the  contest  must  con- 
tinue. "The  question  is  not  half  settled.  New 
splits  will  soon  be  upon  our  adversaries,  and  we 
will  fuse  again."  A  letter  of  November  18, 
1862,  to  General  Steele  and  Governor  Phelps  of 
Arkansas  contains  one  of  his  earliest  expressions 
of  the  plan  of  reconstruction  which  was  carefully 
maturing  in  Lincoln's  mind. 

The  letter  to  Carl  Schurz,  replying  to  the 
latter's  complaint  that  the  President  in  making 
appointments  had  given  too  great  consideration 
to  Democrats,  confirms  Lincoln's  political  pru- 
dence, as  Schurz  later  appreciated.  Those  who 
recall  the  "Lost  Speech"  will  identify  in  the 
letter  to  Alexander  H.  Stephens,  January  1860, 
certain  of  the  ideas  which  became  fixtures  in 
Lincoln's  thoughts  about  slavery  and  states  rights ; 
for  example,  the  declaration:  "We  will  not 
secede  and  you  shall  not."  In  some  respects  this 
letter  reflects  the  body  of  ideas  which  made  up 
the  Cooper  Institute  address  delivered  a  month 
later.  But  the  literary  feature  of  this  collection 
is  the  letter  to  the  King  of  Siam,  February  3, 
1862,  acknowledging  the  receipt  of  certain  costly 
presents  from  his  admiring  majesty,  including 
"your  Majesty's  tender  of  good  offices  in  for- 
warding to  this  Government  a  stock  from  which 
a  supply  of  elephants  might  be  raised  on  our  soil. 
This  Government  would  not  hesitate  to  avail 
itself  of  so  generous  an  offer  if  the  object  were 
one  which  could  be  made  practically  useful  in 
the  present  condition  of  the  United  States.  Our 
political  jurisdiction,  however,  does  not  reach  a 
latitude  so  low  as  to  favor  the  multiplication  of 
the  elephant,  and  steam  on  land  as  well  as  on 
water  has  been  our  best  and  most  efficient  agent 
of  transportation  in  internal  commerce."  This 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


151 


letter  is  as  delicately  informed  with  the  rare 
essence  of  humor  as  the  well-known  letter  to  Mrs. 
Bixby  is  irradiant  with  the  pure  spirit  of  patriot- 
ism. It  strengthens  any  preconception  one  may 
have  had  that  Lincoln,  under  another  set  of 
circumstances  in  life,  might  have  become  as 
distinguished  as  a  man  of  letters  as  he  was  em- 
inent in  statesmanship.  L  £  RoBINSON. 


Quadrangles  "Paved  with  Good 
Intentions 


THE    UNDERGRADUATE    AND    His    COLLEGE.      By 
Frederick  P.  Keppel.     Houghton  Mifflin;  $1.60. 

Mr.  Keppel  is  known  to  all  Columbia  under- 
graduates of  recent  years  as  one  of  the  kindest 
and  most  helpful  of  college  deans.  He  has  now 
given  his  impressions  of  college  life  in  a  book 
which  has  a  kindliness  that  rather  impairs  the 
critical  emphasis,  and  leaves  still  unanswered  the 
question:  What  is  the  American  college  for? 
The  audience  he  imagines  and  for  whom  he 
writes  is  evidently  the  comfortable  father  of  the 
better-bred  boy — "y°ur  boy  and  mine" — and  not 
that  more  critical  public  which  desires  an  ideal 
of  what  the  college  should  be,  or  an  incisive 
analysis  of  the  forces  which  block  that  ideal's 
realization.  Only  in  the  very  last  pages  does 
Dean  Keppel  suggest  his  ideal  and,  admirable 
as  it  is,  it  comes  too  late  to  aid  him  in  correcting 
his  observations  of  college  life.  "A  group  of 
young  men  living  and  working  and  thinking  and 
dreaming  together,  free  to  let  their  thoughts 
and  dreams  determine  the  future  for  them ;  these 
young  men,  hourly  learning  much  from  one 
another,  are  brought  into  touch  with  the  wis- 
dom of  the  past,  the  circumstances  of  the  pres- 
ent, the  visions  of  the  future,  by  a  group  of 
older  students,  striving  to  provide  them  with 
ideas  rather  than  beliefs,  and  guiding  them  in 
observing  for  themselves  nature's  laws  and 
human  relationships" — how  could  this  idea  of 
a  college  be  bettered?  But  Dean  Keppel  pre- 
sents no  very  clear  picture  of  how  young  men 
might  live  and  work  and  think  together.  Nor 
does  he  explain  why  professors  so  emphatically 
do  not  look  upon  themselves  as  "older  students," 
and  why  the  curriculum  is  not  designed  more 
intelligently  and  deliberately  to  effect  that  obser- 
vation of  "nature's  laws  and  human  rela- 
tionships." He  dismisses  lightly  the  prevailing 
utterly  mechanical  and  demoralizing  system  of 
measuring  intellectual  progress  by  "points"  and 


"credits,"  a  system  which  cultivates  the  "taking 
of  courses"  and  not  the  study  of  a  subject.  The 
gap  between  his  ideal  and  his  mild  and  indirect 
criticism  and  suggestion  for  improvement  is  too 
glaring  to  make  the  discussion  very  satisfactory. 
There  is  no  more  obvious  fact  about  the  Ameri- 
can college  than  that  its  administrative  and  cur- 
ricular  organization  has  not,  in  these  last  few 
years  of  standardizing,  been  in  any  way  directed 
by  the  ideal  of  the  "intellectual  community  of 
youth."  While  floundering  deans  and  quarrel- 
some faculties  have  debated,  the  registrar  and 
the  athletic  coach  have  gone  busily  and  invinc- 
ibly ahead  setting  the  motives  and  the  values 
for  the  social  and  intellectual  life  of  the  great 
majority  of  students  in  college.  In  the  presence 
of  an  idealist  like  Dean  Keppel,  who  is  also  an 
executive  officer  and  presumably  has  a  rare  oppor- 
tunity for  leadership,  the  question  insistently 
rises:  How  could  the  present  flagrant  divorce 
between  ideal  and  actuality  have  arisen? 

But  if  this  book  does  not  answer  that  ques- 
tion, it  does  present  a  very  human  and  chatty 
picture  of  the  boyish  undergraduate  as  he  passes 
before  the  dean.  The  author  disarms  a  good 
deal  of  our  criticism  by  showing  us  how  very 
bad  the  colleges  used  to  be,  and  how  very  good 
are  the  present  good  ones  in  comparison  with 
the  bad.  In  the  light  of  that  earlier  institu- 
tion which  was  little  more  than  a  boys'  academy, 
where  the  students  had  a  generous  taint  of  the 
hoodlum  and  the  professors  were  pedantic  theo- 
logians, the  present  college  appears  an  earnest 
and  honorable  place  indeed.  It  is  a  clever  touch 
of  Mr.  Keppel's  to  trace  the  current  organized 
athletics  and  fraternity  life  out  of  the  ancient 
mischief  and  disorder.  If  the  colleges  today  are 
being  strangled  in  their  own  standardization, 
think  of  the  degree  scandals  of  twenty  years  ago, 
and  of  the  salutary  disappearance  of  charlatan 
institutions  and  the  stiffening  of  the  weak.  If 
one  bemoans  the  corruption  of  athletics,  let  him 
think  of  the  rowdyism  and  low  standards  of  the 
last  generation.  Mr.  Keppel  presents  an  engag- 
ing picture  of  the  fraternities  sobering  up  from 
their  historic  debauches,  and  even  engaging  in 
competitive  scholarship.  And  the  old  parental 
discipline  of  the  college  he  sees  to  be  broadening 
into  a  real  concern  about  the  student's  respon- 
sibility to  society,  as  well  as  about  his  personal 
morality  and  habits. 

Reforms,  however,  will  have  to  be  presented 
with  more  fervor  and  with  a  greater  sense  of 
their  integral  place  in  the  "youthful  commu- 
nity" before  they  are  likely  to  stir  the  college 


152 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


mind.  Actually  there  seems  to  be  little  halt  in 
the  process  of  complicating  the  machinery  of 
manufacturing  the  degree,  in  getting  rid  of 
plain-speaking  and  idealistic  teachers,  and  in 
turning  more  and  more  of  the  teaching  over  to 
mediocre  young  instructors.  The  quality  of  the 
undergraduate  will  depend  on  these  influences, 
to  which  Mr.  Keppel  gives  all  too  little  heed. 
No  college  has  sinned  more  grievously  than  his 
own  in  these  respects.  Mildly  to  urge  toler- 
ance and  tact  upon  trustees  and  professors  alike 
is  scarcely  enough,  even  though  one  admit  that 
"errors  of  tact  are  more  likely  to  be  expensive 
to  the  professor  whose  views  on  social  and  polit- 
ical relations  are  disturbing  to  those  about  him." 
These  are  sterner  times,  and  youthful  idealists 
who  saw  Mr.  Keppel  himself  pass  from  the  direc- 
tion of  a  pacifist  society  to  a  post  in  the  War 
Department,  and  Professor  Beard  resign  because 
of  the  sinister  menaces  to  intellectual  freedom 
within  the  American  college,  will  be  a  little 
skeptical  of  the  power  of  the  present  system  to 
produce  in  the  average  student  a  love  for  the 
clear  intellectual  conscience.  It  is  not  enough 
for  Mr.  Keppel  to  have  a  good  word  for  the 
student  "conscientious  objector,"  for  the  student 
socialist  agitator,  and  for  the  ostracized  Jewish 
student.  We  should  be  assured  that  the  college 
is  tending  toward  a  community  where  tolerance 
is  not  merely  chivalrous  but  organic. 

Mr.  Keppel  has  the  task,  in  this  book,  of  play- 
ing the  roles  of  both  prophet  and  loyal  tender 
of  the  machine.  Few  people  could  fuse  them 
happily.  He  does  not  fuse  them  happily.  He 
does  deplore  the  lack  of  thoroughness  in  college 
learning,  the  sin  of  smattering,  and  the  lack  of 
adjustment  of  the  college  to  the  world.  He 
desires  a  closer  understanding  between  faculty 
and  students,  between  college  courses  and  stu- 
dent activities,  between  college  life  and  mature 
activity.  But  he  has  too  much  sense  of  the 
immalleability  of  his  raw  material,  too  much 
sense  of  their  being  much  to  be  said  on  both 
sides,  to  be  a  convincing  prophet.  And  he  is 
too  uneasy  about  the  idealists  to  be  a  mere  loyal 
machine-driver.  His  mind  is  liberal  and  yet  it 
serves  reaction.  It  is  good  to  have  "liberals" 
as  machine-tenders;  however,  they  should  not 
complain  if  their  interpretation  disappoints.  One 
becomes,  in  reading  a  book  like  this,  a  little  too 
conscious  of  those  qualities  for  which,  as  Mr. 
Keppel  says,  the  college  graduate  "has  a  good 
reputation"  —  resourcefulness,  social  agreeable- 
ness,  cheerfulness,  adaptability.  The  liberal 
alumnus  or  the  father  who  wants  to  know  what 


he  may  expect  for  "his  boy"  from  the  college 
will  find  the  book  amusing  and  informing.  He 
may  even  like  the  author's  generous  use  of  aca- 
demic slang,  such  as  "the  quituate  and  the  bust- 
itute,"  and  the  tendency  to  "pad  and  distract" 
rather  than  to  add  and  subtract.  Nevertheless 
the  more  restless  will  long  for  a  fiercer  tone. 
After  all,  when  one  is  strategically  placed  and 
sees  evils  and  goods  in  a  system,  why  be  so  tepid 


about  it? 


RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


Labor,  'Right  or 


TRADE    UNIONISM    IN   THE    UNITED    STATES.     By 
Robert   Franklin   Hoxie.     Appleton  ;   $2.50. 

This  volume  is  the  last  will  and  testament  of 
a  singularly  clear  and  cogent  thinker  who  looked 
out  upon  the  world  with  sympathy  and  under- 
standing and  sought  to  unravel,  by  patient  col- 
lection of  data  and  careful  analysis,  the  tangled 
skein  of  that  most  protean  of  all  democratic 
movements,  trade  unionism.  The  scholar  who 
wrought  these  pages  lay  down  to  his  rest  before 
his  work  was  done  and  we  owe  this  book  to 
labors  of  love  on  the  part  of  those  who  knew 
and  cared  for  him.  It  is  not  unjust  to  say,  there- 
fore, that  this  is  a  group  of  essays  —  not  a  finished 
work  —  reminding  one,  in  a  way,  of  Arnold 
Toynbee's  "Industrial  Revolution."  And  yet  it 
is  a  volume  which  will  be  valuable  in  the  thought 
that  it  will  stir  in  those  widening  circles  now  con- 
scious of  the  significance  of  industrial  democ- 
racy. 

Professor  Hoxie's  book  is  mainly  analytical, 
but  there  are  two  chapters,  all  too  brief,  given 
to  the  history  of  the  labor  movement  in  the 
United  States  from  the  earliest  days  to  the  rise 
of  revolutionary  unionism.  One  chapter  sets 
"the  problem"  of  the  student,  warning  him 
against  hasty  generalizations  and  class  bias,  and 
showing  him  how  complicated  and  fugitive  are 
the  data  of  the  labor  movement.  Some  fifty 
pages  are  devoted  to  an  analysis  of  the  several 
types  of  unionism  and  their  significance,  with 
due  reference  to  structure  and  function.  The 
relation  of  labor  to  the  law,  collective  bargain- 
ing, and  the  economic  program  of  labor  occupy 
nearly  one  hundred  pages.  Scientific  manage- 
ment in  relation  to  labor  is  given  the  emphasis 
which  its  importance  warrants  ;  there  is  a  sketchy 
chapter  on  employers'  associations,  and  some 
shrewd  observations  on  the  psychology  of  lead- 
ership which  recall  the  exceedingly  clever  work 
of  Michels. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


153 


It  would  be  impossible  within  the  limits  of  a 
review  to  enumerate  the  essential  conclusions  and 
capital  suggestions  of  this  volume,  but  some  are 
so  outstanding  that  they  cannot  escape.  The 
shortcomings  and  failures  of  the  American  Fed- 
eration of  Labor  are  temperately  set  forth  (page 
133)  ;  we  are  warned  that  we  shall  see  more, 
rather  than  less,  of  industrial  unionism  (page 
174) ;  much  that  concerns  labor  disputes  and 
administration  must  be  taken  out  of  the  field 
of  contentious  litigation  (page  251)  ;  the  estab- 
lishment of  labor  standards  and  the  education 
of  the  public  offer  more  of  promise  for  the 
future  than  does  legislative  wrangling  (page 
252)  ;  we  cannot  afford  to  give  up  the  vast  pos- 
sibilities of  increased  productiveness  which  scien- 
tific management  offers  (page  324),  and  yet 
scientific  management  falls  afoul  of  craft  union- 
ism and  all  its  rigid  rules  (page  347)  ;  the  public 
is  poorly  equipped  by  knowledge  and  understand- 
ing for  taking  part  in  labor  controversies,  and 
yet  it  is  continually  compelled  to  render  drastic 
judgments  (Chapter  xiv).  The  upshot  of  it  all 
is  that  rough  and  ready  generalizations  about  the 
class  conflict  avail  little  and  that  the  grand  old 
slogan,  "Labor,  right  or  wrong,"  is  not  much  of 
a  guide  amid  the  bewildering  technique  of  mod- 
ern industry.  Patience,  understanding,  knowl- 
edge of  the  facts,  flexibility  of  thought — "these 
are  the  seals  of  that  most  firm  assurance  which 
bars  the  pit  over  Destruction's  strength." 

CHARLES  A.  BEARD. 


A  Novel  with  a  Plot 


SECRET  BREAD.    By  F.  Tennyson  Jesse.    Doran ; 

$1.50. 

"There  was  silence  in  the  room  where  James 
Ruan  lay  in  the  great  bed,  awaiting  his  marriage 
and  his  death."  When  a  novel  makes  such  an 
arresting  entry  as  this  of  "Secret  Bread,"  the 
temptation  is  to  quote  it,  with  the  comment  that 
the  beginnings  of  their  novels  and  their  own  dying 
words  must  be  among  authors'  heavy  responsibil- 
ities. But  the  long  and  absorbing  tale  behind 
these  strange  words  proves  them  to  be  no  mere 
pomp  of  paradox.  The  first  chapter  gives  a 
good  measure  of  the  whole  book.  In  it  Ruan 
of  Cloom,  an  estate  in  Cornwall,  died  on  the 
night  the  story  opens,  after  making  a  wife  of 
Annie,  a  servant  and  his  mistress.  Ruan  had 
the  marriage  performed  in  order  to  bequeath  his 
estate  legally  to  a  posthumous  child,  and  for  the 


peculiar  pleasure  of  disinheriting  Annie  and  the 
other  children  of  their  misbegotten  brood.  Thus 
the  apple  of  discord  was  planted  before  the  hero 
himself  came  on  the  scene,  as  Ishmael  Ruan  did 
only  a  few  hours  after  his  father's  death.  The 
struggle  of  the  youngest  Ruan  to  assert  his  au- 
thority in  the  family  and  in  turn  to  pass  his 
inheritance  on  to  his  eldest  son  is,  very  roughly, 
the  theme  of  the  story.  There  are  no  legal  com- 
plications, and  but  little  play  of  personal  risk. 
The  author  is  too  deft  a  hand  for  that.  The 
struggle  between  Ishmael  and  his  eldest  brother, 
Archelaus,  is  mainly  psychological,  but  not  for 
years  has  there  been  in  fiction  a  plot  so  shocking. 
The  shock  at  the  end  is  the  refreshing  one  of 
sheer  cold  water — no  common  quality  in  psy- 
chological narrative. 

From  the  first  the  tale  strikes  an  eerie  tone 
reminiscent  of  "Wuthering  Heights,"  perhaps, 
or  "Jane  Eyre."  To  some  extent  the  fancied 
resemblance  is  due  to  similarity  of  setting  and 
the  same  dour  aspect  of  the  characters,  as  much 
as  to  the  fact  that  the  excellent  plot  emerges 
from  the  grim  eccentricities  of  one  or  two  of  the 
persons.  As  the  history  of  Ishmael  progresses, 
however,  from  his  boyhood  among  the  Cornish 
country  lads  through  his  school  days  at  St.  Renny 
and  his  young  manhood,  the  author's  very  sure 
searching  of  the  emotions  and  fancies  of  youth 
reminds  one,  on  quite  a  different  hand,  of  the 
realistic  analyses  of  Lawrence's  "Sons  and  Lov- 
ers." There  is  here  more  in  common  between 
the  two  writers  than  the  same  Cornish  country. 
But  such  comparisons  serve  merely  an  impression- 
istic purpose.  The  distinct  achievement  of  the 
author  of  "Secret  Bread"  is  spinning  a  tale  of 
over  five  hundred  pages  on  the  neatly  tied  thread 
of  plot  one  customarily  finds  in  a  short  story, 
playing  incessantly  on  rather  intimate  sensations, 
and  at  the  same  time  weaving  the  story  round  a 
clearly  enunciated  philosophy — "that  we  all  have 
something,  some  secret  bread  of  our  own  soul, 
by  which  we  live,  that  nourishes  and  sustains 
us."  Ishmael's  secret  bread  was  his  love  of  the 
land,  the  earth  of  his  paternal  Cloom.  The  three 
necessary  ingredients  for  a  substantial  novel  are 
here:  vivid  characters,  a  good  plot,  and  an  un- 
derlying purpose,  philosophy,  or  unifying  motive 
of  the  author's  (whatever  term  you  will)  which 
gives  a  novel  its  third  dimension  and  keeps  it 
from  being  a  mere  bas-relief  frieze  of  more  or 
less  entertaining  figures. 

To  the  influence  of  Da  Boase,  a  local  priest, 
was  largely  due  the  wholesome  character  and 
disposition  of  the  hero,  born  under  such  unlikely 


154 


THE   DIAL 


[February  14 


auspices,  the  barely  legitimate  son  of  a  boor  and 
his  wench.  It  was  Da  Boase  who,  when  Ishmael 
was  twelve  years  old,  insisted  that  he  take  his 
place  at  the  head  of  the  table,  on  the  occasion  of 
"crying  the  neck,"  a  pagan  festival  celebrated  at 
harvest  time  partly  in  the  open  fields  at  twilight 
and  partly  within  doors  shortly  after.  It  was 
Da  Boase  also  who  suggested  the  theory  of  secret 
bread.  Undertaking  Ishmael's  education  until 
he  should  go  away  to  boarding  school,  Da  Boase 
tried  not  so  much  to  make  of  him  a  Christian 
gentleman,  in  perhaps  the  English  sense  of  the 
word,  as  to  make  him  a  respectable  and  self- 
respecting  farmer,  since  that  seemed  the  boy's 
natural  trend.  With  other  characters  Da  Boase 
behaved  similarly,  heartily  relishing  Killigrew, 
a  delightful  lad  who  grew  into  an  engagingly 
unmoral  young  man — to  whose  soul  the  priest 
laid  no  siege. 

Set  over  against  this  priest  is  the  dispossessed 
Archelaus,  who  returned  to  Cloom  manor  from 
wanderings  in  Australia,  California,  Canada, 
to  harass  at  irregular  and  significant  intervals  the 
legal  proprietor.  Ishmael's  peace  of  mind,  thanks 
to  his  secret  bread,  remained  proof  against  the 
revenge  motif  of  Archelaus,  which  runs  through 
the  book  like  the  disappearing  thread  in  home- 
spun, observable  but  not  at  all  obvious.  The 
ultimate  twist  was  the  work  of  the  elder  broth- 
er's most  advanced  proficiency  in  the  diabolical. 
There  is  unquestioned  reality  in  the  figure  of  the 
final  Ishmael — an  old  man  bereft  of  friends  and 
wife,  all  of  whom  he  outlived,  and  finally  losing 
his  own  son,  yet  remaining  content  to  the  end, 
consoled  by  some  power  within  himself.  That 
this  is  the  amazing  way  of  all  flesh,  we  have  only 
to  seek  the  fellowship  of  grandparents  to  ascer- 
tain. Considerably  fewer  elders  than  certain 
novelists  would  have  us  believe,  trade  very 
extensively  on  kingdom  come. 

It  is  avowedly  only  an  exercise  in  literary 
marksmanship  to  call  Miss  Jesse  a  twentieth 
century  Bronte,  or  a  twentieth  century  anybody 
else.  But  in  so  aiming,  whether  the  result  be 
a  hit  or  not,  we  are  certain  at  least  of  the  right 
direction  of  our  aim.  The  greatest  emphasis 
must  be  placed  on  the  difference  a  hundred  years 
has  made  in  the  growth  and  outlook  of  an  Eng- 
lishwoman of  letters.  Nowadays,  for  example, 
it  is  no  particular  tribute  to  remark  that  the 
reader  of  "Secret  Bread"  would  not  readily  as- 
sume the  author  to  be  a  woman ;  yet  that  was  an 
incense  especially  grateful  to  the  author  of 
"Wuthering  Heights."  Certainly  this  novel  does 


not  suffer  from  the  neurotic  sort  of  severity,  the 
hard  overdrawing  characteristic  of  Mrs.  Hum- 
phry Ward  and  some  other  contemporary  fem- 
inine writers.  Miss  Jesse's  sharp  corners  are 
gracefully  beveled  with  a  fine  sense  of  humor. 
A  chance  description  of  Killigrew's  mother  sug- 
gests the  author's  cheery  eye  for  foibles : 

"I'm  sure  that  will  be  very  nice,  my  dears,"  was  her 
invariable  comment  on  any  programme  suggested  by 
the  young  men;  and  there  was  a  legend  in  the  family 
that  Killigrew  had  once  said  to  her:  "How  would 
it  be,  Mother,  if  I  were  to  murder  the  Guv'nor  and 
then  take  you  round  the  world  with  me  on  the 
money?  We  could  settle  in  the  South  Sea  Islands, 
and  I'd  marry  a  darky  and  you  could  look  after  the 
pickaninny  grandchildren?"  To  which  Mrs.  Killi- 
grew had  responded :  "Yes,  my  dear,  that  will  be  very 
nice;  and  on  your  way,  if  you're  passing  the  fish- 
monger's, will  you  tell  him  to  alter  the  salmon 
for  this  evening  to  cod,  as  your  father  won't  be  in 
to  dinner?" 

The  most  interesting  doubt  concerning  "Se- 
cret Bread"  is  the  conjecture  whether  this  novel, 
undeniably  modern  in  tone  and  admirable  in 
workmanship,  is  the  product  of  an  essentially 
Victorian  mind  striving  toward  the  present,  or 
of  an  iconoclastic  modern  mind  harking  back 
toward  the  days  of  Unity,  Mass,  and  Coherence 
— that  seemly  trinity.  Quite  apart,  of  course, 
from  Miss  Jesse's  nieceship  to  the  laureate,  one 
must  decide  that  she  is  one  of  the  latest  of  the 
Victorians.  Something  in  the  firm  grip  which 
the  immaculate  Da  Boase  has  on  the  history  of 
events  contributes  to  that  decision.  In  this  un- 
grateful vein  of  criticism  two  or  three  other 
objections  may  be  made.  "Secret  Bread,"  like 
many  another  biographical  novel,  suffers  from 
the  author's  proportioning.  If  Miss  Jesse  was 
not  especially  interested  in  the  antepenultimate 
period  of  Ishmael's  career,  and  was  eager  to 
hasten  on  to  the  brilliant  conclusion  ahead  of 
her,  she  would  have  done  better  to  omit  some 
resume  chapters  that  report  only  the  dotage  and 
deaths  of  lesser  characters.  Ishmael  himself 
made  a  stately  old  man.  Moreover,  with  such 
a  wealth  of  engaging  men  in  the  story,  one's  sense 
of  balance  is  a  little  offended  at  the  almost  un- 
exceptional unattractiveness  of  the  women.  Fi- 
nally, it  is  not  sufficiently  clear  that  the  lack  of 
resentment  in  Ishmael's  nature  was  simply  ab- 
sence of  rancor  and  not  absence  of  spirit.  To 
this  extent  alone  will  we  play  the  devil's  advo- 
cate. Whether  or  not  "Secret  Bread"  is  a  great 
novel,  there  is  a  fair  measure  of  greatness  in  it. 
Not  the  least  of  its  distinctions  is  its  being  an 
intelligent  novel  of  these  times  with  an  actual 
plot  again.  MYRON  R.  WILLIAMS. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


155 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


TRIVIA.   By  Logan  Pearsall  Smith.   Double- 
day,  Page;  $1.25. 

It  is  not  easy  to  be  candid  and  charming  in 
just  this  fragmentary  way  of  "Trivia."  These 
thumbnail  essays  read  much  better  in  quantity 
than  separately  in  the  pages  of  a  magazine.  Most 
of  them  are  delightful  in  the  quaint  turn  of  their 
wit  or  in  the  revealing  glimpse  of  personal  whim. 
Perhaps  there  is  more  playful  irony  than  real 
wit.  Some  of  the  little  sketches  are  rather  too 
"precious";  occasionally  there  is  a  veritable 
descent  to  flatness.  The  book  shows  a  mild-man- 
nered English  gentleman  reflecting  on  the  figure 
he  cuts  not  only  in  the  country  village  where  he 
lives,  but  in  town  society  and  in  the  Universe. 
The  stars  and  the  wheatfields,  the  Vicar  of 
Lynch,  the  lady  he  is  frozen  to  find  himself  bor- 
ing, insects  and  the  solar  system,  destiny  and 
ennui  all  start  his  reflections.  Perhaps  many 
readers  will  give  the  little  book  up  as  all  too 
appropriately  named,  but  others  will  enjoy  the 
beauty  of  the  rhythm  in  these  prose  sentences  and 
the  sudden  denouement  of  a  thought  that  is  not 
quite  so  innocent  as  it  looks.  And  there  is  to  be 
found  also  a  wisdom  which  almost  spoils  one's 
pleasure,  for  it  irritates  one  that  the  author  should 
have  whittled  down  his  ideas  to  so  microscopic 
a  form  and  left  them  with,  on  the  whole,  so 
spinsterly  a  flavor. 

ROOKIE  RHYMES.  By  The  Men  of  the 
1st  and  2nd  Provisional  Training  Regi- 
ments, Plattsburg.  Harper;  75  cts. 
The  spirit  of  camping,  in  its  holiday  rather 
than  its  military  sense,  shines  cheerfully  out  of 
the  songs  and  jingles  in  which  the  rookies  cele- 
brate their  labors.  The  little  book  of  rookie 
rhymes  is  as  smooth  and  jolly  as  its  title,  always 
facile,  occasionally  clever.  These  are  such  verses 
as  a  group  of  boys  might  make  over  the  petty 
trials  of  a  rough  life,  the  lack  of  familiar  creature 
comforts,  their  absurd  misadventures,  the  rather 
engaging  novelty  of  discipline.  Seldom  do  they 
strike  a  solemn  note.  Their  rhymes  of  hate 
might  be  heard  on  a  football  field,  and  except 
for  a  very  few  poems  there  is  no  reference  to  the 
work  of  war  for  which  they  are  preparing,  or 
to  the  agony  they  go  to  face.  They  have  the 
schoolboy  code  of  sportsmanship,  and  the  reiter- 
ant  word  is  here: 

Better  to  pack  your   troubles   with  your  kit, 
To  keep  your  shirt  on,  and  to  play  the  game. 

They  have  too,  a  lively  sense  of  humor.  With 
tender  regret  they  lament  the  lack  of  the  happy 
bowl: 

All,  all  are  gone,  the  old  familiar  glasses, 
Where  once  they  glistened  on  the  fragrant  bar. 


There  is  a  sweet  simplicity  in  F.  E.  Harpel's 
song  about  the  unequipped  cavalry: 
The  Cavalry,  the  Cavalry,  they  haven't  any  horse, 
They're    taking    riding    lessons   by    a    correspondence 

course, 
You'd  think  they  were   equestrians  to  hear  the  way 

they  talk, 
But  when  it  comes  to  riding,  why!     We  always  see 

them  walk. 

The  illustrations  parallel  the  verses  in  pleas- 
ant, if  commonplace,  good  humor.  The  one 
young  rookie  who  writes  verses  with  a  distinct 
quality  of  their  own  is  Anch  Kline,  Co.  1,  1st 
P.  T.  R.  His  "They  Believe  Us  Back  Home" 
and  "Sunday  in  Barracks"  have  that  gentle  irony 
which  the  other  ready  jingles  do  not  achieve. 
They  are  written  in  free  verse,  and  the  author's 
sense  of  cadence  makes  the  form  adequate.  On 
the  whole  it  is  an  agreeable,  and  by  that  very 
token,  a  tragic  little  book. 

RECLAIMING  THE  ARID  WEST.  By  George 
Wharton  James.  Dodd,  Mead ;  $3.50. 
When  history  is  written  for  the  next  genera- 
tion one  of  the  bigger  achievements  for  the  good 
of  mankind  to  be  recorded  will  be  the  work  of 
the  United  States  Reclamation  Service.  Mr. 
James,  who  has  made  the  study  of  the  West  a 
life  work  and  has  popularized  this  vast  region  in 
numerous  volumes,  has  described  in  this  work 
the  development  of  some  thirty  irrigation  proj- 
ects scattered  throughout  the  dry  territory  from 
Canada  to  Mexico.  The  data,  collected  largely 
from  official  documents,  is  dependable  and  pos- 
sesses a  greater  degree  of  human  interest  than 
might  have  been  given  it  by  a  less  skilful  writer. 
The  part  of  the  book  of  most  interest  to  the 
general  reader  is  perhaps  that  setting  forth  the 
government  administration  of  the  projects,  the 
methods  of  encouragement  to  settlers,  and  the 
economic  problems  of  the  irrigated  communities. 
The  illustrations  are  numerous  and  good. 

ADVENTURES  AND  LETTERS  OF  RICHARD 
HARDING  DAVIS.  Edited  by  his  brother, 
Charles  Belmont  Davis.  Scribner ;  $2.50. 
These  letters  were  almost  all  addressed  to  the 
members  of  Richard  Harding  Davis's  immediate 
family,  and  they  give  a  veracious  picture  of  the 
more  intimate  and  personal  life  of  the  writer. 
They  are  tactfully  edited,  with  a  minimum  of 
explanation  and  comment,  and,  except  in  the 
latter  chapters,  the  selections  have  been  wisely 
made.  Here  the  long  series  addressed  to  the 
author's  wife,  consisting  of  little  but  protesta- 
tions of  love  for  her  and  their  little  daughter, 
become  wearisome.  Such  expressions  are  not  for 
the  public,  and  these,  coming  from  a  man  of 
Davis's  age  and  worldly  experience,  seem  to  have 


156 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


something  almost  strange  and  hectic  about  them. 
The  best  letters  of  all  are  those  to  the  author's 
mother.  It  is  impossible  not  to  feel  the  genuine- 
ness and  wholesomeness  of  these,  and  they  reveal 
characteristics  of  the  man  never  suggested  by 
contemporary  newspaper  portrayals,  which  al- 
ways hinted  at  something  of  superciliousness 
and  pose. 

Readers  who,  themselves  young  in  the  early 
nineties,  remember  how  the  first  short  stories  of 
Richard  Harding  Davis  seemed  to  them  a 
promise  of  great,  and  fine  literary  achievement, 
will  try  to  trace  in  this  new  book  the  causes  that 
led  to  a  journalistic  rather  than  a  truly  literary 
career.  Early  letters  from  Rebecca  Harding 
Davis — for  example,  those  printed  on  pages  33 
and  55 — express  a  mother's  fears  of  this  result, 
and  caution  against  haste,  and  against  writing 
for  money  alone.  Part  of  this  advice  he  followed 
well.  A  friend  who  knew  him  best  in  his  later 
years  says  (page  348) :  "Every  phrase  in  his 
fiction  was,  of  all  the  myriad  phrases  he  could 
think  of,  the  fittest  in  his  relentless  judgment  to 
survive.  Phrases,  paragraphs,  pages,  whole 
stories  even,  were  written  over  and  over  again." 
It  was  probably  the  unbounded  energy  of  the 
man,  his  fondness  for  life  in  all  its  aspects,  and 
the  possession  of  a  rare  gift  for  meeting,  manag- 
ing, and  observing  men  that  directed  the  course 
of  his  activities,  and  that  still  leaves  his  admirers 
in  doubt  whether  he  could  have  been  as  great  a 
novelist  as  special  correspondent.  At  all  events 
he  was  a  picturesque  character;  the  well-chosen 
illustrations,  equally  with  the  text,  of  the  book 
before  us,  are  a  reminder  of  how  much  of  the 
history  of  the  last  generation  he  saw  in  the  mak- 
ing, and  how  many  men  of  world  note  he  knew. 

MY  STORY.  Being  the  Memoirs  of  Bene- 
dict Arnold.  By  F.  J.  Stimson.  Scrib- 
ner;  $2. 

The  tendency  to  levy  upon  history  for  char- 
acters in  fiction  has  led  Mr.  Stimson  to  make  a 
bold  experiment.  He  gives  us  a  narrative  as  pro- 
ceeding from  the  pen  of  the  arch-traitor  of  the 
American  Revolution.  The  more  than  six  hun- 
dred pages  of  this  historical  novel,  if  we  may 
term  it  that,  purport  to  give  a  detailed  account 
of  Arnold  and  his  career.  They  show  a  careful 
study  of  some  sides  of  the  Revolution  and  a  still 
more  exhaustive  study  of  the  life  of  the  hero.  For 
it  is  as  a  hero  that  Arnold  is  pictured.  Not  a 
satisfactory  hero,  however;  for  while  Mr.  Stim- 
son's  acquaintance  with  sources  will  not  permit 
him  to  suppress  facts,  his  conception  of  Arnold 
is  fully  as  imaginative  as  it  is  historical.  The 
result  is,  of  course,  inconsistency.  Another  diffi- 
culty under  which  Mr.  Stimson  labors  is  that  his 
method  allows  him  none  of  the  advantages  of 


fiction.  His  book  is  not  frankly  a  story,  with  the 
freedom  and  privileges  of  a  story ;  it  masquerades 
as  autobiography  and  discards  none  of  the  mate- 
rial which  the  mere  fictionist  would  ignore;  it  is 
therefore  tedious  and  heavy  at  times.  Finally, 
it  is  rather  cynical.  That  Arnold  was  mistreated 
any  student  of  the  period  will  admit;  that  other 
men  prominent  then  and  still  well  thought  of  do 
not  deserve  their  reputations,  will  be  conceded; 
but  there  were  splendid  men  in  those  times,  a 
fact  of  which  Mr.  Stimson's  readers  may  grow 
forgetful.  In  short,  "My  Story"  is  not  good 
fiction  on  the  one  hand,  or  sound  history  on  the 
other.  It  is  a  bold  experiment  but,  taken  by  and 
large,  it  is  not  a  success. 

THE  CRUISE  OF  THE  CORWIN.  Journal  of 
the  Arctic  Expedition  of  1881  in  search  of 
DeLong  and  the  Jeannette.  By  John  Muir. 
Edited  by  William  Frederic  Bade.  Hough- 
ton  Mifflin;  $2.75. 

The  Corwin  cruised  in  search  of  the  ill-fated 
Jeannette  Expedition  in  Behring  Sea  and  the 
Arctic  Ocean,  along  the  coasts  of  Siberia  and 
Alaska,  visiting  Herald  Island,  and  made  the  first 
landing  of  white  explorers  on  Wrangell  Land. 
John  Muir  accompanied  this  searching  party  and 
his  private  journals,  letters  published  at  the  time 
in  the  San  Francisco  "Bulletin,"  and  his  contribu- 
tions to  the  government  reports  of  the  Corwin's 
explorations  have  been  skilfully  woven  by  the 
editor  into  a  connected  narrative  of  the  summer's 
cruise  amidst  the  ice-floes,  fogs,  and  storms  of 
these  little  known  seas.  John  Muir  was  an  inter- 
preter of  nature  and  of  men,  an  observer  of 
rare  acumen  and  marvelously  sympathetic  ap- 
proach. This  rare  quality,  combined  with  his 
own  zest  in  exploration,  undaunted  valor,  and 
unreserved  worship  of  the  beautiful  on  land  and 
sea,  lift  his  writings  above  the  commonplace  nar- 
rative to  the  level  of  permanent  distinction.  The 
appendix  contains  valuable  notes  on  glaciation 
and  glaciers  in  these  high  latitudes,  with  illus- 
trations from  Muir's  sketches  and  his  notes  on 
the  Arctic  flora. 

THE    NATIONAL    BUDGET    SYSTEM    AND 

AMERICAN  FINANCE.    By  Charles  Wallace 

Collins.     Macmillan;  $1.25. 

The  naive  belief  that  providence  takes  care 
of  children,  drunken  men,  and  the  United  States 
is  singularly  well  illustrated  by  the  strange  fact 
that,  among  the  great  nations  of  the  world,  the 
United  States  is  the  only  one  without  the  ade- 
quate knowledge  and  necessary  control  of  its 
public  finances  afforded  by  a  budget.  Any  well- 
managed  enterprise  would  have  an  annual  budget 
with  its  consideration  of  income  and  expenditure 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


157 


and  the  measures  necessary  to  make  these  two 
items  balance.  The  same  should  be  true  of  a 
state,  because  an  adequate  revenue  must  be  had 
in  order  to  meet  necessary  expenditure.  In  most 
countries  the  executive  is  made  responsible  for 
the  preparation,  as  well  as  for  the  execution,  of 
the  budget.  Here  in  the  United  States  nobody  in 
particular  is  responsible  for  the  annual  finances. 
Responsibility  is  scattered  over  the  entire  range  of 
governmental  organization  and  divided  among  a 
number  of  detached  sections.  The  departments 
are  responsible  to  the  treasury  or  to  the  presi- 
dent for  their  estimates,  the  committees  of  the 
two  houses  are  not  responsible  to  any  central 
organization,  and  the  two  houses  themselves  are 
responsible  to  the  people  only  by  localities.  There 
has  been  a  shifting  of  the  blame  for  our  finances 
from  the  executive  to  Congress,  from  the  house 
to  the  senate,  from  the  committees  to  the  floor 
of  the  two  houses,  from  Congress  to  the  execu- 
tive, and  even  from  Congress  to  the  people.  Thus 
is  the  idea  of  responsibility  reduced  to  an  ab- 
surdity. Chaos,  log-rolling,  and  either  a  surplus 
or  a  deficit  in  the  national  revenues  are  the  result. 
Presidents  Taft  and  Wilson  have  both  urged  the 
adoption  of  some  form  of  budget  system.  Fiscal 
reform  will  be  one  of  the  great  needs  after  the 
present  great  war,  and  Mr.  Collins  shows  in  a 
clear  and  interesting  way  why  and  how  the 
United  States  should  look  after  its  finances  in  a 
better  way  than  it  has  in  the  past. 

CHATHAM'S  COLONIAL  POLICY.     By  Kate 

Hotblack.     Dutton;  $2.50. 

The  twentieth-century  student  will  misjudge 
the  elder  Pitt  unless  he  remembers  that  the 
eighteenth  century  was  one  marked  by  European 
contests  for  commerce  and  power;  for  there  ran 
through  Pitt's  entire  public  career  the  motive  of 
"war  for  and  on  commerce"  for  the  benefit  of 
England.  In  short  chapters,  richly  annotated, 
sometimes  based  upon  unpublished  manuscripts 
and  records,  Miss  Hotblack  has  reviewed  Pitt's 
influence  in  all  parts  of  the  globe.  She  shows 
her  hero  as  a  man  with  lofty  ideals,  a  statesman 
with  infinite  patience,  careful  of  minute  details, 
and  with  a  strong  sense  of  justice.  Contrary  to 
the  opinion  of  many  political  leaders  of  the  day, 
Pitt  firmly  maintained  that  colonies  should  be  a 
source  of  commerce  for  the  mother  country,  not 
of  direct  revenue.  Some  of  his  last  efforts  were 
made  to  prevent  imposition  of  taxes  upon  Amer- 
ica; but  Miss  Hotblack  shows  that  the  protest 
against  "taxation  without  representation"  did  not 
mean  then  what  modern  writers  understand  by 
the  term.  Pitt,  in  one  of  his  last  speeches,  sup- 
ported the  plea  of  American  representatives  that 
the  colonies  be  permitted  to  govern  themselves 
in  the  British  Empire. 


COOPERATIVE    MARKETING.      By  W.   W. 

Cumberland.     Princeton   University   Press; 

$1.50. 

The  subject  of  cooperative  marketing  of  farm 
products  has  been  growing  in  public  apprecia- 
tion for  some  years,  and  present  food  shortages 
and  distribution  problems  have  greatly  accentu- 
ated this  interest.  This  volume  is  a  detailed 
study  of  the  best-developed  field  of  cooperative 
marketing  in  this  country,  the  California  Fruit 
Growers'  Exchange,  which  in  the  last  twenty 
years  has  grown  from  humble  beginnings  to  a 
position  from  which  it  superintends  the  packing 
and  marketing  of  three-fourths  of  the  citrus 
products  of  the  Golden  State.  With  its  general 
manager,  earning  a  salary  of  $10,000  a  year,  and 
its  corps  of  experienced  salesmen  and  traffic  ex- 
perts, this  is  one  of  the  best  and  most  scientific- 
ally organized  businesses  in  the  world,  bringing 
profits  to  the  producer  and  economy  to  the  con- 
sumer through  its  elimination  of  the  superfluous 
middleman.  The  development  of  the  enterprise, 
in  the  face  of  all  sorts  of  unfriendly  interests, 
constitutes  a  chapter  from  real  modern  romance. 
Its  success  may  well  serve  as  a  stimulus,  as  its 
methods  may  afford  a  model,  for  cooperation  in 
other  fields  of  food-production  and  distribution. 

THE  BOOK  OF  THE  WEST  INDIES.    By  A. 

Hyatt  Verrill.     Dutton;  $2.50. 

Although  it  treats  of  practically  every  island 
of  the  West  Indian  archipelago,  with  the  addition 
of  Bermuda,  this  volume  scarcely  justifies  its 
title;  it  is  a  book,  rather  than  the  book.  Pur- 
posing to  be  a  combination  guide,  history,  and 
general  description,  it  fails  to  be  adequate  in  any 
single  attempt.  To  accomplish  so  much  would 
be  difficult  even  in  a  single,  moderate  sized  vol- 
ume; therefore  Mr.  Verrill  almost  inevitably 
gives  the  impression  of  sketchiness.  Further- 
more his  style  is  hardly  meticulous — for  example, 
he  speaks  of  the  "healthy"  climate  when  he 
means,  of  course,  a  "healthful" ;  and  his  too  insis- 
tent habit  of  inverting  subject  and  predicate  in 
descriptive  paragraphs  deteriorates  into  a  mere 
mannerism.  But  interest  is  not  lacking.  Many 
historical  tidbits  are  served — the  plot  wherein 
George  Washington  secured  a  hundred  barrels 
of  gunpowder  from  the  Bermudians;  the  mar- 
riage of  Lord  Nelson  and  the  birth  of  Alexander 
Hamilton  in  Nevis,  of  the  Leeward  Islands;  in 
Martinique  the  birth  of  the  child  who  was  to 
become  the  Empress  Josephine ;  and  the  first  pub- 
lic appearance  of  Adelina  Patti  in  Santiago, 
Cuba.  The  intending  tourist  is  told  what  he 
may  see  and  a  few  hints  are  given  as  to  the 
costs  that  are  to  be  reckoned  with.  The  book 
is  copiously  illustrated  from  photographs. 


158 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


ANCIENT  WISDOM  SOMETIMES  COMES  to  our 
aid  in  the  attempt  to  understand  the  bewilder- 
ing chaos  of  events  we  call  the  world  war. 
"Whom  the  gods  would  destroy  they  first  make 
mad"  seems  a  guiding  aphorism  for  comprehen- 
sion of  the  antics  of  the  Pangermans.  We  don't 
know  whether  Hindenburg  boasted  that  he 
would  be  in  Paris  by  April,  as  reported  in  the 
press.  But  we  hope  so.  Nor  is  there  confirma- 
tion of  the  dispatch  which  told  us  that  the  Ger- 
man delegates  at  Brest-Litovsk  threatened  to 
capture  Petrograd  unless  the  Russians  should  at 
once  conclude  a  separate  peace  satisfactory  to 
Berlin.  But  again  we  hope  they  did.  Our 
compassion  goes  out  to  the  courageous  German 
strikers  who  were  imprisoned.  Yet  even  in  this 
case,  can  we  honestly  pretend  that  we  are  sorry  ? 
History,  if  it  teaches  us  anything,  teaches  us  that 
an  autocratic  and  unpopular  clique,  losing  con- 
trol, displays  certain  stigmata  of  degeneration. 
It  brags  about  the  overwhelming  love  which 
unites  it  with  its  people,  at  the  same  time  ruth- 
lessly suppressing  any  signs  of  discontent.  It 
tries  to  disguise  an  inner  weakness  by  an  out- 
ward bluster  that  all  is  going  well.  Von  Hert- 
ling  exhibited  the  typical  sort  of  sickening  hypoc- 
risy when  he  said,  "In  the  officers  and  the  men 
lives  unbroken  the  joy  of  battle."  The  old,  old 
circle  is  closing  in  upon  the  German  tyrants 
exactly  as  it  has  closed  in  upon  the  tyrants  of 
history.  Their  boasts  become  more  and  more 
absurd,  their  performances  more  meagre,  their 
threats  more  dire,  their  strangulation  of  their 
own  people  more  shameless  and  severe.  "Wise 
men,"  the  proverb  tells  us,  "learn  by  other  men's 
mistakes;  fools,  by  their  own."  From  this  point 
of  view  the  men  in  control  of  Germany  today, 
are  lower  in  the  scale  of  human  intelligence  than 
even  fools.  They  cannot  learn  by  their  own 
mistakes. 

•     .    •          • 

FOR  THE   FIRST  TIME   SINCE  ITS   FOUNDATION 

seventeen  years  ago  the  Nobel  Prize  for  litera- 
ture goes  to  Denmark.  The  award  for  excel- 
lence has  been  divided  between  the  two  Danish 
authors  Henrik  Pontoppidan  and  Karl  Gjellerup. 
Is  it  possible  that  politics  were  not  left  wholly 
out  of  consideration  in  making  the  choice  for 
1917?  Certain  circumstances  seem  to  justify  a 
suspicion.  Visible  efforts  for  a  rapprochement 
between  Sweden  and  Denmark  have  recently 
been  made  by  the  royal  families  and  diplomatic 
leaders  of  the  two  countries.  No  doubt  it  is  a 
ticklish  business  to  determine  on  a  candidate  in 
a  time  of  world  war.  Obviously  if  Sweden,  as 
a  neutral  state,  were  to  select  an  author  from 
the  warring  nations,  criticism  from  the  opposite 


side  might  easily  become  bitter.  And  to  divide 
between  both  sides  presents  almost  insuperable 
difficulties.  Yet  admitting  gladly  that  the  high 
standard  of  modern  Danish  literature  justifies 
this  year's  choice  of  nationality  aside  from  any 
political  aptness,  why  were  these  particular 
authors  selected?  One  feels  abashed  at  quarrel- 
ing with  the  Royal  Academy  of  Sweden,  that 
august  body  of  eighteen  men  and  one  woman 
( Selma  Lagerlof  being  the  sole  representative  for 
womankind).  But  there  is  one  Danish  name 
which,  unsought,  stands  in  the  foreground,  the 
name  of  Georg  Brandes.  Nor  should  we  have 
been  other  than  pleased  had  Martin  Anderson 
Nexo  been  chosen.  His  "Pelle  the  Conqueror," 
picturing  the  life  and  career  of  a  modern  labor 
leader,  ranks  as  one  of  the  great  books  of  today, 
and  critics  have  agreed  that  it  possesses  "the  lit- 
erary qualities  that  burst  the  bonds  of  nations." 
Perhaps  the  stipulation  in  Alfred  Nobel's  will 
which  makes  it  imperative  that  the  winners 
should  represent  the  "idealistic  tendency"  in  lit- 
erature has  been  taken  too  literally.  Nobel 
reacted  strongly  from  the  pessimistic  naturalism 
which  dominated  Scandinavian  literature  in  the 
later  part  of  the  nineteenth  century.  "Ideal- 
istic," however,  is  a  flexible  adjective:  it  would 
be  a  pity  to  create  a  stable  dogma.  The  currents 
and  forces  of  literature  change  with  the  currents 
and  forces  of  life,  and  any  specific  form  our 
writers  of  today  may  choose  demands  tolerant 
interpretation. 

•          •          • 

IDEALISM,  IN  THE  OLDER  SENSE,  is  certainly 
one  quality  which  Pontoppidan  and  Gjellerup, 
otherwise  of  diametrically  different  tempera- 
ments, have  in  common.  Of  the  two,  Pontop- 
pidan is  the  more  individual.  Born  in  a  family 
of  whom  his  father  and  several  other  members 
were  clergymen,  he  is  deeply  interested  in  the 
many  sectarian  movements  characteristic  of  the 
peasant  class  in  his  youth.  Although  he  began  as 
an  aggressive  realist,  a  religious  feeling  is  present 
in  his  later  books.  In  his  many  novels  picturing 
Danish  life — its  religion,  politics,  art,  and  home- 
sphere — an  all  absorbing  search  for  Truth  is 
manifest.  He  does  not  look  at  his  characters 
from  a  respectful  distance;  their  souls  are 
analyzed.  He  exhibits  sober  mastery  of  a  clear, 
sometimes  biting  or  quietly  humorous  style. 
Among  Pontoppidan 's  foremost  works  stands 
the  trilogy  "The  Promised  Land,"  and  the 
great  cycle  appearing  in  the  last  seven  years: 
"Torben  and  Jytte,"  "Storeholt,"  "Publicans 
and  Sinners,"  "Enslew's  Death,"  and  "Fav- 
singsholm."  Henrik  Pontoppidan  might  be 
called  Denmark's  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson,  his 
work  often  recalling  the  great  Norwegian's, 
though  lacking  its  dominant  grandeur  of 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


159 


conception.  .  .  Karl  Gjellerup,  who  with 
Pontoppidan  divides  the  prize,  has  behind  him  an 
exceptionally  versatile  literary  production,  com- 
prising lyric  poetry,  novels,  scientific  works, 
dramas,  even  a  tragedy  in  old  verse.  It  is  a  wide 
step  from  the  challenging  novel  of  his  youth,  "An 
Idealist,"  to  his  recent  book,  "The  Pilgrim  Kam- 
anita,"  a  beautiful  work  full  of  the  mysticism 
of  the  East  and  the  teaching  of  Buddha.  Here 
the  fiery  idealism  of  his  earlier  writing  has  been 
sobered  by  a  life  of  philosophic  research  and  sci- 
entific study. 

•          •          • 

ANNUALLY  OUR  GREAT  LIBRARY  in  Wash- 
ington reminds  us  afresh  of  its  riches  and  an- 
nounces the  year's  accretions.  For  1917,  in  spite 
of  war  and  rumors  of  war,  the  Librarian  of  Con- 
gress has  no  occasion  to  apologize.  The  biog- 
raphers of  Whistler,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Joseph  Pen- 
nell,  have  presented  the  library  with  their  notable 
assemblage  of  Whistleriana,  which  adds  to  the 
most  complete  existing  collection  of  prints,  etch- 
ings, photographs,  and  other  reproductions  all 
the  books  by  and  about  the  painter,  a  compre- 
hensive representation  of  works  in  which  his  art 
is  discussed,  some  60  folio  volumes  of  press  and 
magazine  clippings,  catalogues  of  exhibits,  and 
several  hundred  letters.  Doubtless  the  next  most 
important  acquisitions  are  the  numerous  items 
of  Americana,  including  John  Wesley's  journal 
of  his  trip  to  Georgia,  Sir  Walter  Raleigh's 
description  of  Guiana  ("auri  abundantissimi"} , 
Diedrich  Knickerbocker's  "History  of  New 
York"  with  unpublished  corrections  by  the 
author,  and  in  manuscript  the  personal  papers 
of  Charles  Thomson  (Secretary  of  the  Conti- 
nental Congress  throughout  its  life),  as  well  as 
papers  of  Robert  Morris,  James  Madison, 
Andrew  Jackson  Donelson  (nephew  and  secre- 
tary to  Andrew  Jackson),  and  of  many  other 
worthies  who  have  enjoyed  peculiar  opportuni- 
ties to  observe  our  history  in  the  making.  The 
Music  Division  can  now  boast  nearly  800,000 
items ;  manuscript  scores  by  many  important  com- 
posers were  added  last  year.  Some  5000  addi- 
tions were  made  to  the  collection  of  prints.  A 
striking  part  of  the  report  discusses  accessions 
from  China,  Japan,  and  their  neighborhood  even 
to  Tibet,  of  which  upwards  of  6600  were 
secured.  Altogether  the  Congressional  Library 
is  richer  now  by  120,769  items  (exclusive  of 
manuscripts,  which  are  not  counted)  than  it  was 
a  year  ago.  Of  these  some  86,000  items  are 
printed  books  and  pamphlets — eight  times  the 
number  of  books  published  here  last  year.  Minds 
not  yet  made  numb  by  the  iteration  of  the  vast 
totals  of  war  finance  may  feel  a  pardonable 
thrill  in  the  fact  that  our  national  library  now 
contains  (still  excepting  manuscripts)  nearly 
four  million  titles. 


ARE  THE  COURTS  USURPING  THE  FUNCTIONS 

of  criticism?  Some  months  ago  Judge  Tuthill 
of  Chicago  ruled  that  Bacon  wrote  Shakespeare. 
It  now  comes  to  light  that  a  member  of  the  East- 
ern bench  had  anticipated  that  precedent  in  lit- 
erary criticism.  Apropos  of  a  recent  divorce,  a 
newspaper  quotes  from  an  earlier  decision  pro- 
voked by  the  same  couple's  matrimonial  diffi- 
culties, a  decision  handed  down  by  Justice  Borst 
of  New  York.  He  said:  "After  becoming 
acquainted,  the  defendant  paid  the  plaintiff 
attention,  and  from  his  letters  and  conduct  was 
evidently  much  enamored  of  her,  writing  her 
numerous  letters,  and  even  lapsing  into  poetry, 
which,  from  its  composition,  was  evidently  orig- 
inal with  him"  (italics  ours).  At  this  point 
somebody — whether  the  learned  judge  or  the 
reporter,  indeed,  does  not  clearly  appear — has 
kindly  introduced  "a  specimen  of  this  poetry." 
Although  entitled,  originally  enough,  "To  Elea- 
nor from  L.  R.,"  the  fifteen  lines  introduced  are 
those  of  a  favorite  song  which  the  merely  liter- 
ary world  has  for  nearly  three  centuries  igno- 
rantly  accepted  as  Robert  Herrick's — the  lines 
"To  a  Rose,"  beginning: 

Go,  happy  rose,  and,  interwove 

With  other  flowers,  bind  my  love.     .     . 

and  ending: 

Lest  a  handsome  anger  fly, 
Like   a   lightning,   from   her   eye 
And  burn  thee  up  as  well  as  I. 

To  be  sure,  there  are  textual  variations,  "from 
her  eye"  becoming  "from  the  sky"  for  instance; 
but  they  are  only  such  variations  as  seem  inev- 
itable to  newspaper  quotation.  For  the  decree 
that  Shakespeare's  plays  were  written  by  Bacon 
we  were  not  altogether  unprepared;  this  decree 
that  Herrick's  songs  were  written  by  an  Ameri- 
can lover  is,  however,  revolutionary.  Is  the 
critical  fraternity  too  weakly  divided  against 
itself  to  present  a  solid  front  to  the  encroaching 
judiciary? 

•  •          • 

WRITING  FROM  LONDON  Mr.  Edward  Shanks 
discussed,  in  the  preceding  issue  of  THE  DIAL, 
Robert  Graves  and  his  "odd  mongrel  of  a 
book  called  'Fairies  and  Fusiliers'  ...  the 
kind  of  book  that  calls  for  a  personal  recom- 
mendation." Of  this  poet  the  New  York  "Even- 
ing Post"  quotes  an  anecdote  by  John  Masefield, 
who  has  lately  returned  to  America:  "Graves 
was  picked  up  for  dead.  He  heard  them  say  he 
was  dead  and  he  called  out,  'I'm  not  dead.  I'm 
damned  if  I'll  die.'  And  he  didn't.  And  he 
wrote  a  poem  about  it."  Mr.  Masefield  cites 
Graves  as  one  of  the  young  men  who  are  writing 
"the  best  poetry  written  in  England  now.  .  . 
These  poems  come  out  of  experience — hard,  big, 
deep  experience." 


160 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


Three  Large  Printings 
In  Thirteen  Days! 

THE  BOLSHEVIKI 
and  WORLD  PEACE 


LEON 

TROTZKY 

(Russian  Foreign  Minister) 

The  man  the  Wall  Street  Journal  says 
Is  Fated  to  Exert  a  Greater  Influence 
on  the  Destinies  of  the  World  than 
Napoleon  Bonaparte. 

"The  Bolsheviki  and  World  Peace," 
shows  Trotzky's  keen  conception,  and 
straight-forward  detestation  of  the 
German  war  aims,  and  the  German 
spirit  in  international  politics.  Trot- 
zky's great  stroke  has  been  the  un- 
masking of  the  German  war  aims." 
—  Springfield  Republican. 


"Leon  Trotzky's  confession  of  faith  is 
naturally  the  most  conspicuous  book 
of  the  week.  This  work  is  the  most 
explicit  exposition  that  has  yet  ap- 
peared of  Russian  Revolutionary 
socialism  in  its  relation  to  the  war,  and 
cannot  but  be  of  interest  to  Ameri- 
can readers." — New  York  Evening 
Post. 

"The  book  presents  a  fair  picture  of 
the  man,  and  illuminates  the  principles 
upon  which  his  policy  at  Brest-Litovsk 
is  based." — The  New  Republic. 

Wherever  Books  Are  Sold 

$1.50 

BONI&LIVERIGHT,  Publishers 

NEW  YORK 


COMMUNICATION 


A  LITERARY  MIDDLE  ENGLISH  READER 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

I  should  like  to  say  a  word  for  a  book  that 
may  easily  escape  your  attention.  The  "Literary 
Middle  English  Reader,"  by  Professor  Albert  S. 
Cook  (Ginn;  $2),  bears  a  title  suggestive  of  peda- 
gogy and  pedestrianism;  yet  a  careful  examination 
convinces  me  that  it  is,  in  its  limits,  an  important 
service  to  literature.  The  English  language  from 
the  Conquest  to  the  Reformation  is,  indeed,  a  philo- 
logical paradise;  but  to  the  seeker  of  literary  satis- 
factions it  presents  a  first  appearance  like  the 
Plain  of  Shinar  at  the  moment  the  building  of 
the  Tower  of  Babel  came  to  an  end. 

Those,  however,  who  love  our  language  and 
literature  because,  apart  from  their  merits,  they 
are  our  very  own,  cannot  but  be  strongly  drawn 
to  Professor  Cook's  volume,  the  first  representative 
anthology  of  Middle  English  that  has  aimed  to 
make  literary  interest  the  sole  criterion  of  selection. 
Middle  English  has  but  two  classics  some  knowl- 
edge of  which  is  necessary  for  all  English-speaking 
persons  who  aspire  to  be  well  read.  These  classics 
are  Chaucer  and  Malory.  Professor  Cook,  how- 
ever, who  brings  to  his  task  a  wide  and  close 
acquaintance  with  his  subject,  and  an  enthusiasm 
that  has  perhaps  never  been  surpassed,  has  demon- 
strated that  besides  Chaucer  and  Malory  there  is 
in  Middle  English  a  large  amount  that  is  at  least 
readable,  much  that  is  decidedly  interesting,  and 
a  few  things  that  even  evoke  enthusiasm. 

The  book  is  excellent  alike  for  what  it  includes 
and  for  what  it  omits.  The  "Ormulum"  is  where 
it  belongs — outside  the  volume.  So  is  the  "Ayenbite 
of  Inwit,"  that  curiously  prosaic  composition  which 
so  distinguished  an  archaeologist  as  Mr.  Ridgeway 
once  guessingly  called  "a  poem."  A  few  only  of 
the  happy  inclusions  in  Mr.  Cook's  volume  may 
be  mentioned.  The  "Secunda  Pastorum"  is  rapidly 
winning  recognition  as  a  work  of  genius.  To  my 
thinking  "Gawain  and  the  Green  Knight"  is  of 
unequal  merit.  The  ethics  of  the  poem  are  mushy. 
Professor  Cook  has  selected  from  those  passages, 
fraught  with  adventure  and  a  feeling  for  nature, 
which  show  real  genius.  He  gives  a  liberal  selec- 
tion from  the  better  lyric  poetry  of  the  period. 
"Sir  Orfeo"  is  a  really  pretty  perversion  of  the 
story  of  Orpheus.  The  passages  selected  from 
"Piers  the  Plowman"  really  exhibit  that  poem  at 
its  best.  "The  Fox  and  the  Wolf"  is  distinguished 
by  a  sly  humor  and  a  happy  characterization  that 
remind  one — not  too  distinctly — of  Chaucer. 

The  format  of  the  book  is  convenient,  the  print- 
ing is  excellent.  Professor  Cook  has  supplied  each 
selection  with  an  introduction.  A  series  of  glosses 
at  the  foot  of  each  page  does  much  to  make  the 
book  intelligible  to  the  general  reader.  Whatever 
defects  the  specialist  may  spy  in  the  execution,  I 
would  urge  that  a  note  of  them  be  sent  to  the 
editor.  If  I  were  engaged  in  teaching  Middle 
English,  I  should  regard  some  use  of  the  book 
as  absolutely  indispensable  for  those  who  wish  to 
begin  the  study  under  favorable  auspices. 

HENRY  BARRETT  HINCKLEY. 

New  Haven,  Connecticut. 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


161 


NOTES  AND  NEWS 


Edward  Garnett,  who  writes  in  this  issue  about 
Edward  Thomas,  is  the  second  son  of  the  English 
scholar,  Richard  Garnett.  He  is  the  author  of 
"The  Breaking  Point,"  "The  Feud,"  and  "The 
Paradox  Club,"  and  of  books  on  Hogarth  and 
Tolstoy. 

Myron  R.  Williams  is  a  graduate  of  Harvard 
who  is  now  teaching  in  the  Hartford,  Connecticut, 
High  Schools. 

The  other  contributors  to  this  issue  are  familiar 
to  readers  of  THE  DIAL. 


Last  month  T.  Fisher  Unwin  published  Jean 
Massart's  account  of  "The  Secret  Press  in  Bel- 
gium." 

"Our  Schools  in  War  Time — and  After,"  by 
Arthur  D.  Dean  of  Teachers  College,  Columbia, 
is  on  the  list  of  Ginn  &  Co. 

The  Macmillan  Co.  published  in  January 
Edoardo  Webber's  technicological  dictionary  in 
English,  French,  Italian,  and  German,  with  the 
four  languages  in  parallel  columns. 

Among  the  early  February  publications  of  Small, 
Maynard  is  "Buddy's  Blighty  and  Other  Verses 
from  the  Trenches,"  by  Lieut.  Jack  Turner,  a 
Canadian. 

The  Four  Seas  Co.  announce  "The  Gentleman 
Ranker  and  Other  Plays,"  by  Leon  Gordon,  and 
"The  Path  of  Error  and  Other  Stories,"  by  Jo- 
seph M.  Meirovitz. 

The  Brooklyn  Public  Library  has  recently  issued 
a  brochure,  "Dramatized  Tales,"  which  lists  nearly 
two  hundred  plays  founded  upon  popular  tales, 
prose  and  verse,  in  all  languages.  An  appendix  adds 
some  "novelized  dramas." 

Edward  J.  Clode  has  lately  announced  the  pub- 
lication of  "The  Story  of  the  Salonica  Army,"  by 
G.  Ward  Price,  and  "If  a  Man  Die,  Shall  He  Live 
Again?"  by  Edward  Clodd,  with  a  Postcript  by 
H.  E.  Armstrong,  F.R.S. 

February  sales  at  the  Anderson  Galleries  in 
New  York  include  a  large  library  of  Shakespereana, 
offered  on  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth,  and  Mr. 
Stephen  Caplin's  collection  of  Americana,  sched- 
uled for  the  nineteenth  and  twentieth. 

Early  February  issues  from  Harper's  are  "In 
Our  First  Year  of  War,"  by  President  Wilson; 
"Traveling  under  Orders,"  by  Major  William  E. 
Dunn;  and  a  new  novel  by  Kate  Langley,  "Kitty 
Canary." 

B.  W.  Huebsch  has  now  added  the  seventh  vol- 
ume to  the  "Collected  Dramas"  of  Hauptmann, 
which  brings  the  dramatist's  work  down  to  the 
war.  Among  these  pieces  is  the  "Commemoration 
Masque,"  which  the  Crown  Prince  ordered  with- 
drawn from  the  stage  after  its  first  presentation, 
in  Breslau  in  1913. 

The  National  Board  of  the  Young  Women's 
Christian  Associations  has  recently  established  a 
secular  press  under  the  publishing  style  of  the 
Woman's  Press.  Its  first  announcement  promises 
a  book  by  Mary  Austin  on  the  young  woman  citi- 
zen, looking  toward  instruction  in  political  tech- 
nique for  feminine  voters. 


From  STOKES'  Spring  List 


Will  German  Women  Stop  the  War? 
GERTRUDE  ATHERTON 

answers  this  question  in  her  stirring  novel 
of  the  German  Revolution  that  may  come 

THE 

WHITE  MORNING 

Based  on  a  startling  idea,  with  an  intense 
love  interest,  and  told  as  only  Gertrude  Ather- 
ton  could  tell  it — it's  a  story  that  everyone 
thinking  about  the  War  will  want  to  read. 

"The  story  is  enthralling.  It  holds  a  fierce, 
pitiless  love  story;  it  is  crowded  with  living 
characters,  and  moves  before  a  vivid  back- 
ground. .  .  A  book  that  will  be  read  far 
and  wide  over  the  world.  .  .  Alive  with  the 
beat  of  the  pulse  of  this  time." — N.  Y.  Times. 
Cloth,  12mo,  net  $1.00 

THE  NEW  BUSINESS 

OF  FARMING  By  JULIAN  A.  DIMOCK 

How  to  put  the  farm  on  &  paying  basis  by  a 
man  who  did  it;  how  to  stop  the  leak  in 
profits  ;  how  to  farm  for  profit ;  what  to  plant 
and  when — these  are  some  of  the  main  sub- 
jects treated  in  this  condensed  handbook  on 
the  business  side  of  farming.  A  book  for  the 
city  man  who  returns  to  the  soil  and  for  the 
"born  and  bred"  farmer.  Net  $1.00 

ARMY  AND  NAVY 
UNIFORMS  AND  INSIGNIA 

By  COL.  DION  WILLIAMS 

The  latest,  most  accurate  information,  taken 
directly  from  official  sources,  regarding  the 
uniforms  and  insignia  of  the  American  army 
and  navy,  and  of  all  the  fighting  powers. 
The  illustrations — 117  in  black-and-white  and 
8  in  full  color — form  a  complete  and  authentic 
record  of  the  uniforms,  corps  and  specialty 
marks  of  the  nations  represented.  Net  $1.50 


Notable  Poetry 


A  CELTIC 
PSALTERY 


By  ALFRED  P.  GRAVES 


English  versions   of  a  wide  selection  of   Irish 
and  Welsh  poems.  Net  $1.75 

ARDOURS  AND 

ENDURANCES  By  ROBERT  NICHOLS 

Poems    of    rare    beauty    by    a    young    English 
soldier.  Net  $1.50 

THE  GREY  FEET 

OF  THE  WIND        By  CATHAL  O'BYRNE 

Poems    essentially   Gaelic,    full   of    beauty   and 
the  magic  lore  of  the  Gael.  Net  $1.00 


FREDERICK  A.  STOKES  COMPANY 


162 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


fUUUUUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIItllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllltlllllUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIU 

!   READING  FOR  "EN-   I 
|   FORCED  HOLIDAYS"   [ 

Where  "Heatless  Mondays" 
are  the  rule,  they  will  at  least 
give  us  all  a  chance  to  read 
those  books  which  are  really 
worth  while  such  as  the  four 
new  ones  below. 


CAVALRY  OF  THE  CLOUDS 

By  CAPT.  ALAN  BOTT,  M.C.,  R.F.C. 

Net  $1.25 

Here  is  "unexaggerated  fact"  by  one  who 
faced  the  machine  guns  of  the  Boche  on  the 
giddy  roof  of  things.  This  book  gives  you 
a  clear  comprehension  of  the  whole  thrilling 
business  of  wartime  flying  so  full  of  amazing 
possibilities  that  the  author  prophesies  "avia- 
tion will  be  the  destruction  of  war." 


THE  FULL  MEASURE  OF 
DEVOTION 

By  DANA  GATLIN  Net  50  cents 

In  this  story  is  wonderfully  compressed 
the  essence  of  the  spirit  of  those  who  march 
away  to  war  and  those  who  must  stay  behind. 

THE  KENTUCKY  WARBLER 

By  JAMES   LANE  ALLEN,   author   of  "A 
Kentucky  Cardinal,"  etc.  Net  $1.25 

The  study  of  a  lad  buried  in  the  great 
adventure  of  finding  himself.  The  book  can 
be  read  in  a  few  hours,  but  the  fascination 
it  exerts  lasts  and  grows — New  York  Times. 


THE  FALSE  FACES 

By  LOUIS  JOSEPH  VANCE 


Net  $1.40 


The  New  York  Tribune  says  of  this  tale  of 
"The  Lone  Wolf"  at  war :  "We  have  indeed 
seldom  read  a  more  incessantly  fascinating 
detective  or  secret  service  tale  than  this. 
There  is  literally  not  a  dull  page  in  it." 

For  Sale  At  All  Bookstores 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  CO 

GARDEN  CITY,  N.  Y. 


The  February  list  of  Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 
includes  "The  Secret  of  Personality,"  by  George 
Trumbull  Ladd;  "Physical  Chemistry  of  the  Pro- 
teins," by  T.  Brailsford  Robertson;  and  "The  Life 
of  John  Cardinal  McCloskey,  First  Prince  of  the 
Church  in  America,"  by  Cardinal  Farley. 

Two  forthcoming  offerings  of  the  Century  Co. 
are  "Roving  and  Fighting:  Adventures  under  Four 
Flags,"  by  "Tex"  O'Reilly  (Edward  S.),  soldier 
of  fortune,  and  "Donald  Thompson  in  Russia,"  be- 
ing letters  home  from  a  free  lance  newspaper  pho- 
tographer and  moving-picture  man. 

The  Scribners  announce  the  seasonable  publica- 
tion of  "The  Voice  of  Lincoln,"  by  R.  M.  Wana- 
maker,  a  Justice  of  the  Ohio  Supreme  Court.  The 
book  is  an  attempt  to  reveal  Lincoln  through  his 
own  many-sided  utterances,  with  the  biographical 
and  historical  significance  of  the  selections  dis- 
cussed by  the  author. 

The  poems  which  appeared  as  chapter-headings 
in  Thomas  Burke's  "Nights  in  Town,"  with  others 
in  the  same  vein,  are  collected  in  his  "London 
Lamps,"  just  published  by  Robert  M.  McBride  & 
Co.  Late  this  month  it  will  be  followed  by  the 
author's  "Twinkletoes,"  a  novel  in  which  some  of 
the  persons  of  "Limehouse  Nights"  reappear. 

For  February  the  Stokes  Co.  offer  in  fiction  "The 
Girl  from  Keller's,"  by  Harold  Bindloss,  and 
"Stepsons  of  France,"  by  P.  C.  Wren.  Their  gen- 
eral list  includes  "A  Celtic  Psaltery,"  by  A.  P. 
Graves;  "Ardours  and  Endurances,"  by  Robert 
Nichols;  and  "The  New  Business  of  Farming," 
by  Julian  A.  Dimock. 

With  "Red  Ruth,"  a  novel  of  the  "birth  of  uni- 
versal brotherhood,"  by  Anna  Ratner  Shapiro,  the 
Arc  Publishing  Company,  122  South  Michigan 
Avenue,  Chicago,  makes  its  bow.  It  will  special- 
ize in  fiction.  "Red  Ruth,"  which  begins  where 
the  war  leaves  off,  is  a  Utopian  prophecy  of  Amer- 
ica's part  in  the  reconstruction  of  a  Europe  still 
prostrate  many  years  after  the  close  of  hostilities. 

Mr.  Philip  Goodman,  one  of  the  latest  comers 
to  the  New  York  publishing  field,  has  announced 
his  books  for  the  new  year:  "Forty-Nine  Little 
Essays,"  by  H.  L.  Mencken;  "How's  Your  Sec- 
ond Act?"  by  Arthur  Hopkins;  and  "A  Book 
Without  a  Title,"  by  George  Jean  Nathan.  This 
spring  he  will  issue  books  by  Benjamin  de  Casseres, 
Eugene  Lombard,  and  Don  Marquis.  • 

For  February  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons  offer  four 
war  books:  "First  Call,"  by  Arthur  Empey;  "Air- 
craft and  Submarine,"  by  Willis  J.  Abbott;  and 
"Tactics  and  Duties  for  Trench  Fighting,"  by 
Georges  Bertrand,  a  captain  in  the  Chasseurs  Al- 
pins,  and  Major  Oscar  N.  Solbert  of  the  United 
States  Corps  of  Engineers. 

On  February  14  Henry  Holt  &  Co.  will  publish 
"Camion  Letters,"  a  collection  of  letters  from 
American  college  men  who  have  been  Camionneurs 
(drivers  of  ammunition  wagons)  in  France;  on 
February  28,  "The  Problems  of  the  Actor,"  by 
Louis  Calvert;  on  March  7,  "Professor  Latimer's 
Progress,"  the  book  title  of  the  anonymous  "Atlan- 
tic Monthly"  serial,  "Professor's  Progress";  and 
later  in  the  spring  DeMorgan's  last  novel,  "The 
Old  Mad  House." 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


163 


LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 


\The  following  list,  containing  in  titles,  includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.'] 

THE  WAR. 

The  Bolshevik!  and  World  Peace.  By  Leon  Trotzky. 
Introduction  by  Lincoln  Steffens.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12moJ  239  pages.  Boni  &  Liveright.  $1.50. 

A  French-English  military  Dictionary.  By  Cor- 
nells De  Witt  Willcox.  8vo,  584  pages.  Harper 
&  Bros.  $4. 

The  Prisoner  of  "War  In  Germany.  The  Care  and 
Treatment  of  the  Prisoner  of  War,  with  a 
History  of  the  Development  of  the  Principle  of 
Neutral  Inspection  and  Control.  By  Daniel  J. 
McCarthy.  Illustrated,  8vo,  345  pages.  Moffat, 
Yard  &  Co.  $2. 

The  New  "Warfare.  By  G.  Blanchon.  Translated  by 
Fred  Rothwell.  12mo,  254  pages.  Thomas  Y. 
Crowell  Co. 

Six  Women  and  the  Invasion.  By  Gabrielle  and 
Marguerite  Yerta.  With  preface  by  Mrs.  Hum- 
phry Ward.  12mo,  377  pages.  Macmillan  Co.  $2. 

To  Arms!  (La  Veillge  des  Armes.)  By  Marcelle 
Tinayre.  Translated  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey. 
With  a  preface  by  John  H.  Finley.  12mo,  292 
pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.50, 

Potterat  and  the  War.  By  Benjamin  Vallotton. 
12mo,  326  pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $1.50. 

Campaign*  and  Intervals.  By  Lieut.  Jean  Girau- 
doux.  Translated  by  Elizabeth  S.  Sargent.  12mo, 
273  pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  $1.50. 

On  the  Field  of  Honor.  By  Hugues  Le  Roux. 
Translated  by  Mrs.  John  Van  Vorst.  12mo,  281 
pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  $1.50. 

Comrades  in  Courage.  (Meditations  dans  la  Tran- 
ch6e.)  By  Lieut.  Antoine  Redier.  Translated 
by  Mrs.  Philip  Duncan  Wilson.  12mo,  260  pages. 
Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  $1.40. 

At  the  Serbian  Front  in  Macedonia.  By  E.  P. 
Stebbing.  Illustrated  with  photographs  by  the 
author.  12mo,  245  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.50. 

Marching  on  Tanga.  (With  Gen.  Smuts  in  East 
Africa,)  By  Francis  Brett  Young.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  265  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

Facing  the  Hindenburg  Line.  Personal  Observa- 
tions at  the  Fronts  and  in  the  Camps  of  the 
British,  French,  Americans,  and  Italians,  during 
the  Campaigns  of  1917.  By  Burris  A.  Jenkins. 
12mo,  256  pages.  Fleming  H.  Revell  Co.  $1.25. 

A  Roumanian  Diary:  1915,  1916,  1917.  By  Lady 
Kennard.  Illustrated,  12mo,  201  pages.  Dodd, 
Mead  &  Co.  $1.25. 

Letters  of  a  Canadian  Stretcher-Bearer.  By 
"R.  A.  L."  Edited  by  Anna  Chapin  Ray.  12mo, 
289  pages.  Little,  Brown  &  Co.  $1.35. 

Visions  and  Vignettes  of  War.  By  Maurice  Pon- 
sonby.  12mo,  116  pages.  Longmans,  Green  & 
Co.  Boards,  $1. 

America  Among  the  Nations.  By  H.  H.  Powers. 
12mo,  376  pages.  Macmillan  Co.  $1.50. 

Democracy  and  the  "War.  By  John  Firman  Coar. 
12mo,  129  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  $1.25. 

Democracy  After  the  War.  By  J.  A.  Hobson.  12mo, 
212  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.25. 

The  Collapse  of  Superman.  By  William  Roscoe 
Thayer.  16mo,  77  pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 
60  cts. 

The  Scar  That  Tripled.  By  William  G.  Shepherd. 
12mo,  48  pages.  Harper  &  Bros.  Boards,  50  cts. 

Military  and  Naval  Recognition  Book.  A  Handbook 
on  the  Organization,  Insignia  of  Rank,  and  Cus- 
toms of  the  Service  of  the  World's  Important 
Armies  and  Navies.  By  Lieut.  J.  W.  Bunkley, 
U.  S.  N.  Illustrated,  16mo,  224  pages.  D.  Van 
Nostrand  Co.,  New  York.  $1. 

Hand-to-Hand  Fighting.  A  System  of  Personal 
Defense  for  the  Soldier.  By  A.  E.  Marriott. 
With  a  foreword  by  Benjamin  S.  Gross.  Illus- 
trated, 16mo,  80  pages.  Macmillan  Co.  $1. 

FICTION. 

South  "Wind.  By  Norman  Douglas.  12mo,  464 
pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $1.60. 

The  "White  Morning.  By  Gertrude  Atherton.  With 
frontispiece,  12mo,  195  pages.  Frederick  A. 
Stokes  Co.  $1. 

Nine  Tales.  By  Hugh  de  SSlincourt.  With  an  in- 
troduction by  Harold  Child.  12mo,  311  pages. 
Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $1.50. 


"You  Germans  have  only  one  will,  and  that  is 
My  will;  there  is  only  one  law  and  that  is  My 
law;  only  one  master  in  this  country,  that  is  I, 
and  who  opposes  Me  I  shall  crush  to  pieces." 
— Wilhelm  II,  Emperor  of  Germany. 

A  Survey  of  International 
Relations  Between  the 
United  States  and  Germany 

August  1st,  1914— April  6th,  1917 

(Based  on  Official  Documents) 

By  James  Brown  Scott 

An  authentic  account  of  the  conduct  of  the 
United  States  during  the  period  of  neutrality. 
Every  step  up  to  the  actual  declaration  of  war 
is  fully  treated.  Also  an  extended  introduction 
comprising  quotations  from  the  writings  of 
leading  German  authors  as  Frederick  the 
Great,  Treitschke,  Bernhardi,  Bismarck,  etc., 
showing  the  German  Conceptions  of  the  State, 
International  Policy  and  International  Law. 

Royal  8vo,  cloth,  506 pages,  net  $5.00 

At  all  Booksellers  or  from  the  Publishers 


UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

AMERICAN  BRANCH 
NEW  YORK 


Important  New  Publications 

Principles    of    American    Diplomacy 
By  John  Bassett  Moore 

Crown  8vo,  $2.00 

National  Progress,  1907-1917 

(American   Nation   Series) 
By  Frederic  A.  Ogg 

Maps,  Crown  8vo,   $2.00 

French-English    Military    Dictionary 

By  Col.  Cornelius  De  Witt  Wilcox,  U.S.A. 

Octavo,  $4.00 

Your  Vote  and  How  To  Use  It 

By  Mrs.  Raymond  Brown 

12mo,  Cloth,  75  Cents 

The  Scar  That  Tripled 

By  William  G.  Shepherd 

Frontispiece,  Thin,  12mo,  Paper  Boards,  Cloth  Back, 

50  Cents 

A  History  of  Architecture 
By  Fiske  Kimball  and  G.  H.  Edgell 

Fully  Illustrated,  Crown  8vo,  $3.00 

Traveling  Under  Orders 

A  Guidebook  for  Troops  En  Route  to  France 
By  Major  William  J.  Dunn,  N.A. 

32mo,  Khaki  Cloth,  50  Cents 

HARPER    &    BROTHERS,  Established    1817 


164 


THE    DIAL 


[February  14 


GREAT    WAR,   BALLADS 

By  Brookes  More 

Readers  of  the  future  (as  well  as  today)  will 
understand  the  Great  War  not  only  from  pe- 
rusal of  histories,  but  also  from  Ballads — having 
a  historical  basis — and  inspired  by  the  war. 

A  collection  of  the  most  interesting,  beauti- 
ful and  pathetic  ballads.— 

True  to  life  and  full  of  action. 
$1.50  Net 

For  Sale  bjt  Brentano'a;  The  Baker  «•  Taylor  Co.,  New 

York;  A.  C.  McClurg   «•   Co.,  Chicago;  St. 

Louis  News  Co.,  and  All  Book  Stores 

THRASH-LICK  PUBLISHING  CO. 

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"An  important  contribution  to  present- 
day    questions."    — Los  Angeles  Times. 

Socialism  and  Feminism 

By  CORREA  MOYLAN  WALSH 
3  volumes,  octavo  $4.50  net 

Sold  separately : 

The  Climax  of  Civilization  $1. 25  net 
Socialism  $1.50  net 

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"In  fact  these  are  the  ablest  anti-social- 
istic books  the  reveiwer  has  ever  seen." 
— The  Boston  Transcript. 

STURGIS  &  WALTON  CO.         New  York 


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Under  the  Hermes,  and  Other  Stories.  By  Richard 
Dehan.  12mo.  341  pages.  Dodd.  Mead  &  Co. 
$1.50. 

Mary  Regan.      By   Leroy   Scott.      Illustrated,   12mo, 

385   pages.      Houghton   Mifflin   Co.      $1.50. 
The  Transactions  of  Lord  Louis  Lewis.     By  Roland 

Pertwee.     Illustrated,    12mo,    332    pages.     Dodd, 

Mead   &   Co.      $1.50. 
Mistress  of  Men.     By  Flora  Annie  Steel.     12mo,  368 

pages.     Frederick  A.  Stokes  Co.     $1.40. 
The  Golden  Block.     By  Sophie  Kerr.     With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  323  pages.     Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 

$1.40. 
The  Mystery  of  the  Downs.     By  Watson  and  Rees. 

12mo,  306  pages.     John  Lane  Co,     $1.40. 
('leek,  the  Master  Detective.     By   T.    W.   Hanshew. 

Illustrated,    12mo.    343   pages.     Doubleday,   Page 

&   Co.      $1.40. 
Carolyn  of  the   Corners.     By   Ruth   Belmore   Endi- 

cott.     Illustrated,  12mo.  318  pages.     Dodd,  Mead 

&  Co.      $1.35. 
Red    Ruth.      The    Birth    of    Universal    Brotherhood. 

By  Anna  Ratner  Shapiro.     Illustrated.  12mo,  268 

pages.    Arc  Publishing  Co.,  Chicago.     $1.35. 

POETRY  AND  DRAMA. 

Oxford  Poetry,  1914-1916.  12mo,  190  pages.  Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co.  $1.25. 

Poems.  By  Edward  Thomas  ("Edward  Eastaway"). 
With  portrait,  12mo.  63  pages.  Henry  Holt  & 
Co.  Boards,  $1. 

The  Last  Blackbird,  and  Other  Lines.  By  Ralph 
Hodgson.  12mo,  95  pages.  Macmillan  Co.  $1.35. 

The  Binding:  of  the  Beast,  and  Other  War  Verse. 
By  George  Sterling.  12mo,  51  pages.  A.  M. 
Robertson,  San  Francisco.  $1. 

Collected  Poems.  By  Charles  V.  H.  Roberts.  12mo, 
143  pages.  The  Torch  Press,  New  York.  Boards, 
$1.25. 

Trackless  Regions.  Poems.  By  G.  O.  Warren. 
12mo,  118  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co,  Boards, 
$1.25. 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


165 


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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


167 


II 


How  I  Save  5 1  °/o  on  Typewriters 

An  Expert  Buyer's  Statement 


II 


"Formerly  the  typewriters  used  in  oar  office  were  priced  at  $100  each. 
Now  we  buy  Olivers  at  $49.  This  saving  of  half  means  a  great  deal 
to  us  because  we  use  so  many  machines.  If  any  typewriter  is  worth 
$100,  it  is  this  Oliver  Nine,  which  we  buy  direct  from  the  maker.  After 
using  Olivers  we  will  never  go  back  to  $100  machines.  It  is  pure  waste." 


Was 
$100 


OLIVER  TVpcWrifers 

Over  600,000  Sold 


The'.Oliver  TypewriterjCompany"now  sells  direct.  It  has  discarded 
old 'and  wasteful  ways.     Formerly  we  had  15,000  salesmen  and  agents.     We  maintained  expensive 
offices  in  50  cities.  These,  and  other  costly  practices,  amounted  to  $51,  which  the  purchaser  had  to  pay. 


Our  new  way  saves  this  $51  and  so 
we  sell  brand  new  Oliver  Nines  for  $49. 

This  is  the  exact  $100  machine — not 
a  change  has  been  made.  Such  is  our 
§2,000,000  guarantee. 

The  entire  facilities  of  the  Oliver 
Typewriter  Company  are  devoted  ex- 
clusively to  the  manufacture  and  dis- 
tribution of  Oliver  Typewriters. 

It  is  ridiculous  to  pay  any  attention 
to  the  rumor  that  we  offer  second  hand 
or  rebuilt  Olivers  of  an  earlier  model. 
This  may  be  done  by  other  concerns. 
So  we_  warn  people  to  answer  only 
advertisements  signed  by  The  Oliver 
Typewriter  Company  itself. 

FREE  TRIAL 

Merely  mail  us  the  coupon  and  we 
will  send  you  an  Oliver  for  five  days' 


free  trial.  Try  it  at  your  office  or  at 
home.  If  you  decide  to  keep  it.  pay 
us  at  the  rate  of  $3  per  month.  If 
you  return  it,  we  will  gladly  refund 
the  transportation  charges.  Old  ma- 
chines are  accepted  in  exchange  at  fair 
valuation. 

We  hope  to  be  able  to  maintain  the 
$49  price.  But,  if  the  cost  of  materials 
and  labor  continues  to  go  up,  we  may 
be  forced  to  increase  this  price.  We 
do  not  wish  to.  We  do  not  expect  to. 
But  we  advise  you  to  act  now  to  be 
certain  of  getting  your  Oliver  Nine 
at  $49. 

The  Oliver  Nine  has  the  universal 
standard  keyboard.  So  any  operator 
may  turn  to  it  without  the  slightest 
hesitation.  And  it  has  a  dozen  other 
features  which  attract.  It  is  greatly 
simplified  in  construction,  having  2000 
fewer  parts.  It  is  noted  for  its  free- 
dom from  trouble,  great  durability  and 
easy  operation. 

WHY  BE  WASTEFUL? 

Whether  you  use  1  typewriter  or  100, 
this  new  Oliver  plan  saves  you  half. 

No  machine  does  better  work.  No 
typewriter  is  speedier.  None  are  more 
satisfactory  in  the  long  run  than  the 
Oliver  Nine. 

All  this  you  can  know  for  yourself 
very  easily.  You  are  your  own  sales- 
man and  decide  for  yourself. 

Read  the  coupon.  Note  how  simple 
our  plan  is.  Then  mail  it  today  for 
either  a  free  trial  Oliver,  or  our  amaz- 
ing book  entitled  "The  High  Cost  of 
Typewriters — The  Reason  and  the  Rem- 
edy." With  the  latter  we  send  an 
illustrated  catalog  describing  the  Oliver 
in  detail. 

Which   for   you?      Check   one   or    the 
other  item  on   the  coupon   now. 
Canadian   Price  $62.65 


Preferred  By 

United  States  Steel  Cor- 
poration 

Montgomery  Ward  & 
Company 

Baldwin  Locomotive 
Works 

Pennsylvania   Railroad 

Lord  &  Thomas 

Columbia  Graphophone 
Company 

Bethlehem   Steel    Co. 

National  Cloak  &  Suit 
Company 

New  York  Edison  Co. 
Cluett,  Peabody  &  Co. 

National    City    Bank    of 

New  York 

Hart,  Schaffner  &  Marx 
Encyclopedia    Britannica 
American  Bridge  Co. 
International    Harvester 

Company 

Diamond  Match  Co. 

Fore  River  Ship  Build- 
ing- Corporation 

Boy  Scouts  of  America 
Corn    Products   Refining 
Company 

Boston  Elevated  Rail- 
way 


The  Oliver  Typewriter  Company 


652  Oliver  Typewriter  Bldg. 


Chicago,  111. 


F 


THE   OLIVER  TYPEWRITER   COMPANY 
652  Oliver  Typewriter  Bldg.,  Chicago,  111. 

IP  Ship  me  a  new  Oliver  Nine  for  five  days  free  I 
inspection.    If  I  keep   it,  I  will  pay  $49  at  the  I 
Irate  of  $3  per  month.    The   title   to   remain    in  I 
you  until  fully  paid  for. 
My   shipping  point  is . 

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168  THE     DIAL  [February   14,   1918 


WHAT  IS  MAN'S  SUPREME  INHERITANCE  ? 

A  Practical   and   Comprehensive   Answer   to   This   Question  Will   Be 

Found  in  an  Original  Work 

Man's  Supreme  Inheritance 

By  F.  MATTHIAS  ALEXANDER 

With  an  Introductory  Word  by  Professor  John  Dewey  of  Columbia  University 

What  are  particularly  original  and  valuable  in  this  work  are  the  author's  analysis  of  the  funda- 
mental conditions  of  human  evolution  and  his  demonstration  that  the  time  has  now  arrived  for 
adapting  man's  life  to  these  conditions,  not  by  a  fatalistic  surrender  to  blind  atavism  and  retrograde 
instincts,  but  by  the  exercise  of  conscious  intelligence,  by  a  conscious  guidance  and  control  of  the 
human  organism  and  human  conduct  which  will  meet  all  the  demands  of  an  advancing  civilization. 

Man's  Supreme  Inheritance  constitutes  a  preventive  and  remedial 
measure  to  combat  the  ills  of  modern  civilization 

A  practical  system  of  physical  and  mental  guidance  and  control  is  offered,  based  not  on  a  specific, 
but  on  a  general  reeducatibn,  coordination,  and  readjustment  of  the  organism  which  commands  ade- 
quate activity  of  the  vital  processes  with  the  minimum  of  effort,  and  complete  adaptability  to  an 
ever-changing  environment. 

Prof.  John  Dewey  of  Columbia  University  in  his  prefatory  word  says: 

"No  one,  it  seems  to  me,  has  grasped  the  meaning,  dangers,  and  possibilities  of  this  change  more 
lucidly  and  completely  than  Mr.  Alexander.  His  account  of  the  crises  which  have  ensued  upon 
this  evolution  IS  A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  A  BETTER  UNDERSTANDING  OF  EVERY  PHASE 
OF  CONTEMPORARY  LIFE.  The  ingeniously  inclined  will  have  little  difficulty  in  paralleling 
Mr.  Alexander's  criticism  of  Physical  Culture  Methods  within  any  field  of  our  economic  and  polit- 
ical life.  In  his  criticism  of  return  or  relapse  to  the  simpler  conditions  from  which  civilized  man 
has  departed  Mr.  Alexander's  philosophy  appears  in  its  essential  features.  He  does  not  stop  with 
a  pious  recommendation  of  such  conscious  control ;  HE  POSSESSES  AND  OFFERS  A  DEFINITE 
METHOD  FOR  ITS  REALIZATION,  and  even  a  layman  can  testify,  as  I  am  glad  to  do,  to  the 
efficiency  of  its  working  in  concrete  cases.  IN  THE  LARGER  SENSE  OF  EDUCATION,  THIS 
WHOLE  BOOK  IS  CONCERNED  WITH  EDUCATION.  TRUE  SPONTANEITY  is  henceforth 
not  a  birthright,  but  the  last  term,  THE  CONSUMMATE  CONQUEST  OF  AN  ART— THE 
ART  OF  CONSCIOUS  CONTROL  to  the  mastery  of  which  MR.  ALEXANDER'S  BOOK  SO  CON- 
VINCINGLY INVITES  US." 

John  Madison  Taylor,  M.D.,  Professor  of  Applied  Therapeutics 

Temple  University,  Philadelphia;  for  16  years  Assistant  of  S.  Weir  Mitchell,  Travelling  Physician 
with  Joseph  Pulitzer,  and  ranch  associate  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  writing  to  Mr.  Alexander  about 
the  theory  and  method  set  forth  in  the  book,  says:  "I  feel  that  you  have  reached 

THE  HEART  OF  A  GREAT  MATTER 

which  I  shall  watch  with  keen  interest  in  its  later  developments.  Do  put  your  views  on  record 
fully,  and  make  many  revisions  and  elaborations  so  long  as  you  live.  It  will  prove 

A  NOTABLE  CONTRIBUTION  TO  HUMAN  WELFARE 

If  it  be  practicable,  I  shall  come  to  you  and  beg  opportunity  to  learn  at  first  hand.  I  particularly 
congratulate  you  on  your  ability  to  reduce  to  practical  procedures  the  principles  you  would  inculcate. 


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THE  DIAL 


Fortnightly  Journal  of 

CRITICISM:  AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


Volume  LXIV. 
No.  761. 


CHICAGO,  FEBRUARY  28,  1918. 


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IN  THIS  ISSUE 


The  Young  World 

By  JAMES  OP  PENH  El M 

A  Happy  Ending  for  the  Little  Theatre 


By  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 


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THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


OVER  THERE  AND  BACK 

IN  THREE  UNIFORMS 
Being  the  Experiences   of   an   American   Boy  in   the   Canadain,    British    and 

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now  is  an  officer  in  the  American  Army.  In  OVER  THERE  AND  BACK  he  takes  you  through  three 
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A  CRUSADER  OF  FRANCE 

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CAPTAIN  FERDINAND  BELMONT 

Introduction  by  Henry  Bordeaux 

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UNDER  FIRE  (Le  Feu) 

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1918]  THE    DIAL  171 


"Holding  the  Line" 

(A  Fighting  Man's  Story  of  the  War) 

By  Sergeant  Harold  Baldwin 

of  the  First  Division,  Canadian  Expeditionary  Forces 

Outgunned,  outnumbered,  their  trenches  leveled  by  the 
furious  cannonade;  a  hurricane  of  shot  and  shell  sweeping 
over  them;  men  dropping  by  the  hundred — yet  the  line 
held  and  saved  the  world.  This  is  the  story  told  in 

"Holding 


the 


Line 


99 


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THE    DIAL 


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THE^DIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  761 


FEBRUARY  28,   1918 


CONTENTS 


THE  YOUNG  WORLD  .  .  Verse  .  . 
THE  STRUCTURE  OF  LASTING  PEACE  . 
A  HAPPY  ENDING  FOR  THE  LITTLE 

THEATRE 

OUR  LONDON  LETTER     .     .     .     .     .     . 

HAVEN  .......     Verse 

ART  IN  VICTORIAN  SUBURBIA    .... 

GOD  AS  VISIBLE  PERSONALITY  .... 

BACKGROUND  WITHOUT  TRADITION  .     . 
YET  ONCE  MORE,  O  YE  LAURELS  !     .     . 
OUR  CHANGING  PERMANENCE  .... 

IF  THIS  BE  LITERATURE  GIVE  ME  DEATH 
BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


James  Oppenheim  .     .175 
H.  M.  Kallen   .     .     .180 

Kenneth  Macgowan  .  187 
Edward  Shanks  .  .189 
Leslie  Nelson  Jennings  190 
Robert  Morss  Lovett .  191 
Edward  Sapir  .  .  .192 
C.  K.  Trueblood  .  .194 
Conrad  Aiken  .  .  .195 
William  E.  Dodd  .  .  197 
B.I.Kinne  .  .  .  .199 
.  200 


Anne  Pedersdotter. — The  Food  Problem — Portraits 
Where  the  Sunsets  Go. — Shakespearean  Playhouses 
— Socialism. — Feminism. — Memories   Discreet   and 
Physical  Chemistry  of  Vital  Phenomena. 

NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION  . 


and  Backgrounds. — The  Land 
, — The  Climax  of  Civilization. 
Indiscreet. — Welfare  Work. — 


The  White  Morning. — The  Terror. — Four  Days. — Temporary  Heroes. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 

COMMUNICATION 

Books  on  Palestine. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  . 


205 

206 
209 

210 
213 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 

CONRAD  AIKEN 
RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


Contributing  Editors 
VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 
PADRAIC  COLUM 
HENRY  B.  FULLER 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

H.  M.  KALLEN 
KENNETH  MACGOWAN 
JOHN  E.  ROBINSON 


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THE    DIAL 


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The  Young  World 


i. 


I  will  make  a  song 

For  the  young  world, 

And  I  will  give  this  song  to  the  winds 

To  blow  whither  it  will.     .     . 

In  a  Japanese  garden  the  young  poet 

Closing  his  book  of  Ibsen 

Shall  look  up  and  hear 

Some  throbbing  bird  loosen  that  music.     .     . 

In  a  German  night-garden  by  a  lake 

The  young  sculptress,  gazing 

On  the  moving  torsos  of  men, 

Shall  suddenly  begin  to  listen 

To  strange  ripples  of  strange  waters.     .     . 

In  a  Russian  peasant's  hut 

One  of  the  boys  waking  at  midnight 

Shall  sit  among  his  brothers  and  sisters 

And  hear  the  forest  whispering.     .     . 

Here  and  there  on  the  Earth 

Youth  shall  listen, 

Hearing  the  song  I  have  lifted 

Out  of  the  song  of  youth.     .     . 

2. 

O  the  pride 

Of  the  young  world.     .     . 

These  youngsters   are   aliens  and   exiles  among 

their  parents: 
Where  they  go 
Goes  rebellion, 

It  could  not  be  otherwise.     .     . 
They  have  left  narrow  rooms 
And  darkened  doorways,  and  gone 
To  new  spiritual  hills.     .     . 
Theirs  is  the  salt  sea  that  belts  the  planet, 
And  the  water  they  taste 
On  the  California  shore 
Is  the  same  bitter  strong  water 
They  taste  at  Calais, 
At  Dover, 
At  China  Bay.     .     . 

3. 

O  the  darkness 
Of  the  young  world.     .     . 
They  dwell  in  wild  weather.     .     . 
The  wind  of  slaughter  over  the  Caucasus 
Is  the  same  wind 
That  gulps  blood  over  Cambrai 
And  whirls  dust  in  Chicago.     .     . 
The  same  wind 
That  carries  the  same  stern  summons  of  terror, 


Red  terror,  red  revolution, 
The  end  of  the  old  Earth, 
The  death, 
The  struggle  to  be  born.     .     . 

4. 

O  the  joy 

Of  the  young  world.     .     . 
They  are  lonely  flames  in  far  places, 
In  wide-sown  separated  cities, 
In  swamps  of  life — 
But  they  are  flame: 
They  are  the  first  winds  of  the  morning  that  call 

the  larks  up, 
They  are  the  rising  of  the  sun  and  the  turn  of 

tides, 

They  are  the  opening  notes  of  a  song — 
Each  is  a  note  seeking  the  other  notes. 
How  far  they  reach !  how  slowly,  surely ! 
And  what  a  dawn  there  shall  be 
When  they  surprise  each  other's  faces 
And  find  they  are  a  host, 
The  notes  blending  together, 
The  new  song  risen. 

They  are  hewn  stones  in  scattered  quarries 
And  the  architect  shall  bring  them  to  his  city 
For  the  new  cathedral.     .     . 
Each  singing  stone  shall  find  his  place. 

They  are  streets,  gardens,  workshops, 

They  are  temples  and  theatres, 

They  are  homes, 

And  out  of  them  shall  the  new  city  be  built 

Shining  on  the  hills 

With  unspeakable  grandeur.     .     . 

5. 

Only  they  shall  be  saved 

Who  have  sting  in  them, 

The  bitterness  unbreakable 

By  temptation.     .     . 

Resisters  of  the  false  kindness   and   the  crowd 

comfort, 

The  ease  of  wealth,  the  power  of  place, 
The  pride  of  medals.     .     . 
Only   the   true   flame   shall  burn   through   the 

world's  damp  tinder, 
Burn  through  to  the  future.     .     . 
Only  they  shall  be  saved 
Who  have  laughter  in  them, 


176 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


Laughter  that  dances  over  the  dead  moralities, 

The  embalmed  frigidities, 

The  canons  of  good  taste.     .     . 

Laughter  that  mocks  the   dreadful-faced   Idols, 

The  painted  Satans, 

The  wooden  Thunderers.     .     . 

Only  they  shall  be  saved 

Who  are  willing  to  be  alone.     .     . 

Yes,  they  are  greatest 

Who  are  willing  to  be  alone.     .     . 

6. 

O  what  is  the  word 
Burning  in  the  heart  of  youth? 
Is  it  the  word,  God  ? 
Is  it  the  word,  Fatherland  ? 
Is  it  the  word,  Liberty  ? 
It  is  none  of  these  words :  the  word 
Has  not  been  shaped,  has  not 
Pealed  its  bugle-challenge  on  Earth.     .     . 
Not  yet.     .     . 
But  it  burns  in  hearts, 
It  shapes  almost  to  the  lips, 
Each  morning  listens  for  it. 

7. 

These  are  the  spirits  who  have  been  alien  from 

birth 

As  if  they  had  been  born  on  the  wrong  planet. 
They  have  been  brought  up  among  miraculous 

machines, 

In  a  universe  widened  by  astronomy 
But  sudden  gone  lifeless; 

That  was  the  age  of  the  Earth's  loneliness.     .     . 
The  planet  that  had  swung  as  a  censer  from  the 

vault  of  heaven, 

Steaming  with  frankincense  of  prayer, 
And  breathed  on  by  angels  and  the  inspirations 

of  God, 

Now  was  a  lonely  atom, 
A  wanderer  in  the  universal  void.     .     . 
Now  no  more  were  the  men  and  women  about 

them 
Souls  struggling  up  out  of  flesh  into  a  burst  of 

wings 

And  flight  into  glory, 
But  physico-chemical  organisms  made  over  in  the 

image  of  the  new  God, 
Yea,  the  Machine.     .     . 

Well-being,  comfort,  tools,  sanitation,  power — 
Their  brothers  strove  for  these.     .     . 

Whose  heart  was  set  on  the  long  visions  of 
eternity, 

Whose  eyes  turned  inward  to  the  mysterious  war 

Of  Demon  and  God  in  the  soul — 

The  war  whose  victory  is  wisdom  and  the  con- 
quest of  love 


And  the  radiance  of  life — 

Whose  heart  needed  song  in  the  day 

And  the  marvelous  adventures  of  intimacies, 

He  was  the  fool  and  the  failure 

Among  the  great  owners. 


Not  to  a  land  alone  is  our  allegiance, 

But  beyond  it  to  one  another.     .     . 

Scattered  in  our  multitude  of  communities 

It  is  as  if  one  hand  had  scattered  the  seed  of  the 
future 

In  many  hidden  places  of  Earth.     .     . 

There  are  no  boundaries  between  us, 

Neither  manners  nor  strange  tongues  nor  per- 
sonal facts 

Can  set  up  walls.     .     . 

Have  we  not  drunk  the  same  wisdom? 

Do  we  not  follow  the  same  poets? 

Share  the  same  Science? 

Are  we  not  children  of  the  same  Earth? 

Walt  Whitman  and  Tolstoi  walk  in  the  shadow 
of  Fujiyama 

As  they  saunter  on  the  East  Side  streets  of  New 
York.  .  . 

Darwin  teaches  in  Hong  Kong  and  Calcutta 

Sitting  beside  Buddha  and  Confucius.     .     . 

Our  terrible  and  lonely  standard-bearer,  Nietzsche, 

Whispers  on  the  heights  of  Colorado 

And  in  the  pass  of  Thermopylae.     .     . 

O  little  did  the  machine-makers  know, 
Trading  on  ships  and  railways, 
With  their  newspapers,   telegraph,   laboratories, 
That  they  were  carrying  the  past  and  setting  it 

down 

On  every  doorstep  of  Earth.     .     . 
But  we,  we  have  drunk  from  the  breast  of  the 

great  Mother 
The  same  milk  of  vision, 
We  belong  to  one  nation, 
The  Land  of  One  Another, 
And  from  us  in  every  nation  shall  spring  the  new 

life  of  Man  on  Earth.     .     . 

9. 

The  day  of  democracy? — Yes.     .     . 

And  what  is  democracy? 

It  is  allowance  for  each  man's  wish, 

And  so  the  mass-wish  rules.     .     . 

Not  needs,  not  duties,  not  rights, 

But  wishes,  desires,  wills.     .     . 

But  when  shall  men  wish  greatly? 

How  many  will  volunteer 

To  create  great  lives  and  loves? 

Look  to  the  past :  how  many 

Are  the  volunteers  on  the  scroll? 

Surely  democracy 

Will  mean  the  end  of  greatness 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


177 


Unless  you,  O  young  world, 
Spring  forth  to  the  call — 
Firstlings  of  the  Voluntary  Life — 
To  go  forth  in  yourself 
To  the  terrible  pains  of  growth, 
To  new  births  and  new  visions, 
To  the  living  of  new  values, 
To  the  risks  of  loneliness  and  persecution  and  dis- 
comfort.    .     . 

Examples — they    are    the    contagious    flame    in 

democracy ; 
Teachers — they  are  the  revealing  light  for  the 

.  people.     .     . 
For  this,  prepare, 
O  Voluntaries! 

10. 

Let  the  great  Artist  teach  you  his  secret, 

How  he  reaches  his  hands  in  his  own  dark  breast, 

That  rich  jungle, 

And  shapes  from  his  sorrow,  delight, 

From  frustration,  music, 

From  lust,  vision.     .     . 

He  becomes,  not  a  precipice  of  authority, 

But  a  hill  that  invites  climbing.     .     . 

He  tempts  men  to  high  places 

By  the  dazzling  beauty  of  his  own  heights 

Which    are   but   a   transformation   of   his    own 

depths.     .     . 

He  is  a  destroying  storm  turned  into  music, 
A  hatred  become  love,  an  evil  become  good.     .     . 

He  is  the  beginning  of  democracy, 

For  in  place  of  imposing  his  passion  upon  others 

He  turns  his  passion  into  a  gift, 

And  the  gift  works  more  miracles  than  a  king's 

command.     .     . 
And  in  place  of  submitting  his  soul  and  mind  to 

the  will  of  others 

He  turns  his  herd-lust  into  a  work  of  self 
Personal  and  new, 
And  so  renders  service  as  no  slave  could  render. 

Are  you  artists,  O  spirits  of  the  young  world  ? 

Are  you  those  who  seek  to  transform  destroying 
things 

Into  symbols  of  glory  and  works  of  f  ruitf  ulness  ? 

Would  you  end  war,  clean  out  poverty,  stop  dis- 
ease? 

Neither  law  nor  science  shall  suffice, 

But  only  Art.     .     . 

When  men  learn  to  sing  together, 
When  they  passionately  desire  their  cities 
To  be  songs  in  stone,  musical  to  the  eyes, 
The  song  of  their  gathered  vision; 
When  they  love  drama  that  reveals  their  future 
heights, 


When  festival  and  laughter  are  shared  in  rever- 
ence, 

When  a  life  without  great  sexual  love  is  shunned 
and  abhorred, 

When  children  are  brought  to  bloom  as  by  per- 
fect gardeners, 

When  work  has  in  it  the  joy  of  the  unexpected 

And  is  wrought  as  a  gift, 

Then  shall  the  abomination  of  desolation, 

Money-striving,  and  slaughter,  and  disease 

Flee  like  night  before  the  irresistible  sun.     .     . 

Great  is  the  task  of  the  artist  who  works  in  stone 

or  in  flesh, 

In  song  or  in  values.     .     . 
But  his  epoch  opens  before  us.     .     . 

11. 

It  is  not  enough  to  love,  O  Voluntaries.     .     . 
It  is  only  enough  when  you  turn  hatred  into 

love.     .     . 

Man  is  a  natural  hater,  hunter,  slayer,  destroyer; 
He  is  a  storm,  a  volcano.     .     . 

This  came  to  me: 

A  dark  mood  out  of  the  depths 

Like  a  storm  rising  out  of  the  sea.     .     . 

But  I  hate  darkness, 

I  cannot  spend  it  on  myself  except  I  slay  myself. 

So  I  send  it  out  upon  others.     .     . 

I  say,  "They  are  the  guilty;  they  are  oppressing 

me; 
They  have  wronged  me.     .     ." 

How  then  does  this  suffice? 

I  writhe  in  the  coils  of  my  hatred, 

I  seek  for  a  victim,  yet  have  none — 

(Am  I  not  civilized?    How  can  I  slay  or  torture 

another?) 

But  neither  can  I  remain  so  encoiled, 
Confused,  wasted,  unable  to  sleep  or  toil.     .     . 
What  shall  I  do? 

I  look  to  the  wisdom  of  the  past: 

"Forgive  my  trespasses 

Even  as  I   forgive  those  who  trespass  against 

me.     .     ." 

Does  this  serve?    I  try  it: 
I  try  it  as  one  who  prays.     .     . 
I  put  passion  into  a  struggle  to  turn  to  mine 

enemies 
And   in  my  heart   embrace   them   and   forgive 

them.     .     . 

And  behold,  I  am  released.     .     . 
For  I  have  taken  the  storm  of  hatred 
And  by  passion  made  love  of  it.     .     . 
Now  I  have  all  this  energy  to  give  unto  others 
Or  unto  my  tasks, 
And  so  go  free.     .     . 

Even  in  this  is  the  great  art  of  living.     .     . 


178 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


12. 

It  is  not  enough  to  love — no, 
It  is  only  enough  when  you  love  strongly.     .     . 
There  is  a  weak  love  that  is  amiable  and  flat- 
tering, 

It  seduces  a  man  to  follow  the  demands  of  others, 
To  soothe,  to  coddle,  to  spoil  with  kindness.     .     . 
Strong  love  may  be  a  scourge.     .     . 
Not  the  scourge  of  hate  and  passion, 
But  the  stab  of  the  surgeon's  scalpel 
Which  goes  with  infinite  deliberation 
And  fine  impersonal  thrust 
Into  the  core  of  the  abscess.     .     . 

Therefore,   go  strongly,   Spirits  of  the  Young 

World, 

Be  advised  by  Nietzsche:  be  hard, 
Creators  must  be  hard.     .     . 
Carry  a  saving  bitterness  and  a  stinging  laughter 
As  weapons  of  self-defence.     .     . 
Know  the  cruelty  of  the  greatest  love.     .     . 

13. 

A  new  day  has  dawned  for  groups.     .     . 

O  lonely  young, 

Seek  one  another  out,  and  be  gathered  to  one 

purpose.     .     . 

A  strength  awakens  in  three  or  in  ten 
That  sleeps  in  one  or  in  two.     .     . 
The  pressure  of  mind  against  mind, 
The  honorable  high  rivalries, 
The  demands  one  on  another, 
The  sense  of  a  herd  backing  one's  vision, 
The   drooping  faith   that   flames   again   in   the 

warm  shelter  of  others: 
These   are  the  gifts   and   the   discipline   of   the 

group.     .     . 

So  comes  massed  power.     .     . 

A  group  is  a  giant, 

It  is  a  flying  wedge  against  the  dull  undergrowth 

of  humanity, 

It  is  a  shock  battalion  against  the  entrenched.   .    . 
It  is  a  miniature  brotherhood,  the  beginnings  of 

camaraderie.     .     . 

Not  in  unions,  commissions,  and  societies 

Organized  for  a  common  gain, 

But  the  natural  coming  of  a  few  together 

Like  fragments  flying  into  place 

To  make  a  new  personality 

Larger  than  a  single  man. 

14. 

Are  the  common  things  for  you? 

Are  you  for  them? 

Surely  not  only  tubers  are  rooted  in  the  soil, 

But  also  roses,  oaks,  redwoods.     .     . 

Our  law  is  from  below  upwards, 


From  the  Earth,  the  body,  the  passions,  desires, 

Up  into  vision  and  love.     .     . 

Ours  is  the  organic  life — 

No  dream  sent  down  from  heaven 

And  clapped  on  us  willy-nilly, 

But  the  dream  opening  even  like  the  petals  of 

the  flower 

Out  of  our  blood  and  impulse.     .     . 
Render  unto  the  human  what  belongs  to  the 

human 

That  you  may  be  free  to  render  unto  your  vision 
What  belongs  to  your  vision.     .     . 

Only  in  a  twist  or  two  are  we  pioneers, 

A  new  color  of  thought,  a  new  note  of  longing, 

A  new  flame  of  vision.     .     . 

Though  our  night  belongs  to  ourselves, 

Our  day  belongs  to  democracy.     .     . 

We  are  different  only  because  there  is  a  future, 
We  are  united  with  humanity  because  of  the 
great  past. 

15. 

Let  us  welcome  each  other  at  table 

With  food  and  drink, 

Let  us  know  the  jolly  unions  of  laughter, 

Let  us  have  our  hour  of  the  wild  Earth, 

The  hour  of  the  uncurbed  gale,  the  whirling  of 

leaves, 
The  dancing  of  grass.     .     . 

Let  us  know  all  healthy  things — the  long  tramp, 
The  swish  of  the  canoe,  the  swimming  in  deep 

deep  waters, 

The  bed  in  the  open  air,  the  splendid  ride, 
The  common  labor.     .     . 
Let  us  burn  the  incense  of  our  pipes  among  the 

pines, 
And  be  a  familiar  of  stars.     .     . 

16. 

Let  us  be  morning-souls, 

Meeting  the  sunrise  with  our  own  sunrise, 

We,  too,  fresh  winds  on  the  flowers, 

We,  too,  dew  on  the  grass, 

We,  too,  lusty  as  the  sleep-strong  dog  barking  his 

way  to  the  forest.     .     . 
Only  too  much  have  we  been  children  of  the 

depths, 

The  depths  of  night, 

The  hugged  of  sorrow,  the  beloved  of  lament; 
But  there  is  a  depth  in  height, 
The  blue  sky  spread  over  the  Earth  by  the  strong 

sun 

Thins  toward  eternity.     .     . 
In  ecstasy  there  is  depth,  in  joy  there  is  depth. 
There  is  a  laughter  that  belongs  to  eagles, 
There  is  a  joy  that  the  air-man  knows 
Winging  through  universal  radiance, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


179 


The  shadow  of  his  plane  on  the  clouds  below. 

O  joy  of  the  artist 

Lost  in  his  vision,  his  hands  shaping  forth  a  new 

universe,  real  and  living.     .     . 
O  joy  of  the  mother 
Like  a  sun  spreading  her  radiant  blue  sky  of 

adoration 

About  her  smiling  contented  planet.     .     . 
O  joy  that  must  come  to  this  Earth 
In  the  epochs  opening, 
Or  all  is  in  vain,  all  is  wasted.     .     . 

17. 

There  is  a  joy  in  love — 

The  love  of  man  and  woman — 

Have  you  known  it,  O  Voluntaries? 

Rarely  without  this  love  is  there  any  other  love. 

/ 

The  great  lover  is  he 

Who  first  seeks  community  of  spirit, 

A  sharing  of  vision, 

And  who  next  seeks  community  of  mind 

And  dovetailing  of  habits, 

And  who  last  brings  all  these  into  marriage 

Through  the  art  of  love.     .     . 

O  infinite  delicacy 

Of  the  gentle  and  tender  word,  the  gradual  caress, 

The  closer  enfolding,   the  secret  and   intimate 
kisses, 

The  evocation  from  the  instrument  of  woman 

Of  a  slow-rising  song,  that  rises,  rises, 

Bursting  into  triumph,  ascending  in  ecstasy, 

Crowned,  consummated  with  union.     .     . 

i 

In  this  union, 

If  even  for  a  moment, 

The  striking  of  Life  into  Life 

Bears  man  and  woman  into  the  core  of  the  sun- 
fire, 

And  through  them  blazes  the  flame  of  the  mys- 
tery, 

And  through  them  is  revealed, 

Blindingly,  the  divinity  and  glory  of  the  uni- 
verse.    .     . 

A  marriage  crowned  with  union 

Creates  out  of  the  flesh 

Depth  of  vision, 

Height  of  joy, 

And  from  these  flow 

A  light  over  the  troubled  days  and  the  darkened 

nights.     .     . 
Through  this  door 

They  walk  into  the  valleys  of  one  another, 
They  reach  to  the  last  intimacy, 
They  bathe  one  another's  faults  with  healing, 
One  another's  sorrow  with  strength; 
Understanding  is  theirs.     .     . 


18. 

It  is  not  an  easy  thing  to  love.     .     . 

Not  easy  to  give  one's  greatest  passion, 

One's  days,  nights,  unremitting  efforts, 

One's  unabating  service  and  thought, 

Out  to  another.     .     . 

But  whoso  has  learned  to  give  to  one 

Has  cut  an  outgoing  channel  from  his  heart 

And  through  this  now  may  love  flow  to  the  world, 

To  tasks,  to  women  and  men.     .     . 

Yea,  the  love  of  man  and  woman 

Is  the  initiation  into  brotherhood.     .     . 

It  is  the  path  out  of  self, 

It  is  the  road  to  Man.     .     . 

19. 

Sally  out,  young  warriors.     .     . 

Haters  as  you  are  of  slaughter, 

Enemies  of  war, 

Yet  yours  is  the  greatest  war.     .     . 

You  know  that  a  man  who  does  not  slay  himself 

Seeks  to  slay  others, 

That  he  who  does  not  grapple  with  the  enemies 
within 

Must  wrestle  with  the  enemies  without.     .     . 

Have  you  forgiven  your  enemies?  have  you  em- 
braced them  with  love? 

Not  till  you  love  these  darknesses  in  yourself 

Shall  you  embrace  the  darknesses  in  others.     .     . 

Sally  out:  but  beware! 

It  is  just  for  such  as  you  that  the  Peril  waits, 

Temptation  of  Omnipotence.     .     . 

He  who  was  an  arrow  of  longing  for  the  Super- 
man 

Became  God,  and  went  mad.     .     . 

He  slew  God,  leaving  the  world  empty, 

And  filled  the  emptiness  with  self.     .     . 

But  beware  of  being  God.     .     . 

We  are  nothing  but  ripples  of  foam  riding  the 
deeps, 

The  deeps  that  moved  in  our  fathers  as  Demons 
and  Divinities.  .  . 

What  image  haunts  you? 

A  Divine  Man,  a  Star,  a  Christ? 

Confess,  do  you  sometimes  think  this  image  is 
you? 

Turn  from  the  peril: 

It  is  but  a  symbol  of  the  depths, 

A  picture  by  which  you  may  see  and  adore  the 
Inscrutable.  .  . 

An  image  you  may  throw  on  the  air  before  you, 

Sundering  yourself  from  the  treacherous  abyss; 

And  as  one  who  feels  a  God  approach  and  en- 
fold him 

You  may  give  yourself  to  this  symbol 

And  drink  strength  out  of  the  depths, 

And  move,  free  of  Omnipotence, 

In  the  path  of  your  destined  self. 


180 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


Young  spirits!  be 

Not  Gods,  but  men  and  women, 

Not  Saviors,  but  excellent  fighters: 

Enemies,  indeed,  of  Magic, 

Of  Divine  Rights  in  yourselves  and  others, 

Of  Mob-Tyranny  and  King-Tyranny, 

Warriors   against  every   fear   and   caution   and 

world-wisdom  that  makes  a  man  crawl 

when  he  should  dance. 

20. 

I  was  meditating  last  night  before  the  fire, 

I  was  meditating  at  midnight.     .     . 

I  saw  the  faces  of  the  young  world  gathering 
about  me, 

I  saw  these  faces 

Young,  troubled,  many  in  tears,  a  few  radiant; 

I  saw  the  divine  brotherhood  of  the  young, 

I  felt  one  flame  pass  through  us  all,  a  flame  burn- 
ing 

Color  of  skin  away,  and  dividing  manners, 


Burning  nationalities  down,  and  leaping  till  we 
sat 

In  the  central  council  circle  of  the  sun; 

Our  floor  was  flame,  our  walls  were  dazzling  fire, 

And  we  were  the  children  of  the  sun, 

Wrapped  in  one  strong  hosanna  of  glory.     .     . 

And  out  of  the  flames  great  shapes  were  leaning, 

Seraphic  shapes,  shapes  of  unutterable  wisdom, 

The  spirits  of  our  brothers  who  are  dead, 

The  spirits  by  which  we  live,  and  the  ancient 
spirits 

Of  that  invisible  hierarchy 

That  lifts  to  ineffable  Light  and  Song.     .     . 

In  the  chain  of  the  mighty  past 

We  were  that  link 

Connecting  Earth  with  Beyond-Earth,  the  Fu- 
ture; 

Through  us  the  glory  ran,  the  song; 

Out  of  us  the  glory  opened. 

JAMES  OPPENHEIM. 


The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace 

x. 

THE  FEDERALIZATION  OF  SOVEREIGN  STATES:     A    PROGRAMME  FOR  A  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS 


To  three  causes  is  to  be  attributed  the 
failure  of  the  Articles  of  Confederation 
between  the  thirteen  original  and  sov- 
ereign states  in  the  American  Union.  The 
most  important  was  the  fact  that  the  Con- 
federation's central  authority,  its  Con- 
gress, had  no  power;  and  it  had  no  power 
because  it  had  no  support  in  public  opinion, 
the  citizens  of  the  states  being  inordinately 
jealous  of  the  exclusive  sovereignty  of 
their  respective  states;  while  the  failure  of 
public  opinion  to  "get  behind"  the  Con- 
gress was  due  to  the  fact  that  it  had  been 
created  by  an  administrative  fiat  of  the 
State  Legislatures,  without  any  reference 
whatsoever  to  such  opinion,  and  hence 
without  contact  with  the  immediate  life 
and  interests  of  the  people  from  whose  in- 
terest and  consent  power  derives.  The 
three  causes  were  at  bottom  one:  Con- 
gress could  not  enforce  its  rulings.  How 
to  secure  for  it  this  force  was  the  one  prob- 
lem before  the  Constitutional  Convention, 
and  the  advance  which  the  instrument 
framed  by  that  body  made  over  the  Ar- 
ticles of  Confederation  is  to  be  measured 
solely  by  the  degree  of  power  it  put  into 
the  hands  of  the  Federal  agencies  of  gov- 
ernment. 

At  the  present  writing  the  relationships 


of  the  democratic  nations  echo  those  of 
the  American  states  between  1776  and 
1787.  What  unity  they  have  is  enforced 
by  the  presence  of  a  common  enemy.  The 
hypertrophied  passion  for  exclusive  sov- 
ereignty which  is  the  vicious  side  of  patri- 
otism, and  the  drag  of  a  diplomatic 
technique  determined  by  the  interests  of 
such  sovereignty  have  made  genuinely  fed- 
erated action  on  a  single  front  unnecessar- 
ily difficult.  Arrangements  between  the 
allied  democracies  are  separate  arrange- 
ments and  their  character  is  that  of  treaty, 
not  of  public  law.  When  Mr.  Lloyd 
George,  compelled  by  events  to  denounce 
the  inexcusable  impasse  which  this  had 
led  the  Allies  into,  made  his  famous  de- 
mand for  unification,  this  jealousy — in- 
stinctive, animal — for  the  integrity  of  the 
herd,  led  to  a  vicious  and  unjustified  as- 
sault upon  him.  Withal,  the  degree  of  co- 
operation between  the  democratic  allies  is 
tremendously  greater  than  was  that  be- 
tween the  American  states.  But  here 
again,  the  moving  cause  is  not  the  will  of 
statesmen;  it  is  the  character  of  warfare 
following  from  the  nature  of  industrial 
society.  The  organization  of  industrial 
life  has  changed  warfare  from  an  affair  of 
armies  to  an  affair  of  nations:  the  logic  of 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


181 


social  circumstance  and  of  industrial  ma- 
chinery has  compelled  a  federalization  far 
beyond  the  present  good  will  of  rulers. 
Were  the  statesmen  of  the  democratic 
alliance  intelligent  and  courageous  and 
free  enough  to  follow  out  immediately 
what  events  will  force  them  to  concede 
ultimately  as  the  inevitable  implications  of 
this  logic,  a  constitutional  convention 
would  now  be  in  public  session  for  the 
federation  of  Russia,  England,  France,  the 
United  States,  the  South  American  repub- 
lics, China,  and  Japan.  It  would  be  in 
session,  war  or  no  war,  and  it  would  gen- 
eralize the  present  practices  of  coopera- 
tion, integrate  them,  and  enact  them  into 
law,  with  the  doors  open  for  the  Central 
Powers  to  come  in  or  not,  as  they  chose. 

Such  far-seeing  relevancy  in  interna- 
tional conduct  is  not  however  to  be  hoped 
for.  Everything  international  will  be 
postponed  until  the  peace  conference;  and 
if  we  may  trust  the  tone  of  the  ruling  and 
possessing  classes,  it  is  a  bold  aspiration 
to  hope  that  even  then  the  compulsion  of 
industrial  interdependence  and  the  im- 
pulsion of  the  very  patent  will  of  the 
peoples  of  Europe  and  America  to  a  league 
of  nations  and  a  democratic  and  lasting 
peace  will  find  their  realization  and  satis- 
faction. 

It  is  a  bold  aspiration.  For  the  under- 
currents of  industry  and  the  streams  of 
feeling  run  counter  the  conscious  life,  the 
established  habits,  and  the  avowed  pur- 
poses of  men.  The  popular  will  needs  to 
be  defined  by  discussion  and  articulated 
in  a  definite  programme.  And  discussions 
are  "disloyal"  or  "unpatriotic,"  and  pro- 
grammes are  "visionary."  The  Real- 
politiker  of  the  public  press  and  the 
interests  it  guards  have  had  very  little 
good  to  say  of  Mr.  Wilson's  address  of 
January  8 ;  yet  they  have  not  said  the 
worst  thing  that  there  is  to  be  said  about 
it.  That  worst  thing  is  this.  It  puts  the 
cart  before  the  horse,  and  the  cart  is  only 
the  skeleton  of  a  cart.  The  article  re- 
quiring a  league  of  nations  should  have 
come  first,  not  last;  and  it  should  have 
been  a  definite  programme  for  the  or- 
ganization of  such  a  league,  not  a  state- 
ment that  a  league  is  desirable.  The  will 
of  the  peoples  to  enduring  peace  needs 
such  a  programme  to  integrate  it — a  pro- 


gramme that  shall  designate  the  personnel 
of  the  peace  conference  and  the  manner 
of  their  election,  the  organization  of  the 
conference  into  a  congress,  and  the  chief 
articles  in  an  international  agreement,  such 
that  they  shall  come  home  to  the  vital  in- 
terests of  the  masses  of  men  and  women 
everywhere. 

Why  the  constitution  of  a  league  of 
nations  ought  to  be  the  first  proposition  in 
the  agenda  of  the  peace  conference  should 
be  obvious  enough.  Once  certain  prin- 
ciples of  public  law  are  established,  the 
adjudication  of  all  specific  racial,  terri- 
torial, economic,  and  military  issues  will 
follow  easily  and  smoothly  enough  from 
them.  The  converse  is  not  true.  Let 
these  issues  be  taken  up  severally  and  sep- 
arately, without  regard  to  an  international 
rule,  and  the  peace  conference  will  become 
a  bargain  counter  between  dickering  diplo- 
mats representing  military  forces.  The 
specific  adjudications  will  preclude  a  gen- 
eral principle  which  must  necessarily  con- 
tradict them.  At  best  we  shall  have 
restored  a  precarious  balance  of  power;  at 
worst  we  shall  resume  fighting.  If  the 
peace  conference  be  permitted  to  begin  at 
the  wrong  end  of  the  series  of  problems, 
there  is  little  hope  for  a  good  end  to  the 
conference. 

Whether  or  not  it  begins  at  the  right 
end  will  depend  on  two  factors.  These 
are  the  pressure  of  enlightened  public  opin- 
ion upon  it  and  the  personnel  of  the  con- 
ference itself.  The  former  must  be 
awakened  by  free  discussion;  the  latter 
will  be  determined  by  the  manner  of  their 
choice  and  the  considerations  leading  to  it. 
In  this  regard  the  experience  of  the  "sov- 
ereign and  independent"  American  states 
is  illuminating.  At  the  Constitutional 
Convention  the  only  statesman  who  had 
also  been  a  member  of  the  Continental 
Congress  that  had  conducted  the  war 
against  England,  was  James  Madison. 
The  rest  were  the  "demigods"  who  had 
won  the  confidence  of  the  citizens  of  their 
states  through  very  specific  and  signal  serv- 
ice during  the  war  or  through  intellectual 
leadership  during  and  after  it.  So  now. 
Diplomatists  are  by  training,  habit,  and 
usage  unfit  for  the  particular  service  in 
hand.  Servants  of  international  conflict 
for  exclusive  national  advantage,  their 


182 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


skill  is  only  in  the  arts  of  innuendo  and 
dickering  which  such  service  demands. 
They  would  be  as  unsuited  to  a  task  requir- 
ing frankness  and  mutual  accommodation 
as  a  pork-magnate  to  settle  a  strike  in  his 
own  packing  plant.  The  men  needed  are 
the  men  of  international  mind,  who  have 
been  studying  these  diplomatists  in  action, 
who  are  aware  of  the  defects  of  the  pres- 
ent state  system,  and  who  have  thought 
out  alterations  and  improvements.  Such 
men  are  Sidney  Webb,  Brailsford,  Hen- 
derson, Lowes  Dickinson,  Norman  Angell 
in  England;  Thomas  and  his  fellow 
Socialists  in  France;  the  members  of  the 
present  Russian  government  and  innumer- 
able others  in  Russia;  John  Dewey,  Louis 
Brandeis,  Secretary  Baker,  David  Starr 
Jordan,  and  Tharsten  Veblen  in  Amer- 
ica. And  so  in  every  country.  Represen- 
tatives should  be  chosen  from  the  effective 
leadership  of  that  great  body  of  sentiment 
and  opinion  which  has  for  the  last  quar- 
ter of  a  century  kept  the  creation  of  a 
league  of  nations  and  the  establishment  of 
lasting  peace  constantly  before  the  minds 
of  men,  which  has  so  taught  these  ideals 
that  the  present  war  is  unique  in  that  the 
democratic  urge  to  see  it  through  to  vic- 
tory is  the  community  of  sentiment  and 
opinion  against  all  war.  In  short,  a  league 
of  nations  can  be  most  effectively  estab- 
lished only  by  representatives  who  are  for 
it  by  habit  of  mind  as  well  as  desire,  who 
have  given  it  prolonged  study,  and  have 
made  themselves  expert  in  the  programmes 
of  its  inauguration. 

But  there  is  yet  a  further  necessity  in 
the  delimitation  of  personnel.  "Self-de- 
termination" for  nationalities,  sincerely 
applied,  would  give  place  and  voice  in  the 
conference  to  representatives  of  all  na- 
tionalities whose  fate  and  status  the  con- 
ference is  to  decide.  An  autonomous 
Poland,  for  example,  is  undoubtedly  de- 
sirable, but  the  unspeakable  Polish  over- 
lords maintain  a  vicious  hegemony  over 
Lithuanians,  Letts,  and  Jews,  no  less  than 
over  Polish  peasants.  Lithuanians,  Letts, 
and  Jews  as  well  as  Poles  should  have 
voice  and  place  at  the  peace  conference. 
Serbo-Croats,  Bohemians,  Poles,  Jews, 
Rumans  should  represent  Austria  no  less 
than  Magyars  and  Germans.  Arabs,  Ar- 
menians, Kurds,  to  mention  just  a  few, 


should  have  voice  and  place  equally  with 
the  Osmanli  Turks  for  the  Ottoman  em- 
pire. How  the  representatives  of  the 
minorities  are  to  be  elected,  what  their  pro- 
portionate weight  should  be,  are  questions 
to  be  solved  by  free  discussion  and  public 
opinion.  That  the  cases  for  their  peoples 
must  be  put  by  the  chosen  representatives 
of  these  peoples,  that  they  must  necessarily 
have  a  voice  in  deciding  their  own  fate  in 
the  community  of  nations,  is  beyond  argu- 
ment. So  much  so,  indeed,  that  following 
the  principle  involved,  Mr.  Norman  An- 
gell suggests  the  representation  not  alone 
of  nationalities  but  also  of  political  parties 
within  nations,  according  to  their  numerical 
strength.  Thus  Germany  would  be  repre- 
sented by  her  Socialists  as  well  as  by  the 
party  in  power,  England  by  her  Laborites 
as  well  as  by  her  Liberals  and  Conserva- 
tives, and  so  on.  In  this  way  fundamental 
differences  in  political  principle  would  get 
representation,  no  less  than  differences  in 
national  character  and  interest. 

What  the  peace  conference  defining 
itself  as  such  a  congress  would  need  to 
establish  is  the  law  of  a  minimum  genuine 
international  control.  Now  all  political 
control  consists  in  the  exercise  of  two  func- 
tions. One  is  limitation ;  the  other,  libera- 
tion. Limitation  and  liberation  are  distinct 
but  not  different,  since  every  just  and  rele- 
vant limitation  is  a  liberation — witness  the 
traffic  policeman.  International  limitation 
would  apply  to  national  armaments,  to 
quarrels  between  states  over  the  "stakes  of 
diplomacy,"  to  quarrels  within  states  over 
national  hegemonies.  The  limitation  of 
armament  is  of  course  basic.  For  no  mat- 
ter what  may  be  the  provocation  to  a  fight, 
the  lack  of  weapons  compels  the  substitu- 
tion of  persuasion  for  blows  and  funda- 
mentally alters  the  locus  of  the  "national 
honor,"  a  figment  for  the  defense  of  which 
most  blows  are  struck.  Hence  the  Inter- 
national Congress  should  determine  for 
the  nations  of  the  world,  as  the  Continen- 
tal Congress  was  by  the  Articles  of  Con- 
federation empowered  to  determine  for 
the  original  thirteen  American  States,  the 
extent  of  the  armament  of  each  state.  The 
simplest  way  to  do  this  would  be  to  fix 
annually  the  amount  of  money  each  state 
might  spend  on  armament.  Control  of 
expenditure  would  require  the  complete 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


183 


socialization  of  the  manufacture  of  muni- 
tions, its  subordination  to  the  inspection 
and  control  of  an  international  commis- 
sion on  armaments,  and  absolute  publicity 
of  records  and  accounts.  All  uses  of  ar- 
mament should  require  license  from  the 
International  Congress,  particularly  such 
uses  as  go  by  the  euphemism  "punitive 
expedition."  Failure  to  carry  out  these 
provisions  or  to  submit  to  the  rule  of  the 
International  Congress  should  be  regarded 
tantamount  to  a  declaration  of  war.  It 
should  be  so  regarded  with  respect  to  the 
other  causes  of  quarrel  between  and  within 
states.  Interstate  disputes  of  whatever 
nature  should  be  submitted  to  the  Interna- 
tional Congress,  which  would  be  also  the 
highest  and  final  court.  There  has  been  a 
good  deal  of  silly  differentiation  between 
"justiciable"  and  "non-justiciable"  dis- 
putes, but  there's  nothing  that's  one  or  the 
other  but  thinking  makes  it  so.  All  group 
disputes  are  justiciable  if  public  opinion 
says  they  are.  When  the  International 
Congress  has  passed  on  them,  they  are 
settled.  Failure  to  accept  the  decision  of 
the  Congress  should  automatically  consti- 
tute a  challenge  of  international  power  and 
be  dealt  with  accordingly. 

The  devices  for  dealing  with  such  fail- 
ure are  not  exclusively  military.  The  mili- 
tary machine,  indeed,  should  be  the  last 
resort.  Initially,  there  is  the  tremendous 
force  of  public  opinion,  which  the  Church 
wielded  in  the  middle  ages  as  the  Excom- 
munication and  the  Interdict.  These 
should  be  revived.  The  economic,  social, 
cultural,  or  total  ostracism  of  states  or 
portions  of  states  involves  tremendously 
less  hardship  and  suffering  than  actual 
military  assault  and  in  the  long  run  is 
bound  in  an  industrial  society  like  ours  to 
attain  the  same  end,  far  more  than  in 
earlier,  less  interdependent  ones. 

What  degree  of  coercive  power  these 
provisions  would  have  at  the  outset  will  de- 
pend of  course  on  the  will  of  the  signa- 
tories to  any  international  constitution  not 
to  turn  it  into  a  scrap  of  paper.  The  gov- 
ernmental organs  of  the  public  will  can  be 
regulated  only  by  the  public  opinion  of 
each  state,  and  the  public  opinion  of  each 
state  can  be  kept  internationally-minded 
only  by  means  of  the  completest  publicity 
regarding  all  international  relationships. 


Publicity  and  education  are  the  cornerstone 
of  any  international  system  that  shall  be 
democratic.  Hence  the  rule  of  publicity 
is  a  paramount  limitative  rule. 

The  foregoing  provisions  would,  I 
think,  supply  the  coercive  force  the  lack  of 
which  rendered  the  American  Confedera- 
tion so  instructive  a  failure.  That  they 
will  absolutely  prevent  war  cannot  be 
claimed.  Even  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  failed  to  do  that,  and  the 
interstate  unity  it  provided  for  became  a 
permanent  constituent  of  American  polit- 
ical common-sense  only  with  the  Civil 
War.  No  doubt  history  on  the  terrestrial 
scale  will  repeat  history  on  the  continental. 
No  doubt  there  will  be,  as  in  America, 
blocs  and  combinations  within  the  combina- 
tion, nullification  and  attempts  at  dissolu- 
tion; but  there  will  be  in  operation  also,  as 
in  America,  a  definitely  formulated,  agreed 
to  principle  of  unity,  insuring  mankind 
against  a  great  many  wars  almost  certain 
to  come  without  it. 

Yet  the  chief  power  of  this  insurance 
would  reside  inx  the  function  of  liberation 
that  the  instruments  of  internationality 
would  perform.  Those  turn  on  the  sat- 
isfaction of  the  basic  wants  of  men,  and 
the  consequent  release  of  their  spontane- 
ous energies  in  the  creative  activities  their 
natures  crave.  Such  satisfaction  and  re- 
lease demand,  as  we  have  already  seen,  a 
free  trade  in  material  commodities  at 
least  equivalent  to  the  free  trade  in  things 
of  the  spirit — in  science,  for  example,  or 
art,  or  music.  It  would  be  fundamental 
for  the  International  Congress  to  create 
international  commissions  concerning 
themselves  with  the  coordination  of  efforts 
to  increase  and  properly  distribute  the 
food  supply,  to  maintain  and  improve  in- 
ternational health,  to  maintain  and  keep 
internationally  open  the  world's  highways, 
to  secure  the  equality  of  all  men  before 
the  law  of  any  land,  to  expand  and  inten- 
sify the  world's  sense  of  community  by 
internationally  coordinated  education. 

Most  of  these  functions  have  already 
been  forced  on  the  allied  democracies  by 
the  exigencies  of  war;  they  would  need 
only  to  be  made  relevant  to  conditions  of 
peace.  Such  are  the  food  and  fuel  ad- 
ministrations, acting  purely  in  view  of  in- 
ternational needs.  Others  existed  long 


184 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


before  the  war.  Such  are  the  postal  union, 
and  Mr.  David  Lubin's  indispensably  serv- 
iceable agricultural  institute,  now  living  a 
starved  life  in  Italy.  Still  others  have 
gone  on  as  voluntary  and  private  enter- 
prises. Such  are  the  various  learned  so- 
cieties, particularly  the  medical  and  the 
chemical  societies.  These  would  need  en- 
dowment, endorsement,  establishment  un- 
der international  rule.  In  none  of  these 
enterprises,  please  note,  is  a  novel  ma- 
terial necessary.  All  the  institutions  exist. 
Attention  needs  only  to  be  shifted  to  their 
cooperative  integration,  expansion,  and 
perfection  by  the  conscious  joint  effort  of 
the  nations  of  the  world  to  turn  them  into 
a  genuine  machinery  of  liberating  interna- 
tional government. 

The  most  important  instrument  of  in- 
ternationality  is,  however,  education. 
Take  care  of  education,  Plato  makes  Soc- 
rates say  in  the  "Republic,"  and  education 
will  take  care  of  everything  else.  Inter- 
nationally, education  must  rest  on  two 
principles:  one,  that  it  must  be  autono- 
mous; the  other,  that  it  must  be  unpreju- 
diced. Regarding  the  first:  We  have 
already  seen  how,  in  the  case  of  Germany, 
the  state's  control  of  education  laid  the 
foundation  for  the  present  war.  The 
school  served  the  state's  vested  interest  in 
the  school.  From  the  dark  ages  to  the 
present  day  the  Church  has  held  a  vested 
interest  in  the  school,  an  interest  from 
which  events  have  more  or  less  freed  it, 
but  which  still  makes  itself  felt.  With  the 
rise  of  private  educational  institutions  or 
the  secularization  of  theological  ones — 
such  as  Harvard  or  Yale  or  Princeton — 
with  the  elaboration  of  the  public  school 
systems  of  the  different  states  of  this  coun- 
try or  any  other,  the  powers  of  govern- 
ment, visible  or  invisible,  have  determined 
largely  what  should  and  what  should  not 
be  taught,  what  is  true  and  what  is  false, 
always  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  in- 
terests of  these  powers.  Heresy  has  been 
consistently  persecuted,  with  means  vary- 
ing from  the  auto-da-fe  of  the  Church  to 
the  more  delicate  tools  of  contemporary 
university  trustees  or  school  committees. 
Heresy  consists  of  that  which  is  not  in 
accord  with  the  interests  or  prejudices  of 
the  ruling  power. 

Now  the  art  of  education  involves  three 


forces:  First,  its  theme — the  growing 
child,  whose  creative  spontaneities  are  to 
be  encouraged,  whose  capacities  for  serv- 
ice and  happiness  are  to  be  actualized,  in- 
tensified, and  perfected.  Second,  the 
investigator  and  inventor  who  discovers 
or  makes  the  material  and  machinery 
which  are  the  conditions  of  the  child's  life 
and  growth,  which  liberate  or  repress 
these.  Third,  the  teacher  who  transmits 
to  the  child  the  knowledge  of  the  nature 
and  use  of  these  things,  drawing  out  its 
powers  and  enhancing  its  vitality  by  means 
of  them.  Obviously,  to  the  last  two,  to 
the  discoverers  and  creators  of  knowledge, 
and  to  its  transmitters  and  distributors,  to 
these  and  to  no  one  else  beside,  belongs 
the  control  of  education.  It  is  as  absurd 
that  any  but  teachers  and  investigators 
should  govern  the  art  of  education  as  that 
any  but  medical  practitioners  and  investi- 
gators should  govern  the  art  of  medicine. 
International  law  would  best  abolish  this 
external  control  by  making  the  communi- 
ties of  educators  everywhere  autonomous 
bodies,  vigorously  cooperative  in  an  inter- 
national union.  Within  this  union  the 
freest  possible  movement  of  teachers  and 
pupils  should  be  provided  for,  exchanges 
of  both  between  all  nationalities  to  the 
end  of  attaining  the  acme  of  free  trade 
in  habits  and  theories  of  life,  in  letters, 
and  in  methods. 

Regarding  the  second  principle  of  in- 
ternationalized education — that  it  must  be 
unprejudiced:  This  requires  the  system- 
atic internationalization  of  certain  subject- 
matters.  In  the  end,  of  course,  all  subject- 
matters  get  internationalized.  The  proc- 
ess is,  however,  too  slow  and  too  dangerous 
with  respect  to  some  of  these,  history  be- 
ing the  most  flagrant.  Compare  any  col- 
lection of  history  textbooks  with  any 
similar  collection  in  physics,  for  example, 
and  you  find  the  latter  possessed  of  a 
unanimity  never  to  be  attained  in  the  for- 
mer. Why?  Because  every  hypothesis  in 
physics  is  immediately  tested  in  a  thousand 
laboratories  and  the  final  conclusion  is  the 
result  of  the  collective  enterprise  of  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  physicists.  In  the 
writing  of  history  such  cooperative  verifi- 
cation never  occurs.  Most  histories,  par- 
ticularly those  put  into  the  hands  of 
children,  utter  vested  interests,  not  scientifi- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


185 


cally  tested  results ;  they  utter  sectarian  or 
national  vanity,  class  privilege,  class  re- 
sentment, and  so  on.  Compare  any  Eng- 
lish history  of  the  American  Revolution 
with  any  American  history!  Fancy  the 
wide  divergence  of  assertion  between 
friends  and  enemies  in  the  matter  of  Ger- 
man atrocities!  Naturally,  the  interpre- 
tation of  historic  "fact"  must  and  should 
vary  with  the  interpreter,  but  the  designa- 
tion of  the  same  "fact"  should  clearly  be 
identical  for  all  interpreters.  To  keep 
education  unprejudiced  requires  therefore 
the  objective  designation  of  historic  fact — 
"historic"  to  mean  the  recorded  enterprise 
of  all  departments  of  human  life.  The 


"facts"  of  history  should  be  attested  by 
an  international  commission.  So  the  sec- 
ond function  of  education  is  served. 

With  this  we  have  established  the  full 
pattern  of  the  house  of  peace — an  inter- 
national democratic  congress,  limiting  ar- 
maments, judging  disputes,  coordinating 
and  harmonizing  the  great  national  insti- 
tutions by  means  of  which  men  get  food 
and  clothing  and  shelter  and  health  and 
happiness,  making  for  a  free  exchange  of 
all  excellence,  punishing  default  with  in- 
terdict or  excommunication  or  war,  rest- 
ing its  authority  upon  public  opinion  and 
strengthening  it  by  internationalized  edu- 
cation. 


XL 

EPILOGUE:    HUMAN  NATURE  AND  THE  LIMITS  OF  INTERNATIONALISM 


Solemn  warnings  echo  through  the  land. 
Prophets  stalk  uncensored,  prophesying 
war  and  woe  unless  we  arm  forever.  Sol- 
emn warnings  flash  across  the  editorial 
pages  of  the  kept  press;  and  the  weighty 
voices  of  Colonel  Roosevelt  and  Congress- 
man Kahn,  of  the  National  Security 
League  and  the  munition  manufacturers, 
of  professors  of  international  law  out  of 
Laputa,  and  of  all  the  comfortable  gentle- 
men who  have  passed  middle  age  and  are 
drawing  upon  a  rich  experience  with  life 
and  light  and  leading,  are  crying  to  us, 
"Arm,  arm !  or  we  are  lost."  What  these 
sapiencies  think  of  human  nature  is  not  fit 
to  print.  And  the  worst  of  it  is,  they  are 
not  without  provocation.  Who,  looking 
over  the  history  of  human  conduct,  dare 
say  they  are?  According  to  the  true  tes- 
timony of  history  war  is  an  institution  of 
civilization  and  an  invention  of  man.  It 
is  a  blasphemy  against  Nature  and  a  libel 
upon  animals  to  say  with  the  militarist 
philosophy  made  in  Germany  that  these 
live  by  war.  For  war  is  organized  mur- 
der for  non-essential  purposes.  The 
struggle  for  survival  is  not  organized,  and 
it  regards  essentials  only.  Animals  do  not 
kill  for  the  sake  of  killing;  they  kill  for 
food,  nor  do  they  kill  their  own  kind.  In 
the  botanical  world  plants  do  not  survive 
by  destroying  their  rivals;  they  do  not  re- 
gard their  rivals.  Plants  survive  by  their 
own  inward  vigor,  striking  roots  into  the 
earth  and  shoots  toward  the  sun.  They 


simply  crowd  out  their  rivals  by  doing  bet- 
ter the  same  things  that  the  rivals  are 
doing.  War  is  common  only  to  a  small 
portion  of  mankind,  for  the  masses  of  men 
are  driven  or  persuaded  into  war  and 
never  have  undertaken  nor  ever  would  of 
their  own  initiative  undertake  it.  War  is  a 
class  perversion  of  the  universal  enterprise 
of  self-expression  and  self-realization.  As 
an  institution  it  rests  upon  the  plasticity  and 
inertia  of  human  nature.  Upon  the  plas- 
ticity because  war  must  be  carried  on  either 
by  driven  slaves  or  mercenaries  or  de- 
ceived free  men,  and  the  war-lust  is  gen- 
erated in  free  men  by  infection  from  their 
rulers.  What  moves  their  rulers  when 
these  are  dynastic  is  the  vanity  or  the  greed 
of  the  personage  commanding  their  alle- 
giance; what  moves  their  rulers  when 
these  are  national  states  are  the  same  mo- 
tives, going  however  by  the  names  "na- 
tional honor"  and  "the  balance  of  trade." 
Both  demand  more  than  is  needful  or  due 
for  the  actual  free  existence  of  either 
princes  or  states.  These  are  able  to  infect 
men  with  the  war-lust,  even  when  they 
realize  that  war  can  do  them  no  good 
whatsoever,  because  of  the  inertia  of  hu- 
man nature.  Men  live  far  more  by  habit 
and  tradition  than  by  initiative  and 
thought.  The  habits  of  deference  and 
obedience  to  the  masters,  the  reverence  for 
the  idols  the  masters  are  and  for  the  shib- 
boleths they  delude  men  with,  reenforce 
initial  military  infection  and  plastic  re- 


186 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


sponsiveness  to  the  stirred-up  herd  feel- 
ing. Fear  also  plays  a  part,  fear  of  rulers, 
fear  of  neighbors:  German  privates  are 
fighting  today  because  they  fear  their  offi- 
cers more  than  the  enemy;  Russian  pri- 
vates are  not  fighting,  because  they  have 
ceased  to  fear  their  officers.  War  thus  rests 
on  and  reenforces  the  maxims  "Every- 
body's doing  it"  and  "What  was  good 
enough  for  father  is  good  enough  for  me." 

That  which  originates  war  and  spreads 
it  is  not,  however,  that  which  nourishes 
it  in  the  mind  of  the  common  man. 
Though  it  derives  from  plasticity  and  in- 
ertia in  human  nature,  it  is  justified  by  the 
soul's  initiative.  The  society  we  live  in 
is  basically  a  system  of  taboos — taboos  set 
by  class  for  mass,  by  property  for  human- 
ity, by  civilization  for  the  animal  as  well 
as  spiritual  spontaneities  within  us.  Hence 
war  is  to  society  what  drink  is  to  the  in- 
dividual. It  dulls  the  sense  of  repression, 
breaks  up  inhibitions,  and  liberates  and 
satisfies  energies  and  appetites  normally 
starved.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the 
possessing  classes  prohibition  is  suicidal. 
No  doubt  it  enhances  "efficiency" ;  but  the 
stored-up  discontents  of  workingmen,  cus- 
tomarily dissipated  in  the  irrelevancies  of 
drink,  accumulate  under  prohibition,  and 
sooner  or  later  must  be  discharged  rele- 
vantly. By  prohibition  capitalism  is  dig- 
ging its  own  grave.  With  regard  to  war, 
its  instinct  is  less  blinded  by  greed.  Hence 
the  jeremiads  of  Mr.  Roosevelt  and  his 
ilk.  In  wartimes  there  is  an  exaltation  in 
the  land:  even  civilians  are  lifted  out  of 
themselves  as  by  strong  drink;  their  ha- 
treds, prejudices,  malices,  and  lusts  need 
only  to  be  decently  cloaked  by  patriotism 
to  flourish  at  the  acme  of  propriety,  while 
in  the  battlefields — frightfulness,  regard- 
less of  race  or  state. 

Now  it  is  to  be  observed  that  the  pres- 
sure toward  peace  and  internationalism 
has  been  a  direct  function  of  the  spread  of 
democracy,  and  the  spread  of  democracy 
has  consisted  in  the  removal  of  political, 
economic,  superstitious,  and  social  taboos 
upon  the  panting  energies,  the  creative 
spontaneities  of  the  masses  of  men.  They 
have  most  to  gain  from  lasting  peace  and 
internationalism ;  they  have  it  most  in  their 
power  to  make  them  real. 

Will  they  do  it?    Can  they  do  it?    The 


portents  are  not  unfavorable.  Men  are 
awake  in  Russia  and  in  England,  and  they 
need  but  to  take  thought  in  France,  and 
with  open  minds  and  active  wills  "get  be- 
hind the  President"  in  America.  What 
is  called  human  nature  by  the  elderly  gen- 
tlemen who  govern  the  world  today  and  of 
whose  interests  and  dogmas  the  Roose- 
velts  are  the  high  priests,  is  not  human  na- 
ture but  second  nature.  Civilization  is  a 
growth,  not  an  eternal  form.  Customs, 
conventions,  and  habits  are  things  that 
once  were  not  and  that  ultimately  will  not 
be.  Investment  too  easily  identifies  these 
changing  manners  and  morals  of  society 
with  everlasting  law,  makes  of  them  idols 
and  masters  where  they  ought  to  be  sym- 
bols and  servants.  The  civilization  of 
Europe  has  gone  a  long  way  since  the 
days  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  and 
what  was  eternal  law  then  is  only  super- 
stitious survival  now.  Change,  society 
does  and  will,  no  matter  how  our  interests 
and  wishes  may  in  idea  arrest  it,  holding 
fast  to  this  or  that  form  or  institution. 
For  the  modern  world  the  question  has 
become:  Shall  we  suffer  or  direct  this 
change?  Shall  we  be  its  victims  or  its 
masters?  There  is  only  one  answer  in  a 
world  so  self-conscious  as  ours.  Human 
institutions  are  but  the  mutual  accommo- 
dations of  separate  human  wills.  Society 
is  more  and  more  what  we  choose  to  make 
it.  In  the  forms  of  human  organization 
belief  is  fact.  "If  you  will  it,"  said  Theo- 
dor  Herzl,  urging  his  people  toward  the 
new  Zion,  "it  is  no  dream."  Surely  the 
record  of  new  achievement  and  invention 
in  this  our  world,  a  record  as  rich  as  that 
of  the  less  conspicuously  changing  old 
order  which  so  dominates  our  attention,  is 
sufficient  warrant  for  attempting  a  new  or- 
der which  needs  no  more  to  make  it  real 
than  a  shift  of  this  same  attention.  Hu- 
man nature  is  not  in  conflict  with  lasting 
peace  and  a  free  international  order.  It 
sets  no  limits  to  internationalism.  Only 
the  perversion  of  human  nature  by  the 
illusions  of  exclusive  sovereignty,  the  harsh 
realities  of  class  vanity  and  class  greed, 
"national  honor"  and  the  "rights  of  prop- 
erty" limit  and  combat  it.  Regard  a  free 
league  of  free  peoples :  if  you  will  it,  it  is 
no  dream.  H.  M.  KALLEN. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


187 


A  Happy  Ending  for  the  Little  Theatre 


Understatement  was  the  gravest  of 
Duse's  errors  when  she  told  us  that,  to 
save  the  theatre,  the  theatre  must  be  de- 
stroyed. We  have  been  hopefully  watch- 
ing the  little  theatre  movement — assisted 
by  the  movies — deliver  the  coup  de  grace, 
only  to  discover  that  Duse  vastly  under- 
stated the  operation.  She  also  missed  a 
further  epigram  and  a  new  demonstration 
of  the  truth  of  Christian  dogma.  To  save 
the  theatre,  its  savior  must  likewise  be  de- 
stroyed. The  salvation  of  the  American 
theatre  by  the  birth,  suffering,  and  death 
of  innumerable  theatres  has  been  going  on 
pretty  steadily  for  the  past  ten  years.  It 
has  reached  the  point — in  spite  of  the  war 
or  because  of  it,  one  can  hardly  say — 
where  our  wholesale  show-shop  of  Broad- 
way and  The  Road  is  thoroughly  discred- 
ited artistically  and  scrapped  financially, 
while  the  little  theatre  movement  hovers 
between  life  and  death,  with  four  literary 
executors  by  the  bedside.  They  are 
Thomas  H.  Dickinson,  author  of  "The 
Insurgent  Theatre"  (Huebsch;  $1.25); 
Sheldon  Cheney,  author  of  "The  Art  The- 
atre" (Knopf;  $1.50) ;  Louise  Burleigh, 
author  of  "The  Community  Theatre" 
(Little,  Brown;  $1.50) ;  and  Constance 
D'Arcy  Mackay,  author  of  "The  Little 
Theatre  in  the  United  States"  (Holt; 
$2.). 

The  importance  and  vitality  of  the  little 
theatre  movement  and  the  insecurity  of 
the  factors  that  compose  it  are  amply  dem- 
onstrated both  by  the  fact  of  the  almost 
simultaneous  publication  of  these  four  vol- 
umes and  by  the  contents  of  the  books 
themselves.  According  to  the  computa- 
tions of  the  writers  there  are  anywhere 
from  23  to  51  little  theatres  in  our  coun- 
try. Miss  Burleigh  records  51  in  the 
course  of  her  argument.  Miss  Mackay 
produces  the  same  total  by  including  5  very 
questionable  cases  and  at  least  4  failures. 
Professor  Dickinson  is  content  to  tell  us 
of  32,  with  9  of  these  now  defunct.  The 
goodly  number  included  by  even  the  most 
careful  of  these  writers  speaks  for  the  re- 
ality of  the  revolt  of  artists,  actors,  and 
even  audiences  and  authors  against  the  gat- 
ling  gun  fodder  of  the  regular  theatre; 


while  the  disagreement  over  the  exact 
facts,  the  inability  which  any  of  the  authors 
would  find  in  arriving  at  the  same  total  two 
months  running,  ought  to  demonstrate — 
as  all  but  one  of  these  writers  is  willing  to 
admit — the  insecurity  of  this  makeshift 
effort  to  create  for  Ainerica  a  new  sort  of 
theatre,  which  was  a  very  old  sort  on  the 
Continent  before  the  war. 

Unpleasant  as  the  cant  phrase  has 
grown,  the  little  theatre  is  a  "movement." 
It  is  going  somewhere.  Three  of  these 
four  volumes — the  three  that  are  really 
worth  reading — frankly  admit  it.  Each 
of  the  three  decides  that  the  little  theatre 
is  a  step  in  a  different  direction — but  a 
step,  not  a  stop.  Miss  Burleigh  says 
that  the  organization  of  little  theatres  is 
a  step  towards  the  "community  theatre 
a  house  of  play  in  which  events 
offer  to  every  member  of  a  body  politic 
active  participation  in  a  common  interest," 
a  theatre  where  audience  and  entertainers 
are  intermittently  one.  Sheldon  Cheney 
sees  the  little  theatre  as  an  experiment  in 
petto  towards  the  "higher  ideal"  of  the 
art  theatre,  whose  products  are  distin- 
guished by  "spiritual  unity,  rhythm,  style." 
Professor  Dickinson,  who  has  written  by 
far  the  most  valuable  book  of  the  four, 
sees  the  little  theatre  as  an  insurgent 
against  things  as  they  are,  and  particu- 
larly a  creator  and  trainer  of  a  new  audi- 
ence for  a  new  theatre  to  come.  Miss 
Mackay,  among  a  score  of  other  inaccu- 
racies— some  of  which,  to  be  sure,  the 
other  writers  do  not  wholly  avoid — de- 
clares that  the  little  theatre  "can  advance 
towards  the  goal  it  has  set  for  itself  un- 
hampered by  the  difficulties  that  beset  the 
commercial  playhouse.  Indeed,  all  diffi- 
culties are  promptly  overridden."  Maurice 
Browne,  whose  Chicago  Little  Theatre 
(source  of  the  most  consistent  and  distin- 
guished work  done  in  America)  has  been 
forced  to  the  wall,  would  doubtless  be 
heartened  by  Miss  Mackay's  statement — 
quite  as  much  as  the  fellow-writers  would 
be  interested  to  learn  that  the  little  thea- 
tre "is  the  theatre  of  the  Future."  If  that 
be  movement,  make  the  most  of  it. 

The  little  theatre  is  a  makeshift   for 


188 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


people  who  wish  to  create  a  fine,  broad, 
democratic  playhouse,  and  who  find  that 
they  can  no  more  begin  by  setting  up  a 
huge,  expensive  theatre  in  competition 
with  the  commercial  houses,  than  a  sculp- 
tor can  begin  his  training  by  hewing  away 
at  heroic  marble.  The  theatre  seating 
three  hundred  is  simply  a  way  of  getting 
round  the  problems  or  maintaining  a  cheap 
theatre  for  a  limited  audience.  It  is  a 
laboratory  out  of  which  will  come  the 
evidences  of  new  possibilities — the  possi- 
bility of  creating  finer  art  by  integral  or- 
ganization of  actors,  producers,  and 
artists  than  by  wholesale  specialists,  and 
the  possibility  of  gathering  together  from 
the  vast  heterogeneous  public  of  the  reg- 
ular theatres  an  audience  which  wants 
that  sort  of  art  and  needs  a  place  where 
it  is  sure  of  getting  it. 

The  problem  of  creating  the  finer  sort 
of  art  depends  of  course  on  individual  and 
group  ability,  but  the  supposition  is  that 
it  can  be  more  easily  created  in  a  single, 
united  theatre-laboratory  than  piecemeal 
all  over  the  country.  And  it  is  safe  to  say 
that  Maurice  Browne  in  Chicago,  Sam 
Hume  in  Detroit,  the  Neighborhood  Play- 
house in  New  York,  and  Stuart  Walker 
in  his  peripatetic  Portmanteau  Theatre 
have  demonstrated  this  in  varying  degrees. 

Gathering  the  audience  is  another  mat- 
ter. There  even  the  Washington  Square 
Players,  with  their  less  exacting  standards, 
are  not  an  indubitable  evidence  of  success. 
Maurice  Browne  has  failed  outright  in  the 
second  city  of  the  country.  Sam  Hume 
and  the  Neighborhood  Playhouse  have 
succeeded  by  combining  the  endowment  of 
a  rent-free  theatre  and  a  limited  number 
of  performances  with  the  economy  of  am- 
ateur acting.  There  is  no  available  evi- 
dence as  to  whether  Mr.  Walker  has  really 
made  money  with  his  "theatre  that  comes 
to  you" — and  brings  a  company  of  paid 
players — but  it  seems  safe  to  say  that  if 
he  has  been  able  to  solve  the  problem  of 
the  limited  audiences  available  in  smaller 
cities,  it  is  because  he  has  lumped  all  these 
audiences  together  by  playing  only  a  few 
performances  in  each  city. 

Summed  up,  the  work  of  the  little  the- 
atres has  demonstrated  one  truth  above  all 
others.  They  have  proved  the  worth  of 
something  that  they  have  avoided.  They 


have  established  the  efficacy  and  the  neces- 
sity of  the  true  repertory  system.  Not  one 
of  these  theatres  has  been  truly  a  reper- 
tory theatre — making  productions  with  a 
certain  regularity  and  dividing  a  week  of 
seven  or  eight  performances  among  three 
or  more  different  plays. 

Outside  New  York  City  it  is  doubtless 
safe  to  say  that  the  day  of  the  true  reper- 
tory theatre  must  be  postponed  until  grad- 
ual experiment  has  demonstrated  the  pres- 
ence of  a  large  enough  audience  to  support 
steadily  a  reasonable-sized  theatre.  In 
New  York  it  is  now  possible,  as  Grace 
George  showed  a  few  seasons  ago,  to 
make  a  better  sort  of  theatre  financially 
feasible  if  it  will  cut  loose  from  compari- 
son with  the  rest  of  Broadway.  It  is  phys- 
ically and  spiritually  possible  to  mount  in 
one  theatre,  with  one  company  of  actors 
and  stage  artists,  fifteen  productions  of  a 
high  level  in  a  single  season.  It  is  no 
exaggeration  to  say  that  each  of  these  pro- 
ductions— averaging  up  the  successes  with 
the  failures — can  be  of  sufficient  interest 
to  15,000  people  to  keep  the  theatre  com- 
fortably filled  for  a  total  of  from  fourteen 
to  sixteen  performances  of  each  bill.  Some 
would  do  less  well,  some  phenomenally 
better.  But  each  would  have  its  chance  to 
be  seen  by  those  interested,  and  none  would 
be  expected  to  draw  the  hundred  thousand 
patrons  of  a  Broadway  run.  As  part  of 
a  repertory  such  as  this,  the  season's  most 
interesting  play  and  most  precipitate  fail- 
ure— "The  Deluge,"  as  presented  by  Ar- 
thur Hopkins — would  have  drawn  back  its 
cost  of  production  very  comfortably  dur- 
ing sixteen  scattered  performances.  It 
could  have  turned  loss  into  profit  if  the 
ten  or  fifteen  thousand  who  would  really 
have  enjoyed  it — and  who  doubtless  in- 
tended to  see  it  at  sometime  during  its 
run — had  divined  the  brevity  of  its  life 
and  rushed  into  the  Hudson  Theatre  dur- 
ing the  two  weeks  through  which  its  actors 
appeared  before  handfuls  of  people.  It 
is  the  essential  principle  of  repertory,  dem- 
onstrated time  after  time  abroad,  that  it 
can  gather  a  play's  utmost  audience  eco- 
nomically and  efficiently.  Our  theatre  fails 
utterly  in  that  important  function.  Our 
little  theatres  are  making  shift  towards 
that  vitally  desirable  end. 

KENNETH  MACGOWAN. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


189 


Our  London  Letter 


(Special  Correspondence  of  THE  DIAL.) 
The  Christmas  lull  in  literary  production 
does  not  last  long,  but  it  gives  one  time  to  look 
round  and  see  things  which  would  otherwise 
escape  the  harried  and  bemused  attention  of  the 
literary  observer.  And  looking  round  me,  I  can 
see  nothing  more  remarkable  than  the  astonish- 
ing literary  activity  which  is  going  on  in  Ire- 
land. It  has  long  been  a  commonplace  of  critics 
that  Anglo-Irish  literature  ought  to  be  judged 
as  a  separate  species,  that  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats 
can  only  be  compared  with  Shelley  as  vaguely 
and  as  distantly  as  Villon  can  be  compared  with 
Byron,  and  that  not  only  the  ideas  but  also  the 
images  and  the  rhythms  of  Dublin  are  differ- 
ent from  those  of  London.  Yet  I  am  not  at 
all  sure  that  this  commonplace  has  ever  been 
true.  Certainly  Mr.  Yeats  has  lived  most  of 
his  time  in  Ireland  and  has  used  the  figures 
of  the  Irish  mythology  in  his  verse;  but  he  was 
also  a  member  of  the  Rhymers'  Club,  the  asso- 
ciate of  Dowson  and  Symons,  and  I  have  a 
suspicion  that  the  affinities  between  him  and  the 
English  poets  of  the  nineties — absurd  and  now 
mercifully  fading  age — are  stronger  than  either 
his  affinities  with  the  Irish  race  at  large  or  those 
of  his  associates  with  the  main  stream  of  Eng- 
lish literature.  The  remarkable  thing  about  him 
is  not  so  much  that  he  is  a  great  Irish  poet  as 
that  he  is  the  one  considerable  new  poet  thrown 
up  by  the  cosmopolitan  and  somewhat  bloodless 
movement  of  the  nineties.  It  is  my  impression 
that  he  found  material  in  Ireland,  whereas  the 
others  found  it  in  France,  the  Roman  decadence, 
Catholic  theology,  Jacobitism,  and  strange  coun- 
tries— the  seeking  and  finding  being  in  all  cases 
very  much  on  the  same  level,  the  difference 
appearing  only  in  the  use  of  that  material. 

But  here  is  some  ground  for  believing  that 
the  case  is  now  a  little  altered  or  is,  at  all  events, 
in  process  of  alteration.  I  doubt  if  the  real 
Anglo-Irish  literature  can  ever  be  properly  sep- 
arated from  pure  English  literature.  Language, 
after  all,  is  that  which  determines  poetry;  and 
the  English  language  is  not  a  brand-new,  en- 
tirely plastic  material  which  can  be  handled 
precisely  as  the  poet  pleases.  It  has  its  tradi- 
tions and  its  habits ;  though  the  Irish  writer  may 
wish  to  compose  upon  Cuchullain  or  Diarmuid 
and  Grainne  instead  of  upon,  let  us  say,  Rich- 
ard Cosur-de-Lion  or  the  Black  Prince  or  Robin 
Hood,  his  only  models  are  the  English  writers. 
It  will  take  the  Irish  a  good  many  generations 


to  evolve  a  distinct  form  of  literary  English 
upon  which  they  can  impress  their  own  tradi- 
tions and  their  own  habits;  and  meanwhile 
everything  that  they  are  doing  in  this  way  will 
react  on  English  literature.  Some  of  Mr.  Yeats's 
most  characteristic  rhythms  and  images  and 
ways  of  thought  are  now  the  commonplaces  of 
purely  English  writers.  I  have  however  already 
expressed  my  view  that  he  is  chiefly  an  English 
poet;  so  perhaps  this  illustration  of  the  argu- 
ment goes  for  nothing.  On  the  other  hand, 
John  Millington  Synge  is  as  exclusively  Irish  a 
dramatist  as  one  could  expect  to  find.  Even 
so,  his  plays  have  generated,  not  an  Irish  drama, 
but  a  type  of  peasant  drama  which  has  flour- 
ished much  more  rankly  in  England  than  in 
the  place  of  its  origin.  His  plays  are  not  now 
Irish  as  opposed  to  English,  but  plays  in  the 
Wicklow  dialect  of  English  which  stand  side 
by  side  with  other — certainly  much  less  important 
— plays  in  the  Gloucestershire,  Westmoreland, 
Yorkshire,  and  Heaven  knows  how  many  other 
dialects  of  English. 

Yet  there  is,  for  all  this,  a  very  definite  and 
independent  stirring  of  life  in  the  literature 
which  can  be  called,  if  no  more  than  topograph- 
ically, the  literature  of  Ireland.  It  began,  I 
think,  with  "^E,"  principally  because  "IE"  was 
not  in  his  writing  specifically  a  Celt,  in  the  way 
in  which  other  and  more  flamboyantly  Irish 
writers  had  led  us  to  interpret  the  word.  He 
was  more  Irish  than  the  rest  because  he  was 
simply  an  Irishman  whose  fundamental  habits 
of  life  were  settled  in  his  own  country,  while 
his  intellectual  and  spiritual  interests,  like  those 
of  any  intellectual  and  spiritual  man,  searched 
the  world  for  their  nourishment  and  brought  it 
back,  when  found,  to  Ireland  to  consume.  His 
was,  on  one  side  at  least,  a  literary  Sinn  Feinism, 
not  by  deliberate  adoption  but  by  nature.  He 
exalted  Ireland,1  not  by  denouncing  England  but 
by  taking  no  particular  notice  of  her.  He  did  not 
carry  into  literature  the  cheerful  Sinn  Fein  pre- 
scription: "Burn  everything  English,  except 
coal."  I  have  never  heard  that  he  organized 
bonfires  of  the  works  of  the  English  mystical 
writers  on  College  Green.  But  he  has  never 
sought  particularly  to  influence  the  English  pub- 
lic or  to  capture  English  opinion.  He  is,  one 
has  always  felt  without  being  able  to  demon- 
strate the  feeling  very  clearly,  an  Irish  writer 
who  would  be  just  as  much  and  as  little  affected 
if  he  were  told  that  he  was  read  and  admired 
in  England,  as  I  should  be  if  I  happened  to 
be  told  that  I  was  read  and  admired  in  Norway. 


190 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


All  this  leads  up  to  the  remark  that  I  have 
on  my  table  at  the  moment  some  ten  or  fifteen 
books  which  have  arrived  there  during  the  last 
two  months  or  so  and  almost  all  of  which  clearly 
have  their  origin  in  a  centre  of  literature  and 
thought  quite  independent  of  the  influence  of 
London.  There  never  has  been,  since  the  days 
of  Byron's  "Scotch  Reviewers,"  any  real  decen- 
tralization in  English  literature,  such  as  can  be 
found  in  Germany.  The  last  word  on  every 
topic  is  said  in  London;  and  though  the  provin- 
cial repertory  theatres  have  attempted  some  de- 
centralization in  the  drama,  their  effort  flickers 
unsteadily  and  has  not  yet  produced  many  results 
of  enduring  value.  But  Dublin  does  pour  out 
a  stream  of  books  in  an  attitude  which  seems 
to  proclaim  indifference  to  the  opinion  of  Lon- 
don; and  this  is  all  to  the  good,  even  if  it  does 
no  more  than  administer  a  healthy  shock  to 
English  criticism.  I  have  here  now  two  vol- 
umes of  the  collected  works  of  Padraic  H.  Pearse, 
who  was  executed  for  his  part  in  the  Easter 
insurrection,  three  volumes  of  sketches  and  sto- 
ries, two  volumes  of  literary  studies,  a  narrative 
poem,  two  or  three  plays,  a  study  of  the  career 
of  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde,  and  a  number  of  miscel- 
laneous books,  such  as  an  account  by  Pearse  of 
the  methods  adopted  in  the  Irish  school,  "Sgoil 
Eanna,"  of  which  he  was  headmaster. 

These  are  signs  of  the  times;  but,  of  course, 
the  times  bristle  with  signs.  It  is  a  curiously 
significant  fact,  for  example,  that  the  collected 
works  of  Padraic  Pearse,  whom  we  shot  as  a 
rebel  less  than  two  years  ago,  have  been  reviewed 
in  the  English  press  generally  with  respect,  gen- 
tleness, and  even  appreciation.  I  do  not  mean 
merely  in  the  Liberal  and  advanced  papers. 
This  curious  portent — meaning  whatever  it  may 
mean — has  been  observed  in  columns  of  the 
"Times."  Yet  Pearse  was  a  man  who  sincerely 
detested  England,  if  any  Irishman  ever  did.  I 
do  not  pretend  to  offer  any  exact  interpretation 
of  this  phenomenon,  though  I  may  be  excused 
for  believing  that  its  significance  is  of  something 
entirely  creditable  to  us.  One  does  not  feel 
inclined  to  do  more  than  call  attention  to  it. 

Pearse's  works,  of  course,  were  mainly  written 
in  Irish  and  have  been  translated,  some  by  his 
own  and  some  by  another  hand,  for  the  present 
edition.  They  are  naturally  somewhat  foreign 
in  flavor  and,  by  reason  of  the  ruling  passion 
of  Pearse's  life,  markedly  Irish  in  sentiment. 
Apart  from  this,  his  translations  of  his  own 
poems  are  often  beautiful  and  characteristic,  as 
in  "A  Woman  of  the  Mountain  Keens  her  Son" : 


Grief  on  the  death,  it  has  blackened  my  heart: 
It  has  snatched  my  love  and  left  me  desolate, 
Without  friend  or  companion  under  the  roof  of  my 

house 
But  this  sorrow  in  the  midst  of  me,  and  I  keening. 

As  I  walked  the  mountain  in  the  evening 
The  birds   spoke  to   me  sorrowfully, 
The  sweet  snipe  spoke  and  the  voiceful  curlew 
Relating  to  me  that  my  darling  was  dead. 

I  called  to  you  and  your  voice  I  heard  not, 

I  called  again  and  I  got  no  answer, 

I  kissed  your  mouth,  and  O  God  how  cold  it  was! 

Ah,  cold  is  your  bed  in  the  lonely  churchyard. 

O  green-sodded  grave   in  which  my  child   is, 
Little  narrow  grave,  since  you  are  his  bed, 
My  blessing  on  you,  and  thousands  of  blessings 
On  the  green  sods  that  are  over  my  treasure. 

Grief  on  the  death,  it  cannot  be  denied, 
It   lays   low   green    and   withered   together — 
And  O  gentle  little  son,  what  tortures  me  is 
That  your  fair  body  should  be  making  clay! 

This  bears  marks  of  a  somewhat  alien  sentiment, 
which,  in  the  hands  of  Pearse,  almost  takes  on 
an  anti-English  tone.  Yet,  putting  my  hand 
into  the  heap  at  random,  I  can  find  nothing  par- 
ticularly exotic  or  propagandist  in  Mr.  Seumas 
O'Sullivan's  "Mud  and  Purple,"  a  volume  of  de- 
scriptions of  Dublin  scenes  and  persons,  or  in  Mr. 
E.  A.  Boyd's  "Appreciations  and  Depreciations," 
studies  of  modern  Irish  writers,  or  in  Mr. 
Austin  Clarke's  "Vengeance  of  Fionn,"  a  beau- 
tiful narrative  poem.  I  do  find  evidence  of 
a  new  centre  of  thought  and  literature — a  pro- 
vincial centre,  if  you  will,  but  still  a  centre. 
And  I  cannot  but  think  that  we  shall  all  profit 

"y  **•  EDWARD  SHANKS. 

London,  February  II,  igi8. 


Haven 


Under  these  moving  tides  that  pass  us  by, 
Or  snatch  us  into  maelstroms  of  profound 
Oblivion    where    a    thousand    dreams    have 
drowned, 

Forgotten  of  all  ports  beneath  the  sky; 

Under  these  waters,  throated  with  a  cry 
Of  old  disaster,  runs  a  deeper  sound — 
Music  the  slimed,  uncrypted  dead  have  found 

In  hushed,  moon-haunted  chasms  where  they  lie. 

Horns  have  been  wound  in  silence.    From  the  far 
Black  forests  of  the  sea  the  shadows  glide 
Sunward;   nor  shall   the  wrath   of   storm 

prevail 

Against  their  keels,  or  night  withhold  a  star.  .  . 
In  many  a  bay  the  white  armadas  ride, 

And  winds  return  to  many  a  straining  sail. 
LESLIE  NELSON  JENNINGS. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


191 


Art  in  Victorian  Suburbia 


THOMAS    WOOLNER,    R.A.,   SCULPTOR    AND    POET. 

His  Life  in   Letters.     By  Amy  Woolner.     Dut- 

ton;  $6. 

Not  in  his  own  letters,  altogether,  but  chiefly 
in  the  letters  written  to  him  by  his  greater  con- 
temporaries; and  not  the  best  letters  that  they 
wrote,  but  in  casual,  usually  trivial  notes  whose 
only  interest  is  in  the  signatures.  Truly  a  sec- 
ond-hand manner  of  biography,  that  inevitably 
gives  the  effect  of  a  pallid,  second-hand  existence. 
Yet  one  suspects  that  this  is  exactly  what  passed 
for  life  in  the  circles  which  Woolner  orna- 
mented, and  among  the  contemporaries  whose 
faces  and  figures  he  earnestly  copied  in  marble 
and  bronze. 

Woolner  emerged  from  obscurity  through  the 
Pre-Raphaelite  Movement.  The  best  letters  in 
the  present  volume  were  written  to  him  by  Ros- 
setti,  and  it  may  be  inferred  that  the  most  vivid 
and  imaginative  experience  of  life  came  to  him 
through  his  association  with  the  Brotherhood — 
inferred  only,  for  his  own  testimony  is  lacking. 
A  disappointment  in  a  competition  for  a  Words- 
worth monument  led  him  to  turn  to  gold  seek- 
ing in  Australia,  and  his  own  chief  contribution 
to  his  "Life"  is  a  rather  dull  chronicle  of  voy- 
aging, trekking,  and  digging.  Emigration  was 
represented  as  a  cure  for  all  forms  of  personal 
disappointment  and  discontent  in  the  diluted 
post-Byronism  of  the  fifties  (vide  "Locksley 
Hall,"  "The  Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich,"  and 
"Alton  Locke").  Woolner  turned  from  unsuc- 
cessful gold  digging  to  successful  commercial 
work  in  Sydney  and  Melbourne. 

After  his  return  we  hear  little  of  Pre-Raphael- 
itism  and  artistic  revolt.  He  connected  himself 
with  his  more  eminent  contemporaries  and 
became  the  official  sculptor  of  a  generation 
whose  standard  of  portrait  art  was  a  good  like- 
ness. He  did  Tennyson,  Carlyle,  Palgrave, 
Maurice,  Cobden,  Gladstone,  Newman,  Palmer- 
stone,  Darwin,  Archdeacon  Hare,  and  Queen 
Victoria.  A  grave  in  Westminster  Abbey  almost 
cried  out  for  a  statue,  bust,  or  medallion  by 
Woolner.  It  is  the  rather  external  or  official 
relation  to  his  age  of  Woolner  the  portraitist 
and  mortuary  artist,  which  the  letters  chiefly 
commemorate. 

Yet  there  is  something  curiously  monumental 
about  the  book  and,  one  might  almost  say,  sig- 
nificant. There  are  the  middle-aged  Victorians 
all  at  play.  A  little  wooden  they  are,  like  the 
figures  in  a  child's  Noah's  Ark — and  one  is 
reminded  that  the  well-behaved  animals  went  in 


two  by  two,  for  many  of  the  letters  are  by  wives 
of  famous  subjects  who  were  too  busy  to  write 
for  themselves  and  make  arrangements  for  "sit- 
tings." Lady  Tennyson,  Mrs.  Carlyle,  Mrs. 
Gladstone,  Mrs.  Froude  take  pen  in  hand  more 
often  than  their  husbands.  It  is  a  very  monoga- 
mous book;  and  when  Woolner,  after  a  really 
lovely  bachelorhood,  took  to  himself  as  wife  the 
beautiful  Miss  Waugh,  the  triumphant  flutter 
among  the  matrons  was  considerable. 

The  book  brings  out  the  essentially  suburban 
quality  of  society  among  the  Victorians.  They 
are  like  people  who  live  on  the  same  street,  and 
are  good  neighbors,  thinking  well  of  one  another, 
cordial,  jocular,  sympathetic.  Everybody  liked 
to  hear  Tennyson  read  his  poetry,  and  we  find 
Woolner,  from  a  safe  distance,  murmuring  of 
"Merlin":  "How  I  wish  I  could  hear  it;  I 
quite  envy  those  fortunates  who  have."  Mrs. 
Tennyson  is  delighted  to  hear  that  Kenyon  left 
a  good  deal  of  money  to  the  Brownings  but,  with 
regret  for  an  emotional  extravagance,  confesses, 
"I  thought  the  Brownings  had  been  poor,  or  I 
should  not  so  much  have  rejoiced  over  their 
acquisition  of  money."  Woolner  stoutly  approves 
of  Browning's  scorn  of  those  who  would  curry  fa- 
vor with  him  by  running  down  Tennyson.  There 
is  a  kindly  bit  of  gossip  about  Mrs.  Browning's 
bribing  the  butler  in  her  old  home  to  leave  the 
blind  up  a  little  so  that  she  might  get  a  last 
glimpse  of  her  unforgiving  father.  One  readily 
divines  which  of  the  group  were  good  neighbors. 
Edward  Lear,  with  his  pattering  drivel  of  baby 
talk,  was  a  general  favorite.  Matthew  Arnold, 
one  fears,  was  a  trifle  remote.  Woolner  writes 
Mrs.  Tennyson  that  Arnold  "made  kind  inquir- 
ies after  you,  who  seem  to  have  taken  his  fancy 
exceedingly.  He  was  a  regular  swell,  in  bril- 
liant white  kid  gloves,  glittering  boots,  and  cos- 
tume cut  in  most  perfect  fashion."  Yet  even 
this  overpowering  distinction  made  someone 
happy,  for  "he  had  a  long  talk  with  Patmore, 
whose  countenance  the  whole  time  beamed  radi- 
ant joy  with  the  satisfaction  of  holding  inter- 
course with  such  a  high  Oxford  don."  Ruskin 
was  loathed.  There  is  positive  malice  in  Wool- 
ner's  note  that  "Ruskin  praised  some  of  the 
worst  pictures  in  the  place;  he  has  made  such 
an  obvious  mess  of  it  this  year  that  his  enemies 
are  dancing  for  delight.  .  .  The  little  despot 
imagines  himself  the  Pope  of  Art  and  would 
wear  3  crowns  as  a  right,  only  they  would  make 
him  look  funny  in  London." 

There  is  very  little  about  art  in  the  book — 
fortunately,  for  it  would  have  been  painful. 


192 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


Lady  Tennyson  suggests  a  slight  improvement  ' 
in  the  medallion  of  her  husband — "the  scraping 
away  of  a  little  of  the  nose  underneath  the  nos- 
tril all  along  to  the  point  so  as  to  shorten  the 
nose  a  wee  bit ;  if  this  would  not  bother  you  and 
if  you  think  it  right."  Woolner  responds  with 
equal  suavity:  "I  have  always  taken  your  hints 
but  in  one  instance,  and  now  find  I  was  wrong 
in  not  doing  so:  I  refer  to  making  the  right 
jaw  of  the  bust  a  trifle  thicker  as  you  wished, 
and  I  did  not  see."  Perhaps  the  ,gem  of  art 
criticism  is  supplied  by  Lady  Hooker.  The  com- 
munity was  justly  incensed  at  the  shocking  acci- 
dent to  Woolner's  bust  of  Sir  William  Hooker, 
which  had  its  nose  knocked  off  on  its  arrival 
at  the  exhibition  of  the  Royal  Academy,  and 
disgusted  when  that  august  body  showed  no  wil- 
lingness to  pay  for  .the  damaged  masterpiece. 
Lady  Hooker  suggested  that  Woolner  should 
exhibit  the  bust  anyway,  and  adds  the  com- 
forting suggestion  that  "the  Elgin  marbles  have 
well  accustomed  spectators  to  this  special  deform- 
ity, so  that  the  loss  of  a  nose  no  longer  looks 
grotesque,  but  a  mark  of  the  real  antique." 
Darwin  would  indeed  make  art  the  handmaid\ 
of  science.  He  turns  to  Woolner,  as  one  to 
whom  certain  matters  are  all  in  the  day's  work, 
to  inquire  how  low  down  an  experienced  model 
will  blush.  He  notes  the  assertion  that  a  "cele- 
brated French  painter  once  saw  a  new  model 
blushing  all  over  her  body"  but,  distrusting  the 
Gallic  verve  of  this  observation,  he  demands  the 
experience  of  "cautious  and  careful  English 
artists."  We  are  sure  that  all  Woolner's  artist 
friends  were  "cautious  and  careful." 

There  is  but  one  touch  of  wholesome  vulgar- 
ity in  this  chronicle  of  Cranford.  Mrs.  Carlyle 
writes  to  Woolner  one  day  that  they  had  two 
tickets  for  Charles  Dickens's  reading,  that  she 
could  not  go,  and  would  he  take  the  vacant  seat 
beside  Mr.  Carlyle?  He  would  be  most  happy. 
Carlyle,  to  do  the  thing  in  style,  took  him  in  a 
cab.  The  reading  was  two  hours,  with  a  ten 
minute  pause  during  which  the  two  unregener- 
ate  males  went  behind  the  scenes  and  had  a 
drink  with  the  entertainer — brandy  and  water. 
"Each  poured  out  a  portion  for  himself  and  Car- 
lyle took  his  glass  and  nodding  to  Dickens  said: 
'Charley,  you  carry — whole  company  of  actors 
under  your  own  hat.'  "  Just  for  a  moment  we 
are  in  a  real  world  with  human  beings — then 
back  again  among  the  frustrate  but  so  courteous 
and  gentle  ghosts  who  owed  their  substance  to 
Woolner's  marble.  Perhaps  that  is  why  they 
adored  him.  ROBERT  MORSS  LOVETT. 


God  as  Visible  "Personality 

GOD  THE  KNOWN  AND  GOD  THE  UNKNOWN.    By 
Samuel  Butler.     Yale  University  Press;  $1.00. 

Whatever  in  the  spiritual  life  of  man  has  the 
highest  potency  for  him,  according  to  tem- 
perament or  level  of  consciousness  attained,  what- 
ever aspect  of  experience  is  felt  to  open  the 
portals  to  the  loftiest  flights  of  creative  imag- 
ination, is  very  apt  to  be  projected  into  his 
God.  The  essence  of  God  is  sought  in  those 
concepts  that  liberate  the  caged  self  and  make 
it  supreme  in  its  own  world  of  chosen  goods. 
God  is  thus  the  impersonation  or  source  of  magic, 
of  power,  of  immortality,  of  truth,  of  art,  of 
morality,  of  ecstatic  vision,  of  annihilation.  All 
gods,  at  any  rate  all  useful  gods,  are  anthropo- 
morphic; in  so  far  as  the  gods  of  theological  and 
philosophical  speculation  escape  the  human  mould, 
they  reduce  to  purely  verbal  formulae.  The 
Jesus  of  Christian  myth  has  intense  vitality  as 
a  symbol  of  human  aspiration,  of  triumph  in 
degradation;  the  Holy  Ghost  can  found  no  cult. 

The  God  of  Samuel  Butler  is  no  exception  to 
the  rule.  He  possesses  the  attributes  of  his  cre- 
ator and  incorporates  his  strongest  aspirations. 
I  had  come  to  Butler's  essay  fresh  from  "The 
Note  Books,"  that  curious  congeries  of  brilliant 
epigrams,  dead-ridden  hobbies,  far-fetched  analo- 
gies, and  penetrating  analyses;  hence  I  could  not 
fail  to  observe  the  impress  of  Butler's  person- 
ality, as  revealed  by  himself  in  these  notes,  on 
his  theological  speculations.  Butler  was  a  man 
of  a  very  definite,  though  not  easily  definable, 
cast  of  mind,  possessed  of  very  clear-cut  likes  and 
dislikes,  and  fond  of  hugging  certain  thoughts, 
attitudes,  and  modes  of  reasoning  with  a  per- 
sistency that  is  occasionally  trying  to  the  reader, 
but  indicative  at  the  same  time  of  their  high 
emotional  value  for  Butler.  Some  of  the  sug- 
gestive traits  revealed  in  "The  Note  Books"  are 
a  pragmatic  attitude  towards  truth  that  must 
have  seemed  paradoxical  to  his  contemporaries 
(in  one  passage  Butler  directly  states  that  that 
is  true  which  it  is  most  "convenient"  to  believe)  ; 
a  strong  disinclination  to  take  account  of  any 
factors  not  directly  yielded  by  experience;  a  dis- 
trust of  all  arguments  pushed  to  their  logical 
extreme;  a  well-nigh  amazing  reliance  on  evi- 
dence from  analogy  (as  Butler  characteristically 
puts  it,  analogy  is  poor  ground  for  an  argument 
but  it  is  the  best  we  have) ;  and,  probably  most 
deep-rooted  of  all,  a  habit  of  bridging  all  sorts 
of  opposites,  which  Butler's  ingrained  love  of 
antithesis  of  expression  leads  him  to  contemplate 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


193 


with  genuine  interest,  into  a  continuum,  so  that 
all  life  is  seen  to  harbor  death  and  no  death 
to  be  altogether  lifeless,  all  mind  to  be  associated 
with  matter  and  no  form  of  matter  to  be  alto- 
gether mindless — in  short,  A  to  include  some- 
thing of  Z  and  Z  something  of  A.  One  may, 
indeed,  suspect  the  last  two  of  these  traits  to 
have  had  over  Butler  something  of  the  tyran- 
nical sway  of  compulsive  thought-habits.  Surely 
not  a  little  in  his  theories  and  fancies  is  attrib- 
utable to  them. 

Through  Butler's  work  runs,  further,  an  ear- 
nest, quietly  passionate,  longing  for  eventual 
recognition,  a  longing  now  rising  to  calm  assur- 
ance, now  masking  itself  in  a  philosophic  humor 
of  indifference  that  was  but  half  insincere.  For 
the  catchpenny  recognition  of  the  passing  hour 
he  had  a  genuine  scorn,  though  the  note  of  wist- 
ful regret  is  not  absent  from  his  contemplation 
of  the  relative  failure  to  achieve  literary  fame 
-that  was  his  lot.  Few  men  have  had  such  con- 
fidence in  the  morrow  succeeding  to  the  day  of 
personal  identity,  few  have  had^such  an  abiding 
sense  of  the  reality  of  the  unity,  biological  and 
spiritual,  which  binds  the  generations  inextrica- 
bly together.  The  sense  of  a  personality  of  flesh 
and  spirit  transcending  that  of  individual  con- 
sciousness is,  indeed,  the  keynote  to  much  of 
Butler's  thinking.  It  is  at  the  heart  of  his  evo- 
lutionary speculations,  with  his  curious  identifi- 
cation of  memory  and  heredity,  as  it,  in  a  meas- 
ure, also  pervades  his  masterpiece,  "The  Way 
of  All  Flesh,"  a  novel  of  four  generations.  Per- 
manence of  a  something  which,  in  the  midst  of 
endless  dissolutions,  unfolds  towards  an  unknown 
goal — the  concept  is  rarely  absent  from  Butler's 
thoughts,  it  takes  shape  in  innumerable  forms. 
Between  the  personal  fame  for  which  he  longed 
and  the  complete  submergence  of  self  in  a  spir- 
itual humus  affording  nourishment  to  those  that 
follow,  Butler  found  no  true  opposition.  Life, 
organic  and  psychic,  is  merely  the  endlessly  rami- 
fied career*  of  a  single  personality. 

This  brings  us  face  to  face  with  Butler's  con- 
ception of  God.  His  God  will,  above  all  things, 
be  one  that  we  can  most  "conveniently"  believe 
in  as  doing  least  violence  to  our  daily  habits  of 
thought  and  most  readily  following  as  a  synthe- 
sis of  actual  experience.  There  will  be  noth- 
ing mystical  about  him,  nothing  that  baffles  the 
understanding.  He  will  be  a  modest  God,  a 
God  in  man's  own  image,  and  he  will  no  more 
hold  in  his  hands  the  key  to  the  riddle  of  exist- 
ence than  does  the  least  of  his  creatures. 


Nor  will  he  hold  himself  austerely  aloof  in  a 
divine  empyrean  whence  issue  strange  fulmina- 
tions  and  prescriptions;  he  will  be  our  veriest 
neighbor,  squatting  on  our  own  domain.  He 
will,  like  any  phenomenon,  be  content  to  fit  him- 
self into  the  analogical  scheme  of  things.  And 
he  will  be  as  everlasting  as  life  itself,  no  more 
and  no  less. 

In  short,  Butler's  God  is  identical  with  that 
ramified  but  single  personality  that  evolution 
knows,  whose  being  is  the  totality  of  life.  He 
is  the  sum  total  and  synthesis  of  all  manifesta- 
tions of  life,  animal  and  vegetable.  To  be  more 
exact,  he  is  the  personalized  energy  or  principle 
that  resides  and  has,  for  untold  aeons,  resided  in 
living  matter  and  mind — for  the  two  are  insep- 
arable. The  single  cell  of  the  animal  organism 
is  a  perfect  and  self-sufficient  life  unit  or  per- 
sonality, unaware,  or  but  dimly  aware,  of  the 
larger  wliole  of  which  it  forms  a  part,  yet  exist- 
ing only  for  the  sake  of  that  *whole.  In  pre- 
cisely the  same  manner,  argues  Butler,  each  indi- 
vidual in  the  great  sum  of  animated  nature,  plant 
or  animal  orjiuman  being,  is  a  life  unit  or  per- 
sonality that  is  unaware,  or  but  dimly  aware, 
of  the  vast  personality  or  God  of  which  it  forms 
an  infinitesimal  fragment  and  which,  we  may 
believe,  possesses  a  consciousness  transcending 
ours  as  this  transcends  the  consciousness  of  the 
single  cell.  Cell,  organism,  God — these  form 
"three  great  concentric  phases  of  life."  The  vast 
personality  indwelling  in  life  is  the  known  God. 
Whether  or  not  there  Hs  a  fourth  concentric 
phase,  an  unknown  God,  embracing  a  multitude 
of  Gods  analogous  to  the  only  one  we  have  direct 
knowledge  of,  it  is  useless  to  speculate.  As  the 
cell  knows  not  our  God,  so  we  cannot  be  ex- 
pected to  know  a  super-God.  Butler's  theology 
leads  to  no  metaphysical  solutions  of  ultimate 
problems. 

This  conception  of  God  differs  radically  not 
only  from  that  of  orthodox  theism  but  from  the 
all-inclusive  God  of  the  pantheists.  Both  of 
these  lack  the  fundamental  essential  of  an  intel- 
ligible God — personality.  Nevertheless  it  is  easy 
to  perceive  that  Butler's  conception  lends  itself 
to  a  readier  approximation  to  the  pantheistic  God 
than  to  the  sovereign  God  of  religion.  In  the 
present  work  Butler  is  at  considerable  pains  to 
dismiss  the  pantheistic  conception  as  unthinkable ; 
yet  we  learn  from  his  editor's  note  to  the  chap- 
ter on  "The  Tree  of  Life"  that  the  separation 
of  the  organic  from  the  inorganic,  which  is  at 
the  basis  of  Butler's  thesis,  was  later  abandoned 


194 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


by  him  and  that  he  felt  impelled,  in  consequence, 
to  reconstruct  his  essay.  This  work  however 
he  left  undone.  It  is  difficult  to  see  how  Butler 
could  in  the  end  have  avoided  the  pantheism 
he  had  opposed.  It  would  have  had  to  be,  need- 
less to  say,  a  pantheism  arrived  at  by  a  series  of 
concentric  phases  of  some  sort  of  evolutionary 
process. 

In  his  critical  study  on  Samuel  Butler  Mr. 
Gilbert  Cannan  somewhat  petulantly  remarks: 
"I  cannot  believe  in  his  God,  simply  because  he 
does  not  write  about  his  God  with  style.  He 
writes  not  as  one  passionately  believing,  but  as 
one  desirous  of  accounting  for  a  phenomenon, 
in  this  instance  faith.  Since  there  is  faith  there 
must  be  God,  panpsychic."  This  is  not  alto- 
gether fair.  There  are  not  a  few  passages  in 
Butler's  little  book  where  the  dialectic  flames 
into  imaginative  diction.  Moreover  his  God 
embodies,  in  the  only  way  possible  for  Butler, 
his  desire  for  spiritual  perpetuation.  Yet,  on  the 
whole,  there  is  small  doubt  that  the  quest  of 
God  had  not  the  burning  necessity  for  Butler's 
ironical  and  eminently  level-headed  tempera- 
ment that  it  has  for  certain  other  natures.  Mr. 
Cannan  could  hardly  have  expected  him  to  write 
of  God  with  the  passionate  conviction  and  the 
love  that  are  due  His  especially  favored  mani- 
festation, Handel.  EDWARD  SAPIR. 


Background  Jf^ithout  Tradition 

A  SON  OF  THE  MIDDLE  BORDER.    By  Hamlin  Gar- 
land.    Macmillan;  $1.60. 

Mr.  Garland,  in  this  story  of  his  own  life, 
seems  hardly  to  be  writing  a  confession,  unless  it 
be  a  confession — or  rather  avowal — of  faith.  He 
does  not  read  like  a  man  who  has  anything  to 
recant  or  even  abate;  he  lays  down  his  cards 
very  assuredly;  he  gives  the  reader,  without  re- 
serve, not  a  finished  and  consequently  more  or 
less  inscrutable  product,  but  himself  the  artist, 
together  with  the  material  of  his  art.  He  pre- 
sents the  Middle  Border  with  both  vivid  par- 
ticularization  and  panoramic  completeness  of 
view ;  he  has  a  filially  sensitive  eye  for  the  menace 
and  rigor  of  the  frontier  as  well  as  for  its  splen- 
dor and  charm.  He  sets  himself  before  the 
reader  with  detachment — the  actual  detachment 
of  time,  for  he  stops  his  narrative  at  his  thirty- 
first  or  thirty-second  year.  The  picture  is  a  large 
and  broad  one,  occasionally  too  sardonic  in  its 
fidelity  to  fact. 


Mr.  Garland  is  inevitably,  of  course,  the  his- 
torian of  his  own  consciousness,  so  far  as  he  can 
call  back  the  materials  of  it;  and  he  recovers 
even  from  the  dimness  of  his  fourth  year  the 
memory  of  a  midsummer  evening  and  the  rescue 
by  his  mother  of  a  "poor,  shrieking  little  tree 
toad"  from  the  jaws  of  a  long  and  wicked 
snake.  The  finer,  certainly  the  more  pleasing, 
parts  of  this  history  are  those  devoted  to  childish 
and  boyish  impressions;  these  memories  are  "of 
the  fibre  of  poetry,"  unshadowed  by  the  preoccu- 
pation which  clings  too  closely  to  the  author's 
mature  consciousness — the  preoccupation  of  the 
"man  who  has  been  there,"  the  "competent  wit- 
ness," who  is  determined  to  set  forth  the  "en- 
forced misery  of  the  pioneer."  The  prairie  land- 
scapes, "the  radiant  slopes  of  grass,"  "the  brant 
and  geese  pushing  their  arrowy  lines  straight  into 
the  north,"  "the  cloudless,  glorious  Maytime 
skies,"  "transcendent  sunsets,"  "the  fields  that 
run  to  the  world's  end,"  "the  fairy  forest"  of 
the  wheat — all  the  fair  things  of  nature  are 
inimitably  done.  And  there  are  numberless  brief 
but  adequate  etchings  of  childhood:  rich  harvests 
of  nuts  and  berries,  bold  explorations  of  the  wil- 
derness, breathless  climbing  of  tall  trees  for 
grapes,  the  soldier  pride  of  standing  sentinel  over 
new  sown  grain  to  guard  it  from  wild  pigeons. 
Whenever  he  speaks  of  these  things,  Mr.  Gar- 
land's voice  carries  with  the  excellent  timbre  of 
romance. 

But  the  convictions  of  the  "man  who  has  been 
there"  assert  themselves  apace.  Even  his  mem- 
ories of  "the  twelve  year  old  son  of  a  Western 
farmer"  frequently  become  memories  of  unre- 
mitting toil  and  desperate  fatigue;  and  he  speaks 
emphatically  of  his  seventeen  year  old  bitterness 
when  his  family  moved  from  town  back  into  the 
country.  The  farm  even  then  had  become  to 
him  the  synonym  for  loneliness,  dirt,  and  drudg- 
ery. That  note  in  his  theme  continually  gathers 
burden  as  he  proceeds;  avowedly  it  becomes  his 
theme ;  it  is  clearly  the  source  of  the  emotionaliza- 
tion  not  only  of  this  but  of  all  his  work.  His 
friends  apparently  found  it  necessary  to  warn  him 
against  the  violence  of  his  truth-telling;  and  the 
reader  of  this  autobiography  and  of  much  of  his 
other  work  will  probably  say  that  they  advised 
him  well,  for  while  his  art  has  become  neither 
satire  nor  caricature,  it  smells  of  vengeance.  In- 
deed from  this  admirable  picture,  both  panoramic 
and  detailed,  which  the  author  spreads  out,  the 
reader  derives  the  contradictory  impressions  not 
only  of  the  splendor  and  poetic  suggestion  of  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


195 


frontier  itself,  but  also  of  the  wretchedness,  the 
pain,  the  futile  inadequacy  of  life  on  the  frontier. 
One  cannot,  however,  infer  from  this  wretched- 
ness and  inadequacy  any  inferiority  in  the  indi- 
viduals who  lead  such  wretched  lives;  these 
pioneers  may  be  more  or  less  unlettered,  but  there 
can  be  no  dispute  as  to  the  rugged  power  of  the 
men  or  the  strength  and  beauty  of  the  women. 
It  is  the  corrosive  monotony,  the  loneliness,  the 
blank  unending  labor,  the  bleak  conditions  of 
life  that  so  preoccupy  the  author's  mind.  And 
perhaps  the  unsuspected  element  which,  for  the 
purposes  of  art,  makes  this  wretchedness  doubly 
tawdry,  is  the  fact  that  it  is  raw  and  new ;  it  has 
no  tradition;  it  is  unhistoric.  In  England  it 
might  have  had  the  impressiveness  of  prescription 
—might  have  been  the  material  of  such  a  mel- 
ancholy as  Thomas  Hardy's;  even  in  New  Eng- 
land much  might  have  been  done  in  Puritan  dark 
gray ;  but  in  Dakota  it  seems  to  have  been,  to  the 
artist  whose  inheritance  it  is,  chiefly  the  material 
of  exasperation.  He  explains  its  existence  not 
by  any  splendid  and  gloomy  conception  of  a  Blind 
Power  in  whose  grip  humanity  is  helpless,  but 
rather  prosaically  as  the  result  of  social  injustice, 
of  institutions  not  founded  in  accordance  with 
the  principle  of  the  single  tax. 

One  may  well  wonder  if  this  result  is  not 
unfortunate.  Has  it  not  partially  impaired  the 
artist's  perception  of  the  dignity  and  antiquity 
of  his  material?  Human  tribulation  is  an  old 
and  impressive  story.  Has  his  emotionalization 
of  the  frontier  not  been  crowded  down  to  a  lower 
level  than  it  might  otherwise  have  attained  ?  Has 
not  the  determined  actualism  which  Mr.  Garland 
here  so  sternly  reasserts,  really  been  the  refuge  in 
adversity  of  a  strongly  romantic  talent,  a  talent 
thwarted  by  the  barrenness  of  its  material? 

C.  K.  TRUEBLOOD. 


Yet  Once  More,  0  Ye  Laurels! 

ANTHOLOGY  OF  MAGAZINE  VERSE:   1917.    William 
Stanley  Braithwaite.     Small,  Maynard ;  $2.50. 

"All  the  glamour  about  our  present  Renais- 
sance of  poetry,"  says  Mr.  Braithwaite  in  the 
introduction  to  his  latest  anthology,  "carries  with 
it  a  palpable  danger,  the  danger  of  disintegrating 
criticism.  .  .  If  the  public  heeds  such  criti- 
cism, audiences  will  diminish,  and  the  consequent 
discouragement  of  the  poets  themselves  will  pro- 
duce a  decline  in  creativeness.  .  .  Fame  and 
fortune  for  the  modern  poet  are  the  gifts  of 


public  recognition  and  appreciation,  and  if  these 
do  not  come  before  youth  advances  to  that  vague 
borderland  where  it  is  lost,  the  modern  poet 
gives  the  best  of  himself  to  other  things.  .  ." 
At  first  glance  this  position — assumed  by  Mr. 
Braithwaite  as  it  has  been  assumed  also,  with 
differences,  by  Miss  Monroe,  editor  of  "Poetry" 
— appears  reasonable  enough.  No  one  will  for 
a  moment  question  the  desirability  of  a  large 
audience  for  poetry,  as  for  any  art,  nor  the  use- 
fulness, to  that  end,  of  extensive  publicity.  But 
if  we  examine  the  doctrine  more  deliberately,  we 
see  certain  flaws  of  logic  in  it.  We  all  agree 
with  Mr.  Braithwaite  that  everything  possible 
should  be  done  to  encourage  the  art  of  poetry 
in  America — we  all  desire  to  see  it  developed  to 
the  highest  degree  of  excellence.  But  many  of 
us,  as  Mr.  Braithwaite  intimates  in  the  paragraph 
quoted  above,  are  beginning  to  doubt  whether  he 
has  hit  upon  the  best  method  for  bringing  this 
about.  Mr.  Braithwaite's  method,  as  is  now 
well  known,  is  a  simple  one.  It  consists  in  carry- 
ing individual  recognition  for  the  poet  to  such 
a  universal  degree — trawling,  so  to  speak,  with 
so  vast  a  net — that  no  poet  can  conceivably  be 
lost.  For  the  poet  whose  work  is  not  represented 
in  the  "Anthology,"  and  whose  book  is  not  en- 
thusiastically reviewed  either  there  or  in  the 
"Boston  Transcript,"  one  would  have  to  go  far 
indeed.  To  find  such  poets  in  any  quantity,  one 
would  have  to  look  among  the  very  poorest  of 
books  published  at  the  author's  own  expense. 
Now  if  by  practicing  this  method  Mr.  Braith- 
waite aims  at  making  fame  and  fortune  for  his 
poets  (and  incidentally,  we  may  properly  assume, 
at  helping  poetry  to  evolve  to  an  always  clearer 
excellence)  we  may  at  once  question  whether 
he  does  not  in  reality  sharply  defeat  both  of  his 
purposes.  Among  all  artists  there  has  always 
been  and  always  will  be  a  merciless  struggle, 
silent,  unconscious,  uncalculated,  for  the  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest.  In  every  generation  there 
is  a  terrific  and  unremittent  competition  among 
them  for  recognition,  and  for  the  consequent  re- 
wards of  fame  or  money.  Unfortunately,  the 
judge  who  awards  the  prize  in  this  struggle  is 
that  most  capricious  and  indiscriminate  of  judges, 
the  public;  the  public,  which,  swayed  too  easily 
by  considerations  of  the  moment,  carried  away 
too  easily  by  its  common  denominators  of  sen- 
timentalism  and  conventionality,  from  genera- 
tion to  generation,  with  a  divine  inevitability, 
takes  to  its  bosom  the  ephemeral,  commonplace, 
and  merely  lusty;  the  cheerful  and  unreflecting 


196 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


public,  which,  left  to  itself,  and  many  times 
even  despite  the  desperate  efforts  of  the  intelli- 
gent few,  ignores  genius  and  permits  it  to  die. 
The  survival  of  the  best  in  literature  is  there- 
fore forever  dependent  on  the  efforts  of  these 
heroic  few.  Without  them  genius  would  be 
ignored,  or  largely  ignored,  during  its  lifetime, 
lost  in  the  blattering  welter  of  the  mediocre ;  and 
after  its  death  wholly  forgotten.  It  is  this  band 
of  aesthetic  pioneers,  relatively  small  in  every 
generation — this  band  of  the  fastidious,  the  aloof, 
the  difficult — which  awes  the  public  by  degrees 
first  into  accepting  its  discoveries,  later  into  un- 
derstanding them,  and  finally  into  loving  them. 
Nor  is  the  essential  reality  of  this  process  vitiated 
by  the  fact  that  the  public  is  itself  the  final  and 
absolute  arbiter  of  what  is  vital  and  what  is  not. 

In  these  circumstances,  it  should  be  obvious 
that  if  here  and  there  in  this  colossal  combat  an 
individual  desires  to  assist  the  best  in  its  struggle 
for  survival,  then  his  task  will  be  to  do,  con- 
sciously, what  nature  in  her  simpler  world  does 
unconsciously — to  discriminate.  Since,  in  the 
world  of  ideas,  the  law  of  natural  selection  works 
imperfectly  and  tardily,  and  encounters  the  sullen 
hostility  of  indifference  and  ignorance  and  char- 
latanism, he  must  help  to  make  it  work  more 
perfectly.  If  fortunate,  he  will  occasionally  find 
the  beautiful  and  subtle,  the  worthy-of-praise, 
and  for  this  he  will  do  all  in  his  power  to  secure 
honor  and  comprehension;  but  far  more  often 
will  he  find  himself  in  the  role  of  the  surgeon 
who  must  be  cruel  in  order  to  be  kind.  Benign 
cancers  are  common  in  the  body  literary,  and 
occupy  valuable  space;  and  the  malignant  can- 
cer is  not  rare.  The  intelligent  critic  must,  in 
other  words,  add  his  own  power  of  destruction 
to  the  fracas  and  destroy  ruthlessly,  secure  in  the 
knowledge  that  only  the  worthless  can  be  truly 
destroyed  and  that  only  the  fine  can  long  sur- 
vive. What  mistakes  he  makes  will  be  auto- 
matically undone.  A  Jeffrey  cannot  kill  a  Keats, 
nor  even  deflect  him.  Is  anyone  prepared  to 
maintain  that  Foe  was  too  severe  a  critic?  Yet 
there  have  been  few  severer.  Potentially  far 
more  dangerous  to  the  recurring  Keats  of  the 
literary  world  is  the  recurring  Leigh  Hunt,  the 
sort  of  Leigh  Hunt,  be  it  understood,  who  is 
more  given  to  praise  than  to  appraisal.  He,  truly, 
is  the  destroyer. 

It  is  to  this  category,  unfortunately,  that  Mr. 
Braithwaite  belongs,  and  it  is  to  this  tendency 
that  American  letters,  and  conspicuously  Amer- 
ican poetry,  seem  to  be  at  the  present  moment 
helplessly  surrendered.  Mr.  Braithwaite  comes 


among  us  preaching,  in  the  aesthetic  world,  what 
is  clearly  a  Christian  ethic,  a  doctrine  of  live 
and  let  live,  a  doctrine  which,  purporting  to 
aim  at  the  betterment  of  the  species,  flies  in  the 
face  of  nature,  since  it  encourages  the  weak  to 
propagate  as  freely  as  the  strong.  And  the  re- 
sult is  rapid  and  sure:  in  the  consequent  pullula- 
tion  of  mediocrity  the  excellent  is  lost  or  stifled. 
Conducted  on  this  principle,  the  world  of  let- 
ters will  suggest  nothing  so  much  as  a  forest 
in  which  the  growth  is  so  rank  that  few  of  the 
trees  can  attain  their  proper  stature;  and  if 
here  and  there  individuals  contrive  by  special 
endowment  to  out-top  the  rest,  it  will  be  literally 
true  that  we  shall  be  unable  to  see  the  tree  for 
the  forest. 

In  other  words,  to  speak  more  precisely  in 
terms  of  poetry,  Mr.  Braithwaite  by  awarding 
laurels  to  a  hundred  poets  indifferently  good, 
delays,  if  he  does  not  prevent,  the  emergence  of 
the  poets  who  partake  of  genius.  The  genius 
must  stand  in  line  while  Tom,  Dick,  and  Harry 
get  their  doles;  and  when  his  own  turn  comes, 
he  too  will  get  only  the  same  dole.  Where  then 
are  the  fame  and  fortune  which  Mr.  Braithwaite 
hopes  to  guarantee  him  ?  They  have,  alas,  ceased 
to  exist  except  in  fractions. 

Of  Mr.  Braithwaite's  actual  performance  in 
the  present  "Anthology"  not  much  need  be  said. 
It  is  more  copious  than  ever.  Here  and  there 
in  it  are  goodish  poems,  inevitably — "A  Bather," 
by  Amy  Lowell;  "To  My  Friend,"  by  Eunice 
Tietjens;  "The  Interpreter,"  by  Orrick  Johns; 
"A  Girl's  Songs,"  by  Mary  Carolyn  Davies; 
"Tomorrow  Is  My  Birthday,"  by  Edgar  Lee 
Masters;  "Return,"  by  Willard  Wattles;  "In 
Tall  Grass,"  by  Carl  Sandburg;  "The  Sons  of 
Metaneira,"  by  John  Erskine;  and  perhaps  a 
half  dozen  others — but  of  the  important  figures 
in  contemporary  poetry  what  ones  are  not  hope- 
lessly obscured  here?  Mr.  Frost,  Mr.  Masters, 
Miss  Lowell,  Mr.  Sandburg  are  dwarfed,  if  not 
lost;  and  among  those  who  do  not  appear  at  all 
are  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  John  Gould 
Fletcher,  T.  S.  Eliot,  Maxwell  Bodenheim,  and 
Wallace  Stevens.  In  his  critical  summaries  of 
the  books  of  verse  published  during  the  year  Mr. 
Braithwaite  is  less  discriminating  than  ever. 
Forty-five  are  listed,  and  a  few  of  them  are 
worth  reading;  but  Mr.  Braithwaite's  enthusiasm 
is  glibly  uniform  and  affords  no  clue.  "This  is 
all  poetry!"  says  Mr.  Braithwaite  in  effect  .  .  . 
and  escapes  his  duty  as  a  critic. 

In  the  end,  one  wonders  whether  such  methods 
will  not  frighten  away  the  audience  far  more 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


197 


surely  than  a  carefully  selective  criticism  and 
whether,  moreover,  it  will  not  also  cheapen  the 
audience,  and  in  consequence  the  art.  Ideals 
would  certainly  be  kept  higher — and  would  not 
the  public  interest  be  keener? — if  Mr.  Braith- 
waite's  "Anthology"  consisted  annually  of  thirty 
instead  of  a  hundred-odd  poems,  and  of  five 
instead  of  forty-five  eulogies  of  books.  .  .  Mr. 
Braithwaite  would  then  be  contributing  towards 
the  survival  of  the  best.  As  it  is,  he  merely 
insures  the  meteoric  evanescence  of  all,  and  by 
encouraging  the  unimportant  many,  discourages 
the  important  few.  It  is  melancholy  to  suspect 
that  Mr.  Braithwaite's  method  is  not  so  much  a 
matter  of  will  as  of  ability.  Is  it  conceivable 
that  in  asking  him  to  discriminate  we  are  ask- 
ing him  to  do  something  of  which  he  is  incap- 


able? 


CONRAD  AIKEN. 


Our  Changing  Permanence 

NATIONAL  PROGRESS,  1907-17.  By  Frederic  Aus- 
tin Ogg.  (Vol.  27  in  "The  American  Nation" 
series,  edited  by  Albert  Bushnell  Hart.)  Har- 
pers; $2. 

Professor  Ogg  has  endeavored  to  write  a  his- 
tory of  the  last  decade  of  American  history.  That 
is,  he  has  written  the  last  installment  of  the  now 
well-known  series  to  which  most  of  the  scholars 
of  repute  in  their  respective  fields  in  this  country 
have  contributed  volumes.  It  is  a  valuable  series, 
which  needed  to  be  brought  down  to  date,  and 
the  work  before  us  is  worthy  to  stand  beside  the 
others. 

Of  course  there  are  scores  of  works  on  the 
great  war  and  the  part  of  the  United  States  in 
that  war,  and  in  recent  years  we  have  had  many 
books  on  our  own  life  which  have  traversed  most 
of  the  subjects  touched  upon  in  this  volume;  but 
there  is  nothing  that  gives  such  an  even  distribu- 
tion of  emphasis,  such  a  just  estimate  of  forces, 
and  such  full  and  satisfying  references  and  bib- 
liographies. Every  student  of  recent  events  will 
be  grateful  for  the  list  of  good  documents,  picked 
from  the  tons  of  Government  publications,  of 
satisfactory  articles  from  the  thousands  of  studies 
in  periodicals,  and  of  the  best  books  on  various 
topics  of  interest.  The  mechanism  of  this  work 
is,  I  think,  beyond  all  praise. 

On  the  score  of  selection,  of  omissions  and 
inclusions,  hardly  less  can  be  said.  No  really 
important  subject  has  been  overlooked.  And  the 
space  allowed  to  the  dominating  figures — Roose- 
velt, Taft,  and  Wilson ;  Bryan,  Root,  and  Harri- 
man;  or  Gompers  and  his  group — is  well  appor- 


tioned. If  Professor  Ogg  plays  favorites,  it  is 
only  in  the  case  of  Roosevelt,  whose  picturesque 
figure  and  spectacular  performances  do,  indeed, 
command  attention.  Of  Bryan  and  his  vast 
farmer  following  the  author  is  not  especially  fond, 
although  he  does  not  deny  him  and  them  their 
due,  especially  in  the  working  of  the  miracle  by 
which  Woodrow  Wilson  was  made  the  nominee 
of  the  Baltimore  convention  in  1912  and  after- 
wards elected  President. 

The  election  of  1908,  the  corporations  and 
the  trusts,  tariff  controversies,  injunctions,  party 
unrest,  and  Taft  reaction  are  the  subjects  which 
occupy  the  earlier  chapters.  The  canal,  Latin 
America,  the  election  of  1912,  and  our  growing 
colonial  empire  come  next  in  the  story.  Wood- 
row  Wilson,  the  Democratic  reforms,  and  the 
great  war  close  the  story. 

According  to  the  author  the  large  issues  were 
the  curbing  of  industrial  overlordship,  the  rise 
of  labor  to  a  commanding  position  in  September, 
1916,  and  the  entrance  of  the  United  States  into 
international  affairs.  And  these  are  the  subjects 
in  which  most  men  will  be  interested,  at  least 
for  the  next  half  dozen  years.  Roosevelt  came  to 
office  when  McKinley's  name  was  a  shibboleth 
and  when  exploitation  of  the  country  was  the 
right  and  proper  thing  for  business  men.  He 
had  a  delicate  task,  to  make  the  great  men  of 
his  party  (to  whom  the  historic  role  of  the  Re- 
publican party  had  become  almost  semi-sacred) 
see  that  there  was  a  new  role,  that  public  leader- 
ship was  a  public  trust,  not  a  group  trust.  The 
vigorous  young  President  did  not  wholly  succeed. 
He  divided  the  party,  secured  a  sort  of  Demo- 
cratic support,  and  drove  some  things  through 
Congress — for  example,  the  Elkins  railroad  bill. 
But  the  rift  which  was  bound  to  come  did  not 
appear  till  Taft  entered  the  White  House  as 
Roosevelt's  protege.  Taft  was  helpless  in  the 
situation  in  which  his  friend  had  placed  him. 
For  Roosevelt  had  made  the  President  the  inter- 
preter of  public  opinion  and  as  the  interpreter  he 
focused  his  powers  upon  Congress.  Congress,  un- 
der the  leadership  of  Cannon  and  Aldrich,  did 
not  like  interpretation;  they  liked  still  less  to 
be  driven.  Since  Taft  did  not  know  how  to 
interpret  the  thoughts  of  ninety  million  people 
and  had  no  mind  to  drive  Congress,  he  tried  to 
govern  according  to  constitution.  He  failed. 

The  failure  became  tragic  in  the  Republican 
convention  of  1912,  and  Roosevelt  appeared  as 
the  angry  opponent  of  his  former  friend.  It  was 
like  Douglas  in  1857  fighting  the  President 
whom  he  had  done  almost  as  much  to  put 


198 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


into  office  as  Roosevelt  had  done  for  Taft. 
Buchanan  was  a  Taft;  Taft  was  a  Buchanan. 
But  this  must  not  be  understood  as  disparaging 
the  reputation  of  either  the  living  or  the  dead 
President.  Both  sought  to  be  guided  by  the  con- 
stitution; both  failed,  because  the  constitution 
failed.  Neither  of  them  should  have  been  de- 
nounced for  not  doing  what  they  were  by  law 
as  good  as  forbidden  to  do.  But  it  is  generally 
the  president  who  keeps  his  oath  to  the  letter 
who  violates  the  spirit  of  his  oath  most  tragically. 

Nor  must  the  Roosevelt  idolaters  consider  the 
comparison  with  Douglas  invidious.  It  is  a  just 
comparison.  Roosevelt  resembles  Douglas  quite 
as  much  as  Taft  resembles  Buchanan.  And 
Douglas  had  the  same  sort  of  qualities  that  Roose- 
velt has — political  agility  and  remarkable  insight. 
The  work  of  each  enters  most  creditably  into  the 
history  of  our  country.  Still,  this  is  not  strictly 
in  point  in  a  review  of  Ogg's  book.  I  only  hope 
that  neither  of  our  distinguished  ex-Presidents 
may  see  these  lines.  Not  because  the  compari- 
sons are  unjust;  but  because  a  living  man  is  not 
a  good  judge  of  himself  in  history. 

The  Monroe  doctrine  and  the  Latin  American 
situation  are  burning  questions;  or  they  would 
be  burning  questions  if  the  present  war  would 
but  come  to  an  end.  Professor  Ogg  thinks  in 
terms  of  a  mild  and  benevolent  imperialism,  a 
moderate  Monroeist,  one  might  say.  He  sees 
that  concessions  and  loans  and  public  utilities 
are  the  forces  behind  our  Monroe  professions. 
He  thinks  Wilson  made  a  poor  spectacle  in  Mex- 
ico; yet  he  sees  that  if  he  had  done  otherwise 
he  must  have  made  a  poorer  spectacle.  To  set 
the  neighbor's  disorderly  house  in  order  would 
have  been  quite  as  bad  a  business  as  not  to  set 
it  in  order.  So  the  President  concluded  to  wait 
"watchfully,"  which  was  about  all  that  anyone 
who  knew  the  facts  and  saw  historically  could 
have  done.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  Roose- 
velt, who  had  so  much  to  say,  would  have  done 
otherwise,  for  somehow  or  other  that  eminent 
man  had  a  wonderfully  shrewd  way  of  waiting 
"watchfully"  when  difficult  matters  were  afoot 
— for  example,  his  tariff  silences  in  many  lan- 
guages. When  one  cannot  do  anything  without 
doing  worse,  one  is  likely  to  do  nothing;  only 
the  Mexicans  would  not  let  Wilson  do  nothing. 
Perhaps  when  ten  more  years  have  passed  and 
historians  review  this  period  they  will  say  that 
Wilson  kept  still  because  he  thought  a  European 
war  would  be  precipitated  if  he  did  otherwise; 
and  that  Germany  did  nothing  in  Mexico,  be- 


cause she  thought  that  to  do  something  would 
throw  the  United  States  into  the  arms  of  England 
and  the  English-French  entente. 

Open-minded  people,  if  there  are  such  in  the 
world,  read  books  about  current  issues  and  living 
statesmen  in  the  hope  of  learning  a  bit  about  the 
future  and  their  duty  in  the  premises.  This  book 
makes  it  appear  that  Labor  has  at  last  won  its 
long  battle  with  capital  and  that  working  men 
will,  in  the  future,  dictate  national  policies.  Did 
not  Labor  compel  the  President  of  the  whole 
people  to  jam  through  Congress  the  Adamson 
law?  And  does  not  British  Labor  give  orders 
to  Lloyd  George?  The  world,  thinks  Professor 
Ogg,  is  starting  upon  a  new  era  with  day-laborers 
in  command.  And  Mr.  Charles  M.  Schwab  of 
the  Bethlehem  Steel  Company,  formerly  a  worker 
with  his  hands,  confirms  the  view.  The  day  of 
capital  is  done. 

Although  the  present  status  of  Labor  is 
strongly  set  forth  in  this  book  and  the  appearance 
of  the  present-day  world  supports  the  same  con- 
clusion, it  may  be  well  to  ask  ourselves  a  question 
before  we  fall  into  line.  The  farmers  thought  in 
1801  that  their  day  had  come  and  that  commerce 
and  finance  had  been  relegated  to  secondary 
places  among  the  great  forces  which  then  drove 
this  country  toward  the  future.  But  seven  years 
had  not  passed  before  the  farmer's  president  had 
been  definitely  checkmated.  In  1829  the  farm- 
ers came  back  again,  but  they  did  not  long  control 
affairs.  And  the  case  was  not  very  different  in 
1860;  yet  three  years  had  not  elapsed  till  finance 
and  industry  were  in  the  saddle.  Now  it  would 
seem  that  labor  has  won. 

The  existence  of  a  great  war  gives  laboring 
men,  especially  skilled  men,  an  advantage  that  no 
other  class  has  ever  had.  They  will  keep  this 
advantage  till  arms  are  stacked  on  the  western 
front.  On  that  day  finance  and  industry  and 
trade  will  return  to  their  former  position. 

A  few  hundred  thousand  men  who  run  rail- 
road trains  or  make  munitions  of  war  may  now 
stop  a  great  battle.  The  rulers  of  great  nations 
who  are  fighting  these  battles  have  to  give  heed  ; 
under  other  circumstances  they  might  let  strikes 
come  and  railroad  trains  stop.  No,  it  is  not  so 
bad  as  some  think,  nor  half  so  good  as  others  hope. 
The  world  is  very  much  the  same  it  has  ever 
been.  Can  the  man  who  has  not  a  week's  sup- 
plies in  his  cupboard  rule  mankind? 

Having  noticed  the  high  status  which  this  book 
gives  to  Messrs.  Roosevelt  and  Taft,  the  reader 
may  wonder  what  the  place  of  Wilson  is  thought 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


199 


to  be.  Professor  Ogg  is  not  sure  that  Wilson 
represents  a  new  era.  The  reforms  of  1913-6 
were  all  on  the  road  in  1901-8  and  the  then 
vigorous  reform  President  is  thought  to  have 
been  the  real  author.  In  other  words,  Wilson 
is  the  heir  of  his  brilliant  critic.  If  one  were 
to  say  that  Lincoln  was  the  fore-worker  of  Wil- 
son, one  would  be  quite  as  near  the  truth.  Every- 
thing that  Wilson  has  carried  into  the  realm  of 
reality  was  fought  for  by  George  Pendleton  or 
Samuel  Tilden  or  Bryan  in  those  days  of  emo- 
tionalism which  the  author  rather  condemns,  or 
by  Roosevelt.  If  comparisons  were  not  odious,  I 
should  venture  to  say  that  Wilson,  although  born 
of  a  line  of  gentle  forbears,  is  more  nearly  like 
Lincoln,  the  son  and  grandson  of  backwoodsmen, 
than  is  any  living  leader  of  our  country.  But 
being  like  Lincoln  has  got  to  be  somewhat  com- 
monplace, and  I  shall  not  press  the  point. 

This  book  helps  one  understand  oneself  and 
points  the  way,  even  if  a  little  hesitatingly,  to  a 
better  future.  For  this,  as  for  the  many  other 
helps  and  suggestions,  the  reader  must  be  duly 
grateful.  WILLIAM  E.  DODD. 


If  This  *Be  Literature  Give  Me 
Death 


THE     GREEN     MIRROR.       By     Hugh     Walpole. 
Doran;   $1.50. 

Memories  of  Meredith  are  provokingly  incon- 
venient when  one  comes  upon  the  younger  Eng- 
lish novelists  of  the  stenographic  school.  "The 
Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel"  dealt  with  the  gulf 
between  the  generations,  presented  the  hideous- 
ness  of  the  smug  family  circle,  and  showed  glo- 
riously young  love  breasting  the  barbed  wire 
entanglements  of  old  conventions.  All  this  Mer- 
edith did  brilliantly,  with  the  penetration  which 
only  the  greatest  possess,  and  with  that  under- 
standing of  human  nature  which  endures  as 
fame.  To  say  that  a  thing  has  been  done  "once 
and  for  all"  has  always  seemed  an  amusing  utter- 
ance in  a  world  where  nothing  is  permanent 
except  change.  There  is  nothing  irreverent  in 
imagining  a  better  novel  than  "Richard  Fev- 
erel," nothing  particularly  daring  in  hoping  that 
the  "parent  problem"  will  be  presented  in  an 
even  more  universal  manner.  Yet  so  long  as 
that  masterpiece  exists  and  is  read,  younger  nov- 
elists, if  they  handle  the  same  situation,  will  have 
to  submit  to  a  devastating  comparison.  And  by 


the  same  situation  can  only  be  meant,  of  course, 
a  similar  situation. 

This  is  what  Hugh  Walpole  has  done  in  "The 
Green  Mirror."  He  has  written,  at  great  length 
and  with  profuse  wordiness,  the  story  of  a  self- 
satisfied,  smug  English  family,  of  their  inherent 
inability  to  admit  the  intrusion  of  a  "stranger," 
of  the  actual  intrusion  of  a  genuinely  undesirable 
stranger — a  stranger  with  a  "past" — and  of 
the  effects  upon  this  family.  Mr.  Walpole's 
most  irritating  fault  is  his  adherence  to  the  court 
reporter's  method  of  observing  and  recording. 
This  is  the  fault  of  many  of  the  contemporary 
novelists.  It  is  their  belief,  apparently,  that  the 
mere  writing  down  of  lists  of  things,  whether 
dishes  of  food,  toilet  articles  on  the  heroine's 
dressing-table,  books  and  objets  d'art  on  the 
drawing-room  tables,  or  the  furnishings  of  a 
room,  constitutes  vivid  literature.  Maybe  they 
feel  that  this  is  reality.  But  the  effect  upon  the 
reader  of  such  cataloguing  as  this  is  possibly  not 
always  what  the  author  intended: 

Further  away  in  the  middle  of  a  clear  space  was  a 
table  with  a  muddle  of  things  upon  it — a  doll  half- 
clothed,  a  writing-case,  a  silver  inkstand,  photographs 
of  Millie,  Henry,  and  Katherine,  a  little  younger 
than  they  were  now,  a  square  silver  clock,  a  pile  of 
socks  with  a  needle  sticking  sharply  out  of  them,  a 
little  oak  book-case  with  "Keble's  Christian  Year," 
Charlotte  Yonge's  "Pillars  of  the  House,"  two  volumes 
of  Bishop  Westcott's  "Sermons,"  and  Mrs.  Gaskell's 
"Wives  and  Daughters."  There  was  also  a  little 
brass  tray  with  a  silver  thimble,  tortoiseshell  paper- 
knife,  a  little  mat  made  of  bright-colored  beads,  a 
reel  of  red  silk,  and  a  tiny  pocket  calendar.  Beside 
the  bed  there  was  a  small  oaken  table  with  a  fine 
silver  Crucifix  and  a  Bible  and  a  prayer  book  and 
a  copy  of  "Before  the  Throne"  in  dark  blue  leather. 

In  this  one  description  there  are  still  two  more 
paragraphs  of  things  listed  in  just  the  same  way 
and  there  are  perhaps  hundreds  of  similar  pas- 
sages. For  example,  after  a  statement  which 
reminds  one  of  the  cook-book — "Sunday  supper 
should  be  surely  a  meal  very  hot  and  very  quickly 
over" — we  are  regaled  with  the  following  bill 
of  fare: 

A  tremendous  piece  of  cold  roast  beef  was  in  front 
of  Mrs.  Trenchard ;  in  front  of  Henry  there  were  two 
cold  chickens.  There  was  a  salad  in  a  huge  glass 
dish,  it  looked  very  cold  indeed.  There  was  a  smaller 
glass  dish  with  beetroot.  There  was  a  large  apple-tart, 
a  white  blancmange,  with  little  "dobs"  of  raspberry 
jam  round  the  side  of  the  dish.  There  was  a  plate  of 
stiff  and  unfriendly  celery — item  a  gorgonzola  cheese, 
item  a  family  of  little  woolly  biscuits,  clustered  to- 
gether for  warmth,  item  a  large  "bought"  cake  that 
had  not  been  cut  yet  and  was  grimly  determined  that 
it  never  should  be,  item  what  was  known  as  "Toasted 
Water"  (a  grim  family  mixture  of  no  colour  and  a 
faded,  melancholy  taste)  in  a  vast  jug,  item,  silver, 
white  table-cloth,  napkin-rings  quite  without  end. 


200 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


If  this  be  literature  give  me  death.  And  so 
it  goes  with  the  whole  book,  not  only  with  things 
but  with  emotions,  conversations,  meals,  the 
details  of  nature,  everything.  There  is  no  abso- 
lute law  that  says  things  must  not  be  listed,  but 
there  is  a  demand  on  the  part  of  the  reader  that 
if  things  come  in  they  must  mean  something  in 
the  mosaic  the  author  is  constructing.  This  is 
not  the  case  with  "The  Green  Mirror."  There 
are  416  pages,  of  which  it  is  not  bold  or  unkind 
to  say  that  100  might  be  eliminated  by  the  wel- 
come reduction  of  mere  lists. 

Psychological  details,  at  best  the  most  fasci- 
nating development  in  the  modern  novel,  become 
under  this  method  little  more  than  mere  statis- 
tics. If  you  chance  upon  a  chapter  headed 
"Katherine,"  you  may  be  sure  that  somewhere 
early  in  that  chapter  there  will  be  pages  of  lists, 
giving  all  the  emotions  Katherine  has  had  since 
childhood,  and  in  such  flat  continuity  as  to 
deaden  the  liveliest  interest.  This  is  mechan- 
ical writing,  and  the  most  vital  human  beings, 
composing  a  situation  of  intense  interest,  are 
slowly  crushed  in  the  machine.  Mr.  Walpole's 
characters  are  the  losers.  Externally  you  know 
everything  about  them,  spiritually  almost  noth- 
ing. It  is  not  that  he  does  not  let  them  think 
and  feel  before  you;  they  are  at  it  most  of  the 
time.  But  you  never  get  really  into  them.  You 
are  always  moving  around  and  about  them, 
watching  them,  observing  and  wondering,  but 
caring  not  a  whit  what  their  fate  may  be.  This 
is  because  their  creator  did  no  selecting,  no  con- 
centrating. With  your  friends  in  real  life  there 
are  ways  and  means  of  ignoring  or  escaping  those 
characteristics  found  annoying.  With  Mr.  Wal- 
pole's people  you  must  endure  everything. 

The  total  result  of  this  manner  of  writing  is 
to  produce  a  story  without  concentration,  a  story 
that  wearies  the  reader  in  spite  of  his  feeling  that 
the  author  is  earnest  and  interested  in  his  people. 
When  it  is  possible  to  skip  whole  pages  without 
loss,  there  is  something  wrong;  when  there  is 
the  desire  to  skip,  even  the  good  qualities  are  in 
danger.  That  desire  is  unquestionably  provoked 
by  Walpole's  novel.  After  you  have  read  five 
or  half  a  dozen  conversations  that  echo  the  dicta- 
phone, there  is  an  impulse  to  shy  at  quotation 
marks.  Later  you  openly  balk.  No  amount  of 
hoping  or  arguing  that  all  this  may  be  necessary 
atmosphere  does  any  good;  the  author  himself 
convinces  you  that  he  is  "writing,"  and  that  he 
is  going  to  write,  come  what  may. 

B.  I.  KlNNE. 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


ANNE  PEDERSDOTTER.  A  drama  in  four 
acts.  By  H.  Wiers-Jenssen.  English  ver- 
sion by  John  Masefield.  Little,  Brown; 
$1.00. 

In  the  theatre,  familiarity  breeds  not  contempt 
but  interest,  and  old,  popular  dramatic  themes, 
treated  in  quite  the  orthodox  manner,  have  often 
won  extravagant  contemporary  praise  for  medi- 
ocre playwrights.  On  the  other  hand,  more  than 
one  great  dramatist  who  has  dared  to  handle 
traditional  material  in  his  own  way  has  won 
harsh  adverse  criticism  even  from  those  who 
should  be  the  first  to  welcome  dramatic  original- 
ity. For  nothing  demands  of  a  dramatist  such 
robust  originality  as  a  new  treatment  of  old 
material;  yet  his  very  strength  is  his  handicap, 
since  nothing  is  so  disconcerting  to  an  audience 
as  to  see  from  a  new  point  of  view  a  character, 
a  plot,  or  a  setting  which  it  knows  well.  Even 
the  intelligent  audiences  of  Mr.  Ames's  Little 
Theatre  could  not  reconcile  the  tremendous 
originalities  of  "Anne  Pedersdotter"  to  their  nat- 
ural expectations.  The  first  production  in  Amer- 
ica was  not  a  popular  success;  but  it  is  strange 
that  publication  in  book  form  has  not  brought 
this  remarkable  play  deserved  recognition. 

Mr.  Wiers-Jenssen's  conception  of  a  sympa- 
thetic psychological  study  of  the  tragedy  of 
witchcraft  was  a  boldly  original  idea,  but  he  has 
even  more  tellingly  proved  his  powers  by  build- 
ing his  play  almost  wholly  out  of  old  materials. 
His  action-plot,  the  love  of  a  young  wife  (Anne 
Pedersdotter)  for  her  step-son  (Martin),  was 
a  favorite  story  of  the  medieval  chronicle  plays 
long  before  Racine  wrote  "Phedre."  Several  of 
his  lesser  characters — notably  the  drunken  cler- 
ical colleagues  of  Anne's  husband,  his  old  mother, 
and  her  servants — are  perilously  typical  figures. 
The  realistic  dialogue  and  modern  motivation 
in  a  play  of  the  sixteenth  century,  which  so  baf- 
fled our  newspaper  critics,  is  no  "startling  nov- 
elty" in  Denmark,  where  Strindberg's  historical 
dramas  are  widely  known.  Even  the  psycholog- 
ical analysis  of  the  strong,  repeated  suggestion 
that  she  has  inherited  the  evil  powers  of  witch- 
craft from  her  mother,  by  which  Anne  is  first 
thrown  into  the  arms  of  her  lover  and  finally 
becomes  convinced  that  she  is  truly  a  witch,  is 
not  an  original  explanation.  The  Danish  play- 
wright could  hardly  have  known  Barrett  Wen- 
dell's illuminating  essay  on  the  witches  of  Salem, 
but  the  hypnotic  power  of  public  opinion,  sup- 
ported by  unlucky  coincidences,  has  been  a  popu- 
lar dramatic  theme  since  Ibsen — a  theme  that 
Brieux,  Shaw,  and  Echegaray  have  all  effectively 
employed.  Mr.  Wiers-Jenssen  has  used  all  these 
familiar  materials  finely  to  his  own  purpose  and, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


201 


aided  by  a  masterly  technique,  has  given  us  a 
great  character,  his  heroine. 

For  centuries  witches  have  appeared  on  the 
stage  in  comedy  and  in  tragedy,  surrounded 
always  by  an  elaborate  machinery  of  the  super- 
natural especially  designed  to  render  them 
un-human.  But  Anne  Pedersdotter  is  a  living 
human  being.  She  is  a  woman  first  and  a  witch 
only  incidentally — in  fact,  even  at  the  end,  when 
she  confesses  herself  a  witch,  she  is  supremely  a 
woman,  a  woman  cheated  in  love  by  her  mar- 
riage, tricked  to  give  herself  to  a  love  which  did 
not  stand  the  test,  for  it  is  Martin's  suspicion 
that  she  has  seduced  him  by  witchcraft  that 
makes  inevitable  for  her  her  self-conviction.  In  a 
plot  so  unsympathetic,  to  have  won  our  sym- 
pathy for  Anne  Pedersdotter  with  no  appeal  to 
sentimentality  is  a  fine  artistic  accomplishment; 
to  have  made  her  a  very  real  human  being  and 
yet  to  make  us  feel  the  eerie  powers  of  the  medi- 
eval Satan  is  a  rare  triumph  of  dramatic  skill. 

THE  FOOD  PROBLEM.    By  Vernon  Kellogg 

and  Alonzo  E.  Taylor.     Macmillan;  $1.25. 

Most  of  us  have  thus  far  felt  the  pressure 
of  war  chiefly  through  war's  interference  with 
certain  favorite  habits  of  diet.  Cooperating 
cheerfully  with  the  Food  Administration,  the 
average  citizen  is  still  somewhat  mystified  as  to 
just  why  he  is  urged  to  eat  more  of  this  and 
less  of  that,  and  dubious  as  to  what  effect,  if  any, 
his  individual  sacrifice  may  have  towards  win- 
ning the  war.  Both  authors  of  "The  Food  Prob- 
lem" are  members  of  the  United  States  Food 
Administration  and  well  equipped  to  answer  his 
questions.  Professor  Kellogg  is  a  member  of  the 
Commission  for  Relief  in  Belgium,  and  Dr.  Tay- 
lor has  made  a  special  study  of  the  food  situation 
in  Germany  and  was  attached  to  Col.  House's 
party  at  the  recent  Paris  Conference  of  the 
Allies.  The  record  of  England,  France,  and 
Italy's  mistakes  in  attempting  to  control  and 
save  food  ought  to  keep  us  from  trying  those 
methods  which  have  already  been  proved  unsuc- 
cessful. In  the  regulation  of  public  eating  places 
in  London,  for  instance,  there  was  tried  out  a 
plan  for  the  limitation  of  courses,  which  permit- 
ted only  two  courses,  or  their  equivalent,  to  be 
served  at  lunch,  and  three  courses  at  dinner. 
With  half  courses  one  might  assemble  a  menu 
which  would  be  safely  within  the  letter  of  the 
law  and  away  outside  its  intention.  Since  the 
result  of  this  order  was  a  heavy  increase  in  the 
consumption  of  meat  and  staples,  instead  of  the 
hoped  for  reduction,  it  was  shortly  revoked. 

Germany's  experience  has  elements  of  special 
interest,  in  view  of  the  scientific  care  which  be- 
forehand she  devoted  to  preparing  for  the  emer- 
gency. The  defect  in  the  prearranged  plan,  it 


appears,  was  the  characteristic  Prussian  failure 
to  allow  for  the  human  equation.  The  German 
peasant  did  not  cooperate  as  wholeheartedly  as 
had  been  expected  in  carrying  out  the  govern- 
ment orders  to  reduce  his  herds  to  the  number 
that  could  be  kept  on  domestic  feed,  and  to 
reserve  all  wheat  and  rye  for  human  consump- 
tion. The  government  was  not  able  to  secure  the 
"equitable  distribution  of  food  stuff  throughout 
all  classes  of  society  .  .  .  because  the  producer 
class  consumed  more  than  their  pro  rata  .  .  . 
diverted  a  portion  of  the  food  stuffs  to  the  feed- 
ing of  domesticated  animals  and  sold  to  the  well 
to  do  classes  in  disregard  of  the  regulations.  .  . 
That  the  restrictions  in  the  diet  .  .  .  have  fallen 
almost  entirely  upon  the  industrial  workers  of 
the  cities  is  fully  realized  by  the  industrial  classes 
and  represents  a  casus  belli  between  them  and 
the  agrarians  that  will  be  the  occasion  of  bitter 
political  contests  after  the  war."  Germany  has 
succeeded  in  keeping  down  the  price  of  bread 
and  sugar  by  the  appropriation  of  state  funds  to 
cover  the  actual  extra  cost,  and  the  milk  supply 
has  been  reserved  for  the  use  of  the  children. 
The  important  part  psychology  plays  in  nutri- 
tion is  revealed  by  a  study  of  the  dietary  habits 
of  different  nations  and  classes.  The  German 
housewife,  deprived  of  milk  and  cooking  fats, 
cannot  make  things  "taste  good"  and  the  result 
is  a  diet  which  is  unsatisfying  even  when  it  is 
scientifically  balanced  and  adequate  in  calories 
and  protein.  In  France  practically  all  of  the 
bread  is  purchased  from  the  baker  and  must  be 
such  as  to  keep  well,  whereas  in  the  United  States 
more  than  half  is  baked  at  home;  it  is  conse- 
quently easier  for  us  here  to  combine  other  grains 
with  wheat  in  the  making  of  quick  breads  which 
need  not  keep  so  long.  The  importance  of  table 
beverages  and  of  a  sufficient  amount  of  fats  in 
the  diet  of  the  working  classes  is  emphasized  as 
a  means  of  avoiding  those  conditions  of  unrest 
which  are  certain  to  arise  in  our  large  cities  if 
the  diet  is  not  satisfying.  The  technology  of 
food  use  is  discussed  in  relation  to  four  factors: 
"the  psychology  of  nutrition,  the  psychology  of 
alimentation,  the  supply  of  food  stuffs,  and  the 
influence  of  trade."  There  is  included  a  brief 
statement  of  the  essentials  of  dietetics  which  will 
be  appreciated  by  the  unprofessional  reader.  It 
is  made  clear  that  the  food  problem  is  not  a 
condition  which  will  disappear  with  the  ending 
of  the  war — that  the  war  has  made  it  an  inter- 
national problem  which  will  demand  our  coop- 
eration for  many  years  to  come.  The  book's  only 
defect  is  in  its  tendency  to  overstate  the  difficul- 
ties of  the  food  situation  in  order  to  emphasize 
the  necessity  for  drastic  reduction  in  certain  types 
of  consumption.  But  this  is  a  forgivable  propa- 
gandist accent  at  a  time  when  we  are  witnessing 
an  approach  to  something  like  a  world  famine. 


202 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


PORTRAITS  AND  BACKGROUNDS.    By  Evan- 

geline  Wilbour  Blashfield.    Scribners ;  $2.50. 

For  most  readers  the  interest  in  Mrs.  Blash- 
field's  new  book  will  centre  in  the  initial  study 
— of  Hrotsvitha,  the  playwriting  Benedictine 
nun  of  Gandersheim  in  the  tenth  century — 
and  particularly  in  that  part  of  it  dealing  with 
her  play  "Paphnutius,"  which  is  the  source  of 
Anatole  France's  "Thais."  Curiously  enough 
M.  France  has  never  acknowledged  his  indebt- 
edness in  this  instance,  though  usually  by  no 
means  averse  to  making  a  display  of  his  erudi- 
tion. How  great  the  indebtedness  is  may  be 
judged  from  a  comparison  of  the  situations  and 
characters  in  "Thais"  with  those  of  the  original 
play,  from  which  copious  extracts  are  given  by 
the  author  of  this  book.  They  reveal  only  one 
notable  change;  namely,  the  transformation  of 
the  holy  hermit,  St.  Paphnutius,  into  an  "eroto- 
maniac." "It  seems  curious,"  comments  Mrs. 
Blashfield,  "that  a  lover  and  writer  of  history 
like  M.  France  should  feel  justified  in  smirch- 
ing the  reputation  of  an  irreproachable  saint,  to 
whom  many  churches  and  monasteries  are  dedi- 
cated, and  whose  intercession  is  daily  sought  by 
thousands  of  Eastern  Christians.  M.  France 
would  have  hesitated  to  take  away  the  character 
of  a  French  saint,  or  one  nearer  home.  But 
St.  Paphnutius  is  an  Egyptian;  like  'Punch's' 
collier  M.  France  has  no  hesitation  in  "caving 
'arf  a  brick  at  a  stranger.'  "  Mrs.  Blashfield — 
who,  in  our  opinion,  makes  too  much  of  the 
matter — apparently  forgets  the  storm  of  protest 
aroused  by  the  same  author's  "Jeanne  d'Arc"! 
More  interesting  is  the  question,  renewed  by  her, 
whether  the  body  of  a  holy  woman  named  Thais, 
discovered  by  M.  Albert  Gayet  in  the  Christian 
necropolis  of  Antinoe  in  Lower  Egypt,  is  actu- 
ally that  of  the  Thais  of  history  and  of  fiction. 
The  archaeologist  himself  refuses  either  to  affirm 
or  to  deny,  and  Mrs.  Blashfield  offers  a  very 
complete  resume  of  the  evidence  on  both  sides: 

Although  the  costume  of  Thais  is  not  that  of  a 
recluse,  yet  the  position  of  the  tomb,  which  was  found 
in  the  midst  of  the  cemetery,  surrounded  by  sepulchres 
of  the  fourth  century ;  the  inscription  on  its  wall, "Here 
reposes  the  blessed  Thais";  and  the  articles  found 
with  the  body  favor  the  hypothesis  that  in  the  Musee 
Guimet  lies  the  blackened  husk  of  the  bewitching  mime 
who  inflamed  the  youth  of  Alexandria,  listened  to  the 
preaching  of  Paphnutius,  burned  her  treasures,  and 
followed  the  hermit  into  the  Thebaid  to  save  her  soul. 
Those  who  would  play  the  devil's  advocate  and 
unsaint  this  poor  shell  argue  that  the  dress — the 
coquettish  wreath-like  hood,  borrowed  from  the  roguish 
Tanagrian  Loves,  the  rich-toned  draperies  that  warm 
the  eye  like  the  tints  of  sun-soaked  nectarines — 
is  that  of  a  child  of  the  world,  provoking  rather  than 
repelling  glances-  To  this  objection  M.  Gayet  replies 
that  saints  who  passed  their  lives  in  sordid  rags  were 
often  buried  in  rich  clothing  and  hoarded  their  festal 
garments  to  enter  the  Presence  bravely;  quoting  the 
words  of  St.  Macarius  of  Thebais,  who  when  sum- 
moned before  the  governor  of  Antinoe  was  advised 


by  his  disciples  to  change  his  tattered  tunic  for  a  more 
decent  habit  and  who  answered:  "I  am  keeping  my 
new  robe  to  appear  before  my  Saviour."  In  a  remote 
Nitrian  convent  the  adventurous  traveller  is  shown 
today  the  body  of  tHe  "Holy  Maximus,"  son  of  the 
Emperor  Valentinian,  clothed  in  purple  and  gold  tis- 
sue, the  costume  of  an  imperial  prince,  though  Maxi- 
mus, who  fled  the  court  and  became  a  monk,  wore 
during  his  lifetime  the  coarse  brown  garb  of  his  fel- 
lows. 

The  richness  and  beauty  of  a  secular  dress,  there- 
fore, prove  nothing  against  the  asceticism  or  sanc- 
tity of  the  wearer: 

That  of  Thais  may  have  been  the  "glorious  habit" 
of  pious  legend,  which  every  Christian  tried  to  pro- 
vide for  his  triumph  in  death  over  the  sorrows  and 
snares  of  life ;  it  may  have  been  the  garments  which 
the  penitent  wore  when  she  received  the  favor  of 
heaven  through  St.  Paphnutius,  and  bade  farewell  to 
the  theatre  and  her  mourning  lovers.  There  is  no 
mundus  muliebris  buried  with  this  Thais;  no  mirror, 
no  jars  of  nard  or  stibium,  no  lute  or  embroidery 
frame;  hers  is  the  funeral  baggage  of  the  eremite. 
The  chaplet,  the  cross — still  recalling  in  form  the  ankh 
of  the  Egyptians — found  by  the  side  of  the  body;  the 
rose  of  Jericho,  symbol  of  resurrection,  held  between 
the  skeleton  fingers;  the  basket  and  goblet  case  of 
woven  palm  fibres  to  contain  the  Sacrament,  which  the 
Oriental  Christians  buried  with  the  dead ;  the  palm 
branches,  martyrs'  attributes,  in  which  she  lies  as  in 
a  nest  of  verdure,  all  testify  to  the  exceptional  holi- 
ness of  the  "blessed  Thais"  of  Antinoe  and  impart 
to  her  sepulchre  a  distinctly  religious  character,  dif- 
ferentiating it  from  the  other  tombs  of  the  same 
necropolis.  In  any  case,  without  attaching  undue 
importance  to  it,  the  "find"  of  M.  Gayet  lends  vitality 
to  the  legend  of  the  courtesan-saint,  and  provides  cos- 
tume and  properties  for  the  winning  figure  of  the 
repentant  actress. 

The  three  other  studies  in  Mrs.  Blashfield 's 
book  deal  respectively  with  Aphra  Behn,  the  nov- 
elist and  playwright  of  the  Restoration;  Ai'sse, 
the  Circassian  girl  who  loved  and  suffered  in 
France  under  the  Regency;  and  Rosalba  Car- 
riera,  the  Venetian  miniaturist  and  pastellist  of 
the  eighteenth  century. 

THE  LAND  WHERE  THE  SUNSETS  Go. 
By  Orville  H.  Leonard.  Sherman,  French ; 
$1.35. 

"Granted  that  they  did  not  find  the  riches  of 
which  they  had  been  told,  they  found  a  place  in 
which  to  search  for  them." 

Such  is  Castaneda's  characterization  of  the 
Southwest  in  his  stately  and  spirited  history  of 
Coronado's  search  for  the  Seven  Cities,  written 
nearly  four  hundred  years  ago.  For  the  reviewer 
the  world  is  divided  into  two  great  classes:  the 
class  of  those  whose  view  of  the  Southwest  is 
like  that  of  the  traveler  on  the  Santa  Fe  whom 
someone  noticed  looking  rapidly  from  side  to  side 
of  the  observation  platform  and  remarking  in  a 
dreary,  bored  tone,  "As  far  as  the  eye  can  see — 
nothing — nothing,"  and  the  class  of  those  for 
whom  the  great  plateaus,  their  mesas  and  cuestas 
and  arroyos,  their  cave-cliffs  and  canons,  painted 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


203 


deserts  and  sand-blown  trails,  their  wild  Spanish- 
American  and  Indian  history  are,  as  for  Coro- 
nado's  companions,  a  place  in  which  to  search 
for  riches. 

To  that  enchanted  place  "The  Land  Where 
the  Sunsets  Go"  will  convey  the  interested  reader. 
The  book  will  be  prized  by  lovers  of  the  South- 
west for  its  power  of  evoking  her  wide-lined 
landscape,  her  brilliant,  inexpressible,  changing 
colors  and  storied  human  scene  of  failure  and 
success — especially  her  tale  of  successes  of  the 
spirit.  The  prose  sketches  of  the  collection  excel 
in  precision  and  originality  the  contributions  in 
verse.  Beautiful  is  the  impression  of  the  terrible 
Devil's  Gate,  its  narrow,  steep,  dangerous  road, 
where  wagon-hubs  almost  graze  the  sides  of  the 
sheer  high  rock-walls  and  "for  a  little  while  at 
noon  a  sword  flash  drops  down  from  the  sun  to 
cut  the  gloom,  then  all  is  purple-dark  again." 

Yes,  the  book  tells  you  of  a  place  where  riches 
may  be  sought,  and  gives  you  something  better 
than  a  treasure  trove,  a  treasure  yet  to  find,  some- 
thing lost  behind  the  ranges. 

SHAKESPEAREAN  PLAYHOUSES.  By  Joseph 
Quincy  Adams.  Houghton  Mifflin ;  $3.50. 
It  is  rather  surprising  that  nobody  else  has 
recently  tried  to  do  what  Professor  Adams  has 
here  so  well  done;  probably  scholars  have  not 
realized  how  rich  the  harvest  could  be.  But 
since  Fleay's  "Chronicle  History,"  1890,  unsound 
and  self-contradictory  in  so  many  of  its  particu- 
lars, and  Ordish's  "Early  London  Theatres  in 
the  Fields,"  1894,  incomplete  by  intention,  this 
field  has  been  left  almost  unworked  in  any  com- 
prehensive way.  But  in  these  twenty  or  more 
years,  much  new  material  has  been  discovered, 
especially  by  Professor  Charles  W.  Wallace,  and 
it  is  of  this  material  that  Professor  Adams  has 
made  particularly  good  use.  What  he  has  sought 
to  do  is  to  give  a  chronological  account  of  each 
of  the  playhouses  of  Pre-Restoration  London,  its 
erection,  the  principal  events  in  its  history,  and 
its  final  disposition.  So  far  as  his  material  per- 
mits, Professor  Adams  describes  the  structure  of 
each  theatre,  its  business  management,  the  com- 
panies that  occupied  it,  and  its  location,  for  the 
last  point  making  effective  use  of  the  various 
contemporary  views  and  maps  of  old  London. 
Professor  Adams's  principal  original  contribution 
is  the  identification  of  certain  sketches  of  Inigo 
Jones's  as  plans  for  the  Cockpit-in-Court,  built 
in  1632  or  1633,  at  Whitehall,  of  the  existence 
of  which  scholars  have  not  previously  known. 
But  every  chapter  shows  more  or  less  important 
fresh  conclusions  based  on  a  careful  study  of  the 
sources.  Scholars  will  find  the  book  invaluable 
for  its  accuracy  and  comprehensiveness;  the 
reader  whose  interest  in  literary  history  is  less 


professional,  will  enjoy  its  picture  of  a  fascinating 
circle  in  London  life.  The  book  is  richly  supplied 
with  well-chosen  maps  and  views  of  London,  and 
has  an  index  and  very  complete  bibliography. 

THE  CLIMAX  OF  CIVILIZATION. 

SOCIALISM. 

FEMINISM.     By    Correa    Moylan    Walsh. 

Sturgis  and  Walton;  the  three,  $4.50. 

An  interesting  and  curious,  though  not  con- 
sistently dependable,  example  of  modern  pessim- 
ism is  this  work  in  three  connected  volumes. 
The  first  develops  a  cyclical  theory  of  civiliza- 
tion and  decay,  maintaining  that  we  have  reached 
a  position  near  the  climax  and  apparently  that 
we  are  destined  to  inevitable  decay.  There  are 
two  great  groups  of  causes  of  decay — the  mate- 
rial, and  the  moral  or  social.  The  material 
causes  derive  from  the  exhaustion  of  the  natural 
resources  from  which  we  draw  our  wealth;  the 
moral  causes,  from  the  degeneration  produced  by 
an  excess  of  wealth  among  the  leaders  of  civili- 
zation and  the  struggle  of  the  masses  for  equal- 
ity without  merit  to  justify  their  pretensions. 
The  masses  are  aroused  by  the  evils  which  afflict 
them  as  the  result  of  corruption  at  the  top  and 
by  the  growing  restriction  which  the  depletion 
of  our  resources  imposes  upon  an  over-expanded 
consumption.  Their  mistake  is  in  aiming  at  a 
part  in  the  spoils  without  making  a  compensating 
contribution. 

The  most  conspicuous  signs  of  this  present-day 
moral  decay,  so  far  as  the  struggle  for  specious 
equality  is  concerned,  are  to  be  found  in  the 
movements  known  as  socialism  and  feminism. 
Each  is,  according  to  the  author,  individualistic 
and  anti-social,  struggling  merely  for  the  satis- 
faction of  the  parties  concerned  without  an 
understanding  of  either  the  foundations  of  so- 
ciety or  of  the  necessity  for  a  cooperative  con- 
tribution to  social  welfare.  The  author's  chief 
abomination  is  the  tendency  among  many — he 
would  say  most — socialists  and  feminists  to  dis- 
pense with  the  family  as  an  antiquated  institu- 
tion enforced  by  superstition  and  repugnant  to 
the  modern  desire  for  maximum  enjoyment  with- 
out social  responsibility.  The  author's  reading 
has  been  very  extensive,  but  his  patent  prejudices 
— such  as  his  assumption  of  the  native  mental 
inferiority  of  women — have  often  prevented  him 
from  presenting  a  clear  and  well  balanced  inter- 
pretation of  the  two  movements  to  which  he 
devotes  his  attention.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that 
he  hits  tellingly  upon  some  of  their  major  weak- 
nesses, he  signally  fails  to  grasp  the  highly  social 
and  idealistic  aims  back  of  both  socialism  and 
feminism  in  their  best  expression.  To  ignore 
these  disqualifies  him  as  a  competent  critic. 


204 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


MEMORIES  DISCREET  AND  INDISCREET.  By 
a  Woman  of  No  Importance.  Dutton;  $5. 
Someone  has  said  that  it  is  necessary  to  be 
indiscreet  to  be  interesting,  but  the  anonymous 
writer  of  "Memories  Discreet  and  Indiscreet" 
manages  to  interest  without  fulfilling  the  prom- 
ise of  the  last  word  of  her  book's  title.  In  spite 
of  the  fact  that  she  devotes  a  large  part  of  her 
fat  volume  to  dull  and  garrulous  gossip  about 
people  whose  names,  to  the  average  American  at 
least,  have  no  significance  whatever,  she  offers 
what  must  be  regarded  as  a  distinct  contribution 
to  contemporary  history.  The  book  is  rich  in 
intimate  glimpses  of  such  personages  as  Garibaldi, 
Parnell,  De  Lesseps,  Cecil  Rhodes,  Lord  Roberts, 
Lord  Kitchener,  Sir  laan  Hamilton,  and  a  dozen 
or  so  others — royalties  and  smaller  fry — whose 
names  are  already  historic.  It  affords,  in  addi- 
tion, "inside"  gossip  concerning  certain  famous 
British  campaigns  in  the  East.  But  its  chief 
value  lies,  not  so  much  in  its  "close-ups"  of  the 
great  or  its  analysis  of  past  events,  as  in  a  pano- 
rama, not  altogether  flattering  but  certainly 
faithful  in  detail,  of  the  English  haut  monde. 
The  manners  revealed  are  probably  already  the 
manners  of  a  past  age  (the  war  will  have  seen 
to  that)  but  the  revelation  has  a  very  present 
interest.  The  student  of  history,  of  society,  of 
politics,  and  the  dilettante  in  the  curious  ways 
of  humanity  as  well,  can  find  much  that  is  sig- 
nificant in  what  the  writer  says  of  other  people 
and,  more  or  less  unwittingly,  of  herself. 

WELFARE     WORK.      By     E.      Dorothea 

Proud,    with    an    introduction    by    Lloyd 

George.     Macmillan;  $3. 

An  Australian  by  birth  and  nurture  goes  to 
England  to  study  and  makes  her  return  con- 
tribution in  the  form  of  this  volume.  Evidently 
she  takes  the  capitalistic  state  as  a  permanent 
fact,  and  her  effort  therefore  is  not  toward  re- 
placing it  with  a  more  ideal  social  order  but 
toward  making  it  as  workable  as  possible  for 
those  who  live  in  it.  Welfare  work  is  one  of 
these  means.  Despite  the  workers'  distrust  of 
welfare  work,  the  author  finds  in  its  proper 
development  the  key  to  the  promotion  of  the 
workers'  best  interests.  She  frankly  recognizes 
its  paternalistic  character — possibly  believing 
that  the  worker  has  not  yet  developed  sufficient 
intellectual  and  political  initiative  to  advance 
alone — and  seeks  to  direct  this  in  the  best  pos- 
sible channels.  Her  study  of  welfare  work 
in  England  shows  many  signs  of  reasonable 
thoroughness,  so  far  as  an  analysis  of  the  best 
examples  is  concerned.  It  certainly  is  to  be 
doubted  whether  she  sees  equally  clearly  its  un- 
favorable aspects  under  less  ideal  conditions. 
Nor  can  one  help  wondering  whether  she  has 


not  overrated  the  altruistic  initiative  of  the 
manufacturer  in  promoting  beneficent  factory 
legislation  in  the  past.  To  the  manufacturer, 
rather  than  to  the  worker,  she  now  turns  for  the 
development  of  normal  working-conditions  in  the 
factory  and  in  the  factory-worker's  home.  To  her 
the  welfare  worker  is — what  he  should  be — the 
institution's  social  secretary.  But  as  inspector, 
disciplinarian,  employing  agent,  timekeeper,  res- 
taurant-manager, recreational  director,  and  a 
score  of  other  things  which  quite  hopelessly 
combine  service  to  master  and  servant,  how  can 
he  be  considered  the  friend  of  both  in  a  capital- 
istic system  of  industry,  when  the  system  is  a 
battle  field?  Yet  in  the  best-managed  factories 
he  is  just  that.  The  author  believes  that  under 
proper  conditions  he  may  be  such  in  all.  The 
worker  believes  he  cannot,  preferring  the  free- 
dom and  errors  of  democracy  in  industry  to 
efficiency  with  mistrust  of  industrial  paternalism. 
We  shall  not  attempt  to  settle  the  question  at 
issue,  preferring  to  leave  it  to  the  reader,  but 
we  commend  the  book  both  for  its  information 
and  because  it  is  so  well  written. 

PHYSICAL  CHEMISTRY  OF  VITAL  PHENOM- 
ENA. By  J.  F.  McClendon.  Princeton 
University  Press;  $2. 

This  is  a  compendium  of  biochemistry  for  the 
use  of  students  and  investigators  in  the  biological 
and  medical  sciences.  It  is  the  outgrowth,  pri- 
marily, of  instruction  of  medical  students  in  this 
relatively  new  and  rapidly  developing  field  on 
the  frontier  of  biology.  It  deals  with  the  efforts 
to  interpret  the  processes  of  life  in  the  terms  of 
the  physicist  and  chemist.  From  the  study  of  the 
decomposition  products  of  once  living  cells  and 
from  the  analysis  of  the  exchanges  which  such 
cells  make  with  matter  and  energy  of  their  en- 
vironment, the  investigator  seeks  to  determine 
the  actual  composition  of  the  living  cell  and  to 
describe  the  changes  which  go  on  within  its  sub- 
stance during  its  functional  activity.  Hence  we 
find  here  discussions  of  ionic  concentrations,  os- 
motic pressure,  electrolytic  dissociation,  surface 
tension,  absorption,  colloids,  enzyme  action,  per- 
meability, polarization,  anaesthesia,  amoeboid 
motion,  and  many  other  topics  which  reflect  the 
triumphs  or  propose  the  hypotheses  of  those  who 
attack  the  problems  of  physiology  with  the  weap- 
ons of  the  physical  chemist.  A  terse,  almost  tele- 
graphic, style  leaves  the  reader  at  times  to  supply 
his  own  transitions  and  detect  relations  of  the 
disjunct  items.  The  specialist,  who  needs  none 
of  these  aids  to  comprehension,  finds  here  a  com- 
pact and  suggestive  array  of  fact  and  theory, 
annotated  to  indicate  both  the  territories  of  ex- 
ception or  debate  and  the  fields  for  further  in- 
quiry. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


205 


NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 


It  is  Mrs.  Atherton's  purpose  in  "The  White 
Morning"  (Stokes;  $1.)  to  show  that  assistance 
to  the  Allies  may  come  almost  any  day  from  the 
German  women  themselves,  rising  in  rebellion 
against  the  government.  For  in  the  years  before 
the  war,  when  women's  personal  liberty  had 
been  ignored  by  the  autocratic  heads  of  German 
households,  a  growing  distaste  for  marriage  had 
been  aroused  in  the  women  of  the  empire.  Now, 
according  to  Mrs.  Atherton,  as  soon  as  the  fun- 
damental truth  that  they  have  been  waging 
neither  a  defensive  nor  a  victorious  war  pene- 
trates to  the  German  women,  they  will,  "driven 
to  desperation  by  suffering  and  privation  and 
disillusion,"  suddenly  "arise  and  overthrow  the 
dynasty."  The  republic  which  they  will  then 
set  up  can  be  depended  upon  to  put  an  instant 
end  to  the  war  and  to  conclude  a  fair  peace. 

This  is  demonstrable  perhaps  as  a  thesis.  It  is 
regrettable,  however,  that  "The  White  Morn- 
ing" resembles  a  thesis  more  than  it  does  a  novel, 
especially  in  its  brevity,  its  rather  gaunt,  undis- 
tinguished style,  and  its  logical  impersonality. 
Whether  the  prophecy  is  sound  or  not — and  a 
cogent  note  appended  to  the  novel  by  Mrs.  Ath- 
erton makes  it  at  least  seem  plausible — the  reader 
is  not  moved  by  the  story  itself.  One  can  under- 
stand the  author's  impatience  to  put  into  circu- 
lation an  original  and  encouraging  notion  like 
this;  yet  the  fact  remains  that  the  growth  of  a 
great  popular  movement  with  the  depth  and 
breadth  of  the  French  Revolution  is  reported  in 
a  slender  novel  of  174  pages.  To  attempt  within 
these  limits  to  depict  even  a  few  chosen  charac- 
ters and  to  imply  their  participation  in  such  a 
revolution,  almost  dooms  a  writer  to  give  his 
story  that  cursory  hearsay  accent  of  the  twice 
told  tale  of  colloquial  narration.  Evident  marks 
of  a  too  zealous  haste  mar  the  book. 

"I  have  been  asked,"  states  the  author,  "to 
set  forth  my  authority  for  writing  'The  White 
Morning';  in  other  words,  for  daring  to  believe 
that  a  revolution  conceived  and  engineered  by 
women  is  possible  in  Germany."  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton explains  that  her  authority  is  based  on  what 
she  had  an  opportunity  for  observing  during  a 
seven  years'  residence  in  Munich.  There  she 
saw  what  seemed  to  be  a  pretty  general  dis- 
content with  marriage  on  the  part  of  women  of 
the  intellectual  class.  The  idea  of  its  growing 
into  a  definite  rebellion  was  Mrs.  Atherton's 
own,  although  since  the  novel  was  begun  con- 
firmation of  the  possibility  has  come  in  two  arti- 
cles published  in  this  country,  one  by  Mr.  A.  C. 
Roth,  ex-consul  in  Plauen,  and  another  by  Herr 
J.  Koetiggen,  a  refugee  from  Germany  whose 
article  appeared  in  the  New  York  "Chronicle" 


in  November.  No  one  can  question  the  sincerity 
of  Mrs.  Atherton's  prophecy — propaganda,  for 
obvious  reasons,  it  cannot  be.  It  is  clearly  one 
of  several  good  guesses  as  to  what  is  just  now 
in  Pandora's  box — Germany.  More  than  one 
writer  has  also  laid  claim  to  a  private  peep. 
And  our  hope  is  father  to  the  thought  that  Mrs. 
Atherton  may  be  correct  in  her  surmise. 

The  angels  of  Mons  might  testify  that  in 
"The  Terror"  (McBride;  $1.25)  Arthur  Ma- 
chen  knows  how  to  play  with  states  of  mind, 
especially  credulity.  In  this  case  he  has  added 
to  credulity,  horror.  He  mentions  one  dreadful 
event  after  another  in  an  offhand  manner — mur- 
ders and  sudden  death  in  a  war-swept  and  terror- 
ized England.  Each  one  he  orients  with  the 
matter-of-fact  exactitude  of  newspaper  narration. 
He  reports  suspicions  and  surmises  about  these 
horrors,  even  to  the  conversation  of  bores. 
He  goes  so  far  as  to  gag  the  British  press  on 
the  subject,  this  being  one  of  the  most  realistic 
touches  in  the  book.  He  pretends  himself  to  be 
humbly  ignorant ;  he  cannot  account  for  the  mys- 
terious horror  that  has  descended  on  the  land. 
All  this  is  to  sustain  the  mood.  A  few  charac- 
ters are  sketched  in  to  enrich  the  picture.  For 
those  who  love  mystery  and  that  titillation  of 
the  emotions  that  comes  of  something  dreadful 
about  to  be  explained,  who  have,  too,  some  crav- 
ing for  the  lurid  as  it  is  to  be  found  in  good 
description  of  crime  and  sudden  death,  "The 
Terror"  will  have  fascination.  Its  imaginative 
quality — halfway  between  the  exaggeration  of 
gossip  and  the  extravagance  of  tradition — gives 
it  its  slight  value.  But  it  remains  a  sketch,  an 
exercise  in  evoking  horror,  which  is  so  well  done 
as  to  leave  nothing  to  be  said  in  its  favor. 

"Four  Days,"  by  Hetty  Hemenway  (Little, 
Brown;  50  cts.),  is  yet  another  record  of  the 
intensity  which  these  years  of  war  have  brought 
— a  record  of  a  snatched  bit  of  honeymoon,  a 
torn  uniform,  a  few  poignant  days  of  sunshine, 
the  bitter  brevity  of  the  parting.  Originally 
published  as  a  short  story  in  the  "Atlantic 
Monthly,"  it  does  not,  in  book  form,  wholly 
justify  the  striking  impression  that  it  first  made. 
In  other  words,  although  clear  and  coherent  and 
tragic,  it  is  not  the  type  of  story  that  gains  by 
re-reading. 

Cecil  Sommers's  "Temporary  Heroes"  (Lane), 
a  series  of  letters  from  the  front  during  a  period 
of  eighteen  months,  is  notable  for  two  things: 
the  letters  are  readable;  and,  though  probably 
true,  they  are  not  horrible.  One  suspects  the 
author  of  indulging  a  proclivity  for  amusing 
description,  but  at  the  expense  merely  of  time. 
Surely  in  the  rush  of  horrors  there  should  be 
appreciation  for  this  light-hearted  chronicle  of 
the  trenches. 


206 


THE   DIAL 


[February  28 


CASUAL  COMMENT 


FOR  PRINTING  A  POEM  in  place  of  a  leading 
article  there  is  no  precedent  in  the  history  of 
THE  DIAL,  but  in  so  doing  the  publisher  feels 
that  he  is  living  up  to  his  declared  editorial  pol- 
icy: "to  try  to  meet  the  challenge  of  the  new 
time  by  reflecting  and  interpreting  its  spirit — 
a  spirit  freely  experimental,  skeptical  of  inher- 
ited values,  ready  to  examine  old  dogmas  and 
to  submit  afresh  its  sanctions  to  the  test  of  expe- 
rience." The  publisher  believes  that  "The 
Young  World"  is  of  the  utmost  significance  at 
the  present  time  in  that  it  gives  so  vivid  an 
expression  to  a  spirit  which  many  of  us  already 
see  emerging  from  the  war  conflict,  the  spirit 
of  internationalism.  There  are  rumors  on  every 
side  of  spiritual  awakening  .  .  .  even  we  in 
America  have  not  been  unmoved.  In  such  crises 
the  poet  is  the  truest  prophet.  In  this  connec- 
tion it  is  interesting  to  quote  Ralph  Adams  Cram, 
who  says  in  his  recently  published  "The  Sub- 
stance of  Gothic":  "Unless  there  is  behind  him 
[the  artist]  a  communal  self-consciousness,  unless 
the  air  is  quick  with  the  impulses  and  desires 
of  a  whole  people  eager  for  the  expression  of 
their  own  spiritual  experiences  and  emotions  .  .  . 
then  the  art  of  the  individual,  however  great  he 
may  be,  is  a  fond  thing,  vainly  imagined,  and 
no  part  of  any  life  save  only  his  own."  It  is 
not  too  soon  even  now  to  anticipate  this  social 
self -consciousness  which  the  war  will  bring  to 
America.  Once  that  consciousness  has  become 
articulate,  it  will  be  served  only  by  those  who 
move  unflinchingly  forward  toward  the  future. 


A  SANE  WARTIME  ECONOMY  is  urged  by  the 
"Publishers'  Weekly"  in  its  recent  summary  of 
the  1917  book  field.  Now  is  the  time,  says  the 
editor,  to  resist  the  fetish  of  the  new  book 
Sharper  and  sharper  competition  in  the  produc- 
tion of  novelties  has  brought  the  bookseller  to 
the  point  where  "he  dares  not  order  all  that  a 
new  book  might  warrant  for  fear  that  a  newer 
book  will  take  the  wind  out  of  its  sales  before 
his  counters  are  cleared."  The  publisher,  too, 
can  scarcely  "give  each  new  title  a  push"  into 
the  hazardous  world  before  he  must  father  its 
successor.  And  the  reader,  it  should  be  added, 
is  increasingly  harassed  by  the  fear  that  if  for 
a  moment  he  relax  vigilance  some  deserving  vol- 
ume, thus  orphaned,  may  slip  past  him  into  obliv- 
ion. Such  conditions,  observes  the  "Weekly," 
make  the  business  of  publishing  (and  of  reading) 
one  of  "continual  speculation  and  waste."  Now 
that  production  is  somewhat  reduced  and  fiction 
is  selling  less  than  non-fiction,  so  that  time  is 
less  of  the  essence  of  the  business,  publishers  have 


an  opportunity  to  guide  their  children  through 
the  mischances  of  a  life  that  need  not  be  so  brief. 
Let  them  "carry  on  1917  into  1918"— and 
beyond ;  let  them  distribute  emphasis  more  impar- 
tially between  the  newer  and  the  older  members 
of  their  families;  in  short,  while  they  are  making 
a  market  for  today's  book  let  them  remember  to 
extend  the  market  for  the  excellent  book  of  yes- 
terday. The  responsibility  for  this  economy  must 
rest  upon  the  publishers'  advertising ;  but  its  ben- 
efits would  reach  beyond  the  dealer  and  the 
publisher  himself,  in  whom  the  "Weekly"  is  pro- 
fessionally interested,  to  every  reader  whose 
pleasure  or  profit  interests  him  in  the  conserva- 
tion of  good  books. 

•  •     • 

THE  RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION  has  now  prac- 
tically completed  the  first  year  of  its  erratic  and 
thrilling  progress.  So  speedily  do  we  adapt  our- 
selves today  to  new  social  conditions  that  already 
the  autocratic  Russia  of  romance  and  fiction 
seems  something  of  the  dim  legendary  past.  For 
the  historian  and  psychologist  the  sudden  collapse 
of  the  older  myths  about  Russia  and  the  forma- 
tion of  new  ones  must  be  a  fascinating  contem- 
porary record  of  how  ideas  and  concepts  about 
a  nation  are  destroyed  and  remade.  Very  likely 
the  immediate  picture  of  Russia  as  a  country  torn 
to  pieces  by  anarchy,  violence,  and  fanatical  ideas 
is  as  false  to  reality  as  the  picture  in  the  pop- 
ular melodramas  of  ten  years  ago.  Even  in 
peace-time  it  is  not  easy  to  get  a  cool,  historical 
perspective;  in  time  of  war,  almost  the  attempt 
alone  seems  presumptuous.  Yet  it  is  an  attempt 
worth  making.  For  some  sense  of  the  movement 
of  history  would  probably  have  checked  us,  at 
the  beginning  of  the  revolution,  from  indulging 
in  too  fantastic  hopes  for  a  speedy  Russian  Utopia, 
just  as  some  sense  of  the  movement  of  history 
would  probably  today  check  us  from  too  great 
a  despair  at  the  current  course  of  events.  Let 
us  remember  that  nations  seldom  die  when  they 
have  the  vitality  for  anarchy. 

•  •     • 

THE  REPORT  ON  RECONSTRUCTION  after  the 
war,  prepared  by  the  sub-committee  of  the  British 
Labor  party,  is  a  document  of  remarkable  elo- 
quence and  vigor.  Compared  with  this  clear  and 
courageous  programme  for  a  new  social  order, 
the  tepid  and  rhetorical  generalizations  about 
the  necessity  for  cooperation  and  burying  the 
hatchet  between  capital  and  labor  for  the  period 
of  the  war,  which  have  emanated  from  American 
Labor  organizations,  seem  really  pitiful.  Is  there 
no  boldness,  no  intellectual  back-bone,  no  social 
thinking  in  the  leaders  of  American  Labor? 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


207 


Could  a  passage  like  the  following  be  found  in 
any  of  their  pronunciamentos  ? 

It  [the  Labor  party]  calls  for  more  warmth  in  poli- 
tics, for  much  less  apathetic  acquiesence  in  the  miseries 
that  exist,  for  none  of  the  cynicism  which  saps  the 
life  of  leisure.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Labor  party 
has  no  beliefs  in  any  of  the  problems  of  the  world  be- 
ing solved  by  good  will  alone.  Good  will  without 
knowledge  is  warmth  without  light.  Especially  in  all 
the  complexities  of  politics,  in  the  still  undeveloped 
science  of  society,  the  Labor  party  stands  for  increased 
study,  for  the  scientific  investigation  of  each  succeed- 
ing problem,  for  the  deliberate  organization  of  re- 
search, and  for  a  much  more  rapid  dissemination 
among  the  whole  people  of  all  the  science  that  exists.  .  . 
No  labor  party  can  hope  to  maintain  its  position  un- 
less its  proposals  are,  in  fact,  the  outcome  of  the 
best  political  science  of  its  time ;  or  to  fulfil  its  pur- 
pose unless  that  science  is  continually  wresting  new 
fields  from  human  ignorance. 

Obviously  this  passage  was  not  written  by  a 
Welsh  miner  or  a  Liverpool  dock-worker,  and 
perhaps  the  clue  to  the  discouraging  feebleness 
and  conventionality  of  the  social  vision  of  Amer- 
ican Labor  lies  ultimately  in  that  simple  fact. 
Between  the  British  laborer  and  the  intellectual 
man,  the  scientist,  the  Oxford  or  Cambridge  rad- 
ical, the  scholar  like  Graham  Wallas,  the  pub- 
licists like  Ramsey  Macdonald  and  J.  A.  Hobson, 
the  patient  investigator  like  Sydney  Webb,  the 
mathematician  and  philosopher  like  Bertrand 
Russell,  the  artist  and  poet  like  John  Masefield, 
the  popular  novelist  like  Wells,  the  satirist  like 
Shaw — between  men  of  this  type  and  the  British 
laborer  there  has  always  been  a  friendly  rap- 
prochement. For  example,  the  "Home  Univer- 
sity Library"  series,  selling  for  a  shilling  a 
volume,  brought  art  and  science  and  history  and 
religion  to  the  humblest  household.  The  men 
and  women  who  wrote  these  books  knew  how 
to  be  popular  without  becoming  patronizing ;  they 
could  be  informative  without  also  being  dull. 
Since  the  nineties,  too,  it  had  been  a  kind  of  tra- 
dition for  the  young  radical  to  join  some  wing 
of  the  Socialist  party  or  the  I.  L.  P.  The  lead- 
ers of  the  Labor  party,  although  at  first  the  mere 
business  agents  for  selfish  and  snobbish  crafts 
unions,  came  more  and  more  to  look  to  the  lib- 
eral university  men  for  guidance  and  help  instead 
of  regarding  them  suspiciously  as  the  special 
pleaders  for  a  privileged  class.  Socialism  was  a 
living  theory  then,  not  the  doctrinaire  rigidness 
of  immigrants  and  the  industrially  exploited,  as 
too  often  with  us.  British  Labor  leaders  had 
less  and  less  of  our  morbid  fear  of  the  "high- 
brow." Even  before  the  war  there  was  the  be- 
ginning of  a  genuine  alliance  between  those  who 
worked  with  their  hands  and  those  who  worked 
with  their  brain.  Since  the  war,  accompanying 
the  accelerating  deliquescence  of  traditional  Lib- 
eralism, the  Labor  party  has  grown  not  merely 
in  political  power  and  actual  membership  but  in 
steadiness  of  purpose,  in  the  power  to  think  and 


plan  constructively,  in  wise  and  temperedly  rad- 
ical leadership.  This  programme  for  reconstruc- 
tion is  the  fine  result  of  the  growth  and  union 
of  those  enlightened  and  vital  forces.  It  is  the 
programme  at  last  for  a  real  democracy. 


NOW    IF    THIS    HIGHLY    EFFECTIVE    ALLIANCE 

between  the  intellectuals  and  the  laborites  in 
England  has  its  obvious  political  and  moral  les- 
son for  American  trade-unionism,  it  has  equally 
a  lesson  for  the  American  professor.  Not  only 
must  our  own  labor  organizations  "go  into  poli- 
tics" with  a  purpose  and  a  programme  and  re- 
model their  antiquated  craft-unionism  structure, 
but  our  own  university  men  must  make  a  more 
vigorous  attempt  to  establish  a  real  political  and 
intellectual  partnership  with  the  leaders  of  or- 
ganized labor.  The  time  is  now  ripe  for  the 
organization  of  some  kind  of  non-exclusive  La- 
bor party,  with  a  touch  of  healthy  opportunism 
in  politics  perhaps,  yet  with  a  definite,  conscious 
programme.  Such  a  party  might  utilize  the 
brains  of  the  Socialist  party,  the  scientific  help 
of  the  university  men;  capitalize  the  discontent 
of  the  middle  class;  get  vitality  and  direction 
from  the  trade-unions.  Already  our  professorial 
type  tends  more  and  more  to  the  timid  recluse, 
the  jejune  well-mannered  and  over-cultivated. 
Our  Labor  organizations  still  think  mostly  of  the 
main  chance  for  themselves,  still  regard  politics 
as  a  game  where  clever  bargainers  know  how  to 
gain  special  legislative  privileges.  Our  Socialists 
still  shriek  in  impotent,  dogmatic  rage,  garner- 
ing the  votes  of  the  miserable  and  the  disinher- 
ited. Have  we  no  leaders  with  the  wisdom  and 
ability  to  gather  these  forces  together  and  focus 
them  on  a  common  democratic  purpose? 


THE  INCORRIGIBLE  ANTHOLOGIST,  like  the  con- 
firmed toper,  is  never  without  plausible  occasions 
for  indulging  his  vice.  Though  the  day  of 
unblushing  lists  of  "the  hundred  best  books"  now 
seems  as  remote  as  the  day  of  the  candid  remark 
that  passed  between  the  governors  of  the  Caro- 
linas,  listing  no  more  abates  in  the  face  of  out- 
raged public  opinion  than  (unless  statistics  lie 
and  there  is  no  truth  in  eye-opened  witnesses) 
alcoholic  consumption  diminishes  in  the  con- 
genial, but  now  "dry,"  Southland.  The  devotee 
has  merely  transferred  more  and  more  of  his 
ingenuity  from  the  compiling  of  lists  to  the  devis- 
ing of  new  occasions  for  lists.  It  was  a  genius 
in  his  day  who  first  posed  that  seductive  query, 
"If  you  were  cast  away  on  a  desert  isle  what 
score  of  books  would  you  select  .  .  .?"  How 
many  of  us  escaped  his  lure?  But  we  are  warier 
now  and  will  not  be  intrigued  by  any  but  the 
most  cunning  adepts  at  the  vice.  One  such  has 


208 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


"It's  a  Queer  Feller 

seen  by  a  queerer  feller." 
Such  is  Mr.  Tarkington's 
good-humored  description 
of  Mr.Holliday's  new  book. 
A  striking  portrait  of  the 
man  and  a  keen  analysis 
of  his  work,  without  any 
of  the  hero-worship  that 
sometimes  crops  out  in 
such  books.  Booth  Tark- 
ington's progress  is  traced 
from  the  spacious  Prince- 
ton days  to  the  later  Pen- 
rod  era.  There  are  en- 
lightening anecdotes  ga- 
lore and  engaging  pas- 
sages of  critical  insight. 
You  will  realize  why  this 
man  has  gathered  one  of 
the  most  enviable  follow- 
ings  in  America  when 
you  read 

BOOTH 
TARKINGTON 

By   Robert   Cortes    Holliday 

Net,  $1.25 
AT  YOUR  BOOKSELLER'S 


DOUBLED  AY, 
PAGE  &  CO. 


GARDEN  CITY 
NEW  YORK 


lately  drawn  up  a  full  net  from  the  sophisticated 
waters  of  the  New  York  "Sun."  His  technique 
is  inimitable: 

Sir:  You  were  choosing,  let  us  suppose,  some  books 
to  put  on  a  guest  room  shelf.  .  .  Many  of  your 
guests  are  of  the  male  sex  and  have  the  habit  of 
reading  in  bed.  You  keep  a  reading  lamp  by  the 
bed,  of  course,  and  a  bookshelf.  What  thirty  vol- 
umes. .  .?  May  I  tell  you  my.  .  .? 

The  thing  is  diabolical!  It  is  not  enough  to 
pillory  this  offender — Mr.  Christopher  Morley, 
Oxonian,  author  of  "Songs  for  a  Little  House," 
and  (so  brazen  is  the  cult!)  an  editor  of  "The 
Ladies'  Home  Journal" ;  such  crimes  evoke  emu- 
lators. The  wise,  therefore,  are  hereby  warned 
to  give  neither  comfort  nor  aid  to  anyone  solic- 
iting help  in  the  selection  of  "a  simple  library 
— say  three  score  titles — for  the  butler's  pantry" 
...  or  "a  shelf  of  thrillers  for  the  telephone 
booth,  to  while  away  the  hours  of  waiting"  .  .  . 
or  "a  half  dozen  duodecimos,  on  India  paper, 
for  the  bird  house  under  the  eaves." 


A    VIVID    DESCRIPTION    OF    THE    SAMMIES    in 

France  appears  in  a  recent  number  of  "Inter- 
America,"  a  new  monthly  magazine  of  Pan- 
Americanism  published  by  Doubleday,  Page  and 
Company  which  is  printed  alternately  in  Spanish 
and  in  English.  The  quotation  is  from  an  article 
by  Antonio  G.  de  Linares,  Paris  correspondent  of 
the  Argentine  "Caras  y  Caretas" : 

Large,  slow,  phlegmatic,  the  Americans  filed  through 
the  streets  of  the  city  without  being  affected  in  the 
least  by  the  "parade." 

They  are  countrymen  or  sportive  citizens,  dressed 
rather  as  cowboys  than  as  soldiers,  and  they  savor 
of  the  Far  West.  Among  them  there  is  no  display 
of  gold  lace,  no  fine  trimmings,  and  barely  an  oak 
leaf,  an  eagle,  or  a  star  shows  on  their  collars  or 
shoulders  to  indicate  their  rank.  They  are  strong 
and  healthy,  and  they  are  not  warlike.  They  give  the 
impression  of  being  good,  frank,  well  trained  boys; 
and  they  will  get  themselves  killed — since  this  is  what 
they  came  for — and  they  will  die  in  the  Dantesque 
waste  of  No  Man's  Land  with  great  valor  and  with 
ever  greater  surprise,  while  seeking  with  their  almost 
infantile  blue  eyes  the  maternal  bosom  of  their  native 
heavens  and  the  soft  horizon  of  the  prairies. 

THE  GOLD  MEDAL  of  the  National  Insti- 
tute of  Arts  and  Letters  returns  to  sculpture 
after  nine  years.  It  was  first  awarded  to  Augus- 
tus Saint-Gaudens ;  it  now  comes  to  Daniel  Ches- 
ter French.  Meanwhile,  however,  it  has  almost 
as  often  gone  out  into  the  by-ways  and  hedges 
as  it  has  decorated  men  whom  the  nation  must 
delight  to  honor — Riley,  Howells,  or  Sargent. 
Perhaps  it  only  imitates  the  inscrutable  ballot  of 
election.  This  year  Franklin  Henry  Giddings, 
Edward  Sheldon,  Frank  Vincent  Dumond,  Fred- 
erick Law  Olmsted,  Douglas  Volk,  and  John 
Alden  Carpenter  have  become  immortal. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


209 


COMMUNICATION 


BOOKS  ON  PALESTINE. 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

The  recent  capture  of  Jerusalem  by  the  British 
and  the  declaration  of  the  British  government  in 
favor  of  the  reestablishment  of  a  Jewish  state  in 
Palestine  has  created  a  great  revival  of  interest  in 
books  bearing  on  the  Holy  Land  and  the  world- 
wide movement  among  the  Jews  to  recover  their 
homeland.  The  Jews  of  the  United  States  are  rais- 
ing a  fund  to  restore  Palestine  and  accomplish  the 
repatriation  of  their  people.  It  is  predicted  that 
a  great  revival  of  Hebrew  culture  will  follow  the 
reestablishment. 

A  list  of  easily  obtainable  books  published  in 
English  in  recent  years,  dealing  with  Palestine  and 
its  people,  and  describing  the  modern  Jewish  colo- 
nies already  established  in  Palestine,  may  interest 
your  readers: 

"Palestine,  the  Rebirth  of  an  Ancient  People." 
By  Albert  M.  Hyamson;  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1917. 

"Zionism  and  the  Jewish  Future."  By  various 
writers,  edited  by  H.  Sacher;  John  Murray,  Lon- 
don, 1917. 

"Zionism — Problems  and  Views."  By  P.  Good- 
man and  Arthur  D.  Lewis;  T.  F.  Unwin,  Ltd., 
London,  1916. 

"Recent  Jewish  Progress  in  Palestine."  By  Hen- 
rietta Szold;  Jewish  Publication  Society  of  Amer- 
ica, Philadelphia,  1915. 

"Zionist  Pamphlets."  London,  1915.  Published 
by  "The  Zionist." 

"Zionism."  By  Richard  Gottheil;  Jewish  Pub- 
lication Society  of  America,  Philadelphia,  1914. 

"Palestine  and  the  Jews."  By  F.  G.  Jannaway; 
Birmingham,  1914. 

"The  Haskalah  Movement."  By  Jacob  S.  Rai- 
sin; Jewish  Publication  Society  of  America,  Phila- 
delphia, 1913. 

"Jews  of  Today."  By  Dr.  Arthur  Ruppin. 
Translated  from  the  German  by  Margery  Bent- 
wich,  with  an  introduction  by  Joseph  Jacobs;  G. 
Bell  and  Sons,  London,  1913. 

"Zionist  Work  in  Palestine."  By  various 
authorities,  edited  by  Israel  Cohen;  Judaean  Pub- 
lishing Co.,  New  York,  1912. 

"The  Story  of  Jerusalem."  (Historical.)  By  Sir 
C.  M.  Watson;  J.  M.  Dent  &  Sons,  Ltd.,  Lon- 
don, 1912. 

"The  Land  That  Is  Desolate."  By  Sir  Freder- 
ick Treves;  E.  P.  Button  &  Co.,  1912. 

"Palestine  and  its  Transformation."  By  Ells- 
worth Huntington;  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.,  1911. 

"Selected  Essays."  By  A.  Ginsberg  (Achad 
Ha'am) ;  Jewish  Publication  Society  of  America, 
Philadelphia,  1910. 

"The  Historical  Biography  of  the  Holy  Land." 
(16th  edition.)  By  George  Adam  Smith;  London, 
1910. 

"A  Jewish  State."  By  Theodor  Herzl;  D.  Nutt, 
London,  1896. 

HAROLD  KELLOCK. 

Provisional  Executive  Committee 
For  General  Zionist  Affairs 
New  York  City. 


RECENT  BOOKS 

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The  United  States  and  the  War.    The 
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Root  as  head  of  the  Mission  to  Russia. 
All  of  his  public  utterances  in  that  capacity 
are  included. 

Norman  Institutions 

By  CHARLES  HOMER  HASKINS,  Gurney 
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Trade  and  Navigation  between 
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Special  stress  is  laid  upon  the  period  of  the 
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An  investigation  of  the  actual  operation  of 
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The  Divine  Comedy  of  Dante  Alighieri 

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210 


THE    DIAL 


[February  28 


"I  visited  with  a  natural  rapture  the 
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See  the  chapter  on  Chicago,  page  43,  "Yow 
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It  is  recognized  throughout  the  country 
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combined  with  our  unsurpassed  book  stock, 
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NOTES  AND  NEWS 


James  Oppenheim,  whose  poem  "The  Young 
World"  leads  this  issue  of  THE  DIAL,  is  the  author 
of  several  volumes  of  fiction  and  verse.  His  bet- 
ter known  books  of  poetry  have  been:  "Monday 
Morning,  and  Other  Poems"  (1909),  "The  Pi- 
oneers" (a  play  in  verse,  1910),  and  "Songs  for 
the  New  Age"  (1914).  In  March  Huebsch  will 
issue  another  collection,  which  will  include  and 
take  its  title  from  "The  Young  World."  Mr. 
Oppenheim  has  been  a  frequent  contributor  to  peri- 
odicals and  was  editor  of  "The  Seven  Arts." 

C.  K.  Trueblood  is  a  graduate  in  science  of  both 
Earlham  and  Haverford  colleges.  In  1915  he  re- 
ceived an  A.M.  from  Harvard.  He  is  now  an  in- 
structor in  English  at  the  University  of  Wisconsin. 

The  other  contributors  to  this  issue  have  previ- 
ously appeared  in  the  columns  of  THE  DIAL. 


January  17  this  column  published  an  announce- 
ment by  The  Poetry-Lovers  of  New  York  City 
regarding  a  prize  contest  in  which  Ridgely  Tor- 
rence  was  included  among  the  judges.  Mr.  Tor- 
rence  writes  that  he  is  not  serving  in  that  capacity. 

Harper  &  Bros,  have  announced  "A  History  of 
Architecture,"  by  Fiske  Kimball  and  G.  H.  Edgell. 

Sully  &  Kleinteich,  publishers,  have  now  become 
George  Sully  &  Co.  Their  address  is  373  Fourth 
Avenue,  New  York  City. 

Rand  McNally  &  Co.  are  the  publishers  of  a 
vest-pocket  manual  on  "The  United  States  Army, 
Facts  and  Insignia,"  by  Valdemar  Paulsen. 

The  cumulated  annual  "Readers'  Guide"  for 
1917  is  just  off  the  press  of  the  H.  W.  Wilson  Co. 
THE  DIAL  is  among  the  periodicals  regularly  in- 
dexed in  the  "Guide." 

Stanton  &  Van  Vliet  are  offering  "Aeroplane 
Construction  and  Operation,"  by  John  B.  Rathbun 
— a  manual  for  constructors,  students,  aero-mechan- 
ics, flight  officers,  and  schools. 

"The  Pilgrims  of  Hawaii,"  an  account  of  the 
first  American  missionaries  in  the  Pacific  islands, 
by  Rev.  Orramel  Hinckley  Gulick  and  his  wife, 
has  just  been  published  by  the  Revell  Co. 

The  World  Book  Co.,  Yonkers-on-Hudson,  New 
York,  have  recently  published  a  blank-book  designed 
to  assist  farmers  in  keeping  necessary  daily  rec- 
ords, the  "Farm  Diary,"  designed  by  E.  H.  Thom- 
son. 

March  1  the  Association  Press,  which  prints  gen- 
eral religious  works  and  some  fiction  as  well  as 
the  publications  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  will  move 
to  the  new  Equitable  Trust  Building,  45th  Street 
at  Madison  Avenue,  New  York. 

Mr.  Christian  D.  Larson  announces  that  in 
March  "Eternal  Progress"  will  resume  publica- 
tion. It  will  appear  monthly  from  San  Francisco. 
Communications  should  be  addressed  to  Mr.  Lar- 
son at  210  Post  Street. 

Edgar  Middleton,  author  of  "Airfare  of  Today 
and  of  the  Future"  (Scribners),  plans  to  accompany 
the  aviator  Herbert  Sykes  in  a  projected  flight  from 
London  to  New  York  by  aeroplane.  They  expect 
to  leave  Feltham,  Middlesex,  at  dawn  and  reach 
New  York  before  dark. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


211 


H.  M.  Kallen's  series  of  papers  on  "The  Struc- 
ture of  Lasting  Peace,"  which  are  concluded  in  this 
number  of  THE  DIAL,  are  to  be  issued  in  book  form 
by  Marshall  Jones  this  spring.  Next  month  Mof- 
fat,  Yard  &  Co.  will  publish  his  "Book  of  Job," 
a  Greek  tragedy. 

"Great  Britain  at  War"  is  the  title  under  which 
Jeffery  Farnol  has  collected  his  pen  pictures  of  the 
French  battle-fields,  the  grand  fleet,  the  training 
camps,  and  the  English  munition  plants  and  ship- 
yards which  he  has  visited.  The  volume  will 
shortly  be  brought  out  by  Little,  Brown  &  Co. 

Mr.  Philip  Goodman  announces  that  the  title  of 
H.  L.  Mencken's  volume  which  he  will  publish 
March  15  has  been  changed  from  "Forty-Nine 
Little  Essays"  to  "Damn!  A  Book  of  Calumny." 
Mr.  Goodman  has  another  Mencken  book  listed 
for  May  1 — "The  Infernal  Feminine." 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  now  have  ready  the  sec- 
ond volume  of  James  Ward's  "History  and 
Methods  of  Ancient  and  Modern  Painting,"  which 
is  devoted  to  Italian  art  from  the  twelfth  to  the 
fifteenth  century.  The  third  volume  will  continue 
with  Italian  art  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries. 

The  "Collected  Works"  of  Padraic  Pearse  will 
be  issued  in  this  country  next  month  by  the  Fred- 
erick A.  Stokes  Co.,  who  also  announce  three 
March  additions  to  their  "New  Commonwealth 
Series":  "The  World  of  States,"  by  C.  Delisle 
Burns;  "The  Church  in  the  Commonwealth,"  by 
Richard  Roberts;  and  "Freedom,"  by  Gilbert 
Cannan. 

The  Page  Co.  have  issued  this  month  two  addi- 
tions to  their  "See  America  First"  Series:  "Flor- 
ida, the  Land  of  Enchantment,"  by  Nevin  O. 
Winter,  and  "Colorado,  the  Queen  Jewel  of  the 
Rockies,"  by  Mae  Lucy  Baggs.  For  spring  pub- 
lication they  announce  a  novel  of  business  life, 
"Dawson  Black,"  by  Prof.  Harold  Whitehead  of 
Boston  University. 

Mrs.  F.  L.  Coolidge  has  offered  a  prize  of  $1000 
for  the  best  original  string  quartet  submitted  in  a 
competition  to  be  judged  by  Franz  Kneisel,  Fred- 
erick A.  Stock,  Georges  Longy,  Kurn  Schindler, 
and  Hugo  Kortschak.  Inquiries  should  be  ad- 
dressed to  Mr.  Kortschak  at  Aeolian  Hall,  New 
York. 

Among  the  books  promised  on  the  spring  list 
of  the  Yale  University  Press  are:  "The  Method 
of  Henry  James,"  by  Joseph  Warren  Beach;  "The 
History  of  Henry  Fielding,"  by  Wilbur  L.  Cross; 
"An  Outline  Sketch  of  English  Constitutional  His- 
tory," by  George  Burton  Adams;  "The  Processes 
of  History,"  by  Frederick  J.  Teggert;  and  "Human 
Nature  and  Its  Remaking,"  by  William  Ernest 
Hocking. 

Last  year  St.  Andrew's  University,  Edinburgh, 
established  prizes  for  essays  on  prayer.  The  first 
competition  brought  out  1700  contestants  and  the 
five  prizes  were  divided  between  England,  India, 
Switzerland,  and  America.  The  American  win- 
ner ($500)  was  the  Rev.  Samuel  McComb  of 
Baltimore,  author  of  "A  Book  of  Prayers,"  of 
which  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  recently  got  out  a  new 
edition. 


OLD    STATE    HOUSE,    SPRINGFIELD 

LINCOLN  IN  ILLINOIS 

By  OCTAVIA  ROBERTS 
Illustrations  by  LESTER  G.  HORNBY 

The  author  of  this  notable  book  is  a  native 
of  Springfield,  Illinois.  From  her  childhood, 
she  has  been  steeped  in  traditions  and  anec- 
dotes of  Lincoln's  life  there,  and  by  good 
fortune  has  recently  obtained  a  manuscript 
diary  kept  by  a  neighbor  of  Lincoln's  dur- 
ing his  Springfield  life,  which  contains  many 
vivid  pen  pictures  of  the  President.  From 
this  material  and  from  her  own  memories 
and  investigations,  she  has  constructed  a 
most  interesting,  readable,  and  illuminating 
book. 

Recognizing  the  importance  of  the  ma- 
terial, Mr.  Lester  G.  Hornby,  the  famous 
illustrator,  consented  to  go  to  Illinois  and 
make  for  the  book  a  permanent  pictorial  rec- 
ord of  the  scenes  associated  with  Lincoln. 
The  result  is  a  volume  as  attractive  as  it 
is  important,  and  one  that  has  fixed  for  all 
time — pictorially  and  textually — the  details 
of  Lincoln's  life  in  Illinois. 

Royal  8vo,  Large-Paper  Edition,  limited 
to  1,000  copies  for  sale,  at  $5.00  net,  each. 

Other  Recent  and  Notable 
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HONEST  ABE 

By   ALONZO   ROTHSCHILD 
Illustrated.     $2.00  net 

LINCOLN:  MASTER  OF  MEN 

By   ALONZO   ROTHSCHILD 
With  frontispiece.     $1.75  net 

UNCOLLECTED  LETTERS  OF 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Now  first  brought  together  by  GILBERT 
TRACY.    With  introduction  by  IDA  M.  TAR- 
BELL.     With  photogravure  frontispiece. 
$2.50  net 

ABRAHAM  LINCOLN, 
THE  LAWYER-STATESMAN 

By  JOHN  T.  RICHARDS 
Illustrated.     $3.00  net 

Houghton  Mifflin  Company 

Boston  and  New  York 


212 


THE   DIAL 


[February  28 


BUSINESS  BOOKS 

Business  books  are  helping  to  solve 
the  economic  problems  caused  by 
the  war.  Men  and  women  every- 
where are  seeking  practical  help 
to  carry  on  increased  business  with 
fewer  workers.  The  demand  for 
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D.  Appleton  &  Company  publish  the 
business  books  people  want.  Pi- 
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up  a  great,  varied  list  of  authori- 
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is  represented.  Every  librarian, 
every  teacher  of  business  subjects, 
every  business  man  and  woman 
will  find  it  profitable  to  examine 
the  Appleton  list.  Write  to  D.  Ap- 
pleton &  Company,  35  West  32d 
Street,  New  York,  for  a  copy  of 
their  special  Business  Book  Cat- 
alog. Appleton  Business  Books 
may  be  had  at  all  booksellers. 

When  You  Think  of  Business 
Books  Think  of  APPLETONS' 


"A  Philadelphia  Pepys" 

The  Homely  Diary 
of  a  Diplomat  in  the  East 

By  THOMAS  S.  HARRISON 

THE  author  of  this  delightful  volume  was 
American  Diplomatic  Agent  and  Consul- 
General  in  Egypt  in  the  late  nineties.    A 
man   of  means   and   culture,   with   a  charming 
wife,    he    had    a    high    position    in    diplomatic 
society  at  one  of  the  most  cosmopolitan  of  capi- 
tals,   and    this    fresh    and    intimate    record    of 
experiences  and  of  his  acquaintance  with  many 
notabilities  makes  a  most  readable  narrative. 

"The  student  of  social  history,  browsing 
through  the  libraries  of  the  year  2020,  who 
discovers  Colonel  Harrison's  Homely  Diary  will 
exclaim  with  delight  at  the  treasures  he  will 
find  buried  there." — Philadelphia  Public  Ledger. 

Lavishly  illustrated.     $5.  00  net.     At  all  bookstore* 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

Boston  New  York 


Joseph  Pennell's  "Pictures  of  War  Work  in 
America,"  the  publication  of  which  has  been  de- 
layed from  December,  is  among  the  forthcoming 
Lippincott  books.  "The  Training  and  Rewards  of 
the  Physician,"  by  Richard  C.  Cabot,  and  "The 
Organization  of  Thought,"  by  A.  N.  Whitehead, 
are  announced  for  early  publication  by  the  same 
house. 

Late  this  month  Henry  Holt  &  Co.  are  issuing 
"Leon  Trotzky  as  Revealed  in  his  Writings  and 
Life,"  which  will  contain  a  translation  of  his  "Our 
Revolution"  (secretly  published  in  Petrograd  be- 
fore the  revolution),  his  essays  and  articles  written 
between  1904  and  1917,  and  a  biography  and  notes 
by  the  translator,  M.  J.  Olgin,  author  of  "The 
Soul  of  the  Russian  Revolution." 

Another  new  book  which  reflects  recent  history 
in  Russia  is  "The  Life  and  Confessions  of  the 
Mad  Monk,  Iliodor— Sergius  M.  Trufanoff,"  which 
the  Century  Co.  publishes.  Father  Iliodor  pre- 
pared Rasputin  for  the  priesthood  and  was  for  sev- 
eral years  the  friend  and  confidant  of  the  "holy 
devil."  Later  on  he  discovered  the  latter's  intrigues 
and  led  a  campaign  against  him,  for  which  he  was 
unfrocked  and  imprisoned.  He  escaped  to  Nor- 
way and  is  now  living  in  New  York. 

The  mid-February  Houghton  Mifflin  list  in- 
cluded "Lincoln  in  Illinois,"  by  Octavia  Roberts,  in 
a  limited,  large  paper  edition  illustrated  by  Lester 
G.  Hornby;  the  "Life  of  Naomi  Norsworthy,"  of 
Teachers  College,  by  Frances  Caldwell  Higgins;  a 
new  book  of  verse  by  Jessie  B.  Rittenhouse,  "The 
Door  of  Dreams";  and  another  contribution  to 
the  rapidly  growing  literature  about  contemporary 
Russia — "Trapped  in  Black  Russia,"  by  Ruth 
Pierce,  who  was  for  six  weeks  detained  as  a  spy. 

Upton  Sinclair  has  issued  the  first  number  of  a 
monthly  magazine  "to  advocate  a  just  and  perma- 
nent peace  settlement."  It  is  called  "Upton  Sin- 
clair's" and  is  issued  from  his  home  at  Pasadena, 
California.  In  this  magazine  he  will  publish  seri- 
ally the  sequel  to  "King  Coal"— "The  Coal  War," 
a  novel  about  the  Colorado  coal  strike;  and  "The 
Profits  of  Religion,  an  Essay  in  Economic  Interpre- 
tation," being  a  study  of  supernaturalism  "as  a 
source  of  income  and  a  shield  to  privilege." 

The  following  religious  works  are  among  those 
announced  as  nearly  ready  by  Longmans,  Green  & 
Co.:  "The  Mount  of  Vision:  Being  a  Study  of 
Life  in  Terms  of  the  Whole,"  by  the  Right  Rev. 
Charles  H.  Brent;  "The  Cross,"  by  Rev.  Jesse 
Brett;  "Christianity  and  Immortality,"  by  Vernon 
F.  Storr;  "Religious  Reality,"  by  Rev.  A.  E.  J. 
Rawlinson;  "Social  Problems  and  Christian  Ideals," 
by  a  few  Northern  Churchmen. 

Five  years  ago  "The  Publishers'  Weekly"  pre- 
pared its  list  of  1200  private  book  collectors.  Two 
years  later  the  work  was  extended  to  1800  names; 
and  an  alphabetical  list,  as  well  as  an  index  to  the 
various  subjects  represented  by  the  collectors,  was 
added  to  the  geographical  arrangement.  For  fall 
publication  another  revision  is  planned,  to  bring  the 
list  down  to  date.  Book  collectors  not  hitherto 
included,  if  they  desire  to  be  registered — with  their 
hobbies — should  write  to  the  "Weekly"  at  241 
West  37th  Street,  New  York. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


213 


LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 


\The  following    list,   containing   8l   titles,   includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.} 

THE  WAR. 

The  United  State*  and  the  War;  The  mission  to 
Russia;  Political  Addresses.  By  Elihu  Root. 
Collected  and  edited  by  Robert  Bacon  and  James 
Brown  Scott.  8vo,  362  pages.  Harvard  Univer- 
sity Press.  $2.50. 

The  Voices  of  Our  Leaders.  A  Collection  of  Ad- 
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1918] 


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215 


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216  THE     DIAL  [February  28,  1918 


OUR 
REVOLUTION 

By  I*eon  Trotzky 

ESSAYS   ON   WORKING    CLASS   AND    INTERNATIONAL   REVOLUTION    (1904-1917) 

Collected   and   translated,   with   biography   and  explanatory    notes   by    MOISSAYE   J. 

OLGIN,  author  of  "The  Soul  of  the  Russian  Revolution" 

Ready  immediately,  $1.25  net 

The  reader  may  agree  or  disagree  with  Trotzky's  views  and  acts,  but  these  writ- 
ings of  his,  which  twelve  years  ago  pictured  an  imaginary  world,  seem  today  but  the 
history  of  an  accomplished  episode.  They  show  a  continuity  of  revolutionary  doctrine 
unrealized  by  most  of  the  world  outside  Russia,  with  which  it  behooves  English  read- 
ers to  become  acquainted. 

This  book  contains  the  one  English  translation  of  the  theoretical  portions  of 
Trotzky's  book  "Our  Revolution"  published  in  Russia  in  1906  in  defiance  of  censor- 
ship and  immediately  suppressed  This  is  Trotzky's  clearest  exposition  of  his  views. 
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America. 

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abortive  revolution  of  1905;  predicting  revolution;  an  essay  written  ten  days 
after  the  revolution  of  1905;  an  essay  on  the  Workingmen's  Council  of  1905 
of  which  Trotzky  was  Chairman ;  the  preface  to  Trotzky's  "My  Round  Trip," 
an  account  of  his  exile  to  Siberia,  expressing  his  ironclad  certainty  of  a  Rus- 
sian revolution ;  and  several  essays  written  in  New  York  before  Trotzky  left 
for  Petrograd  in  July,  1917 

The  Soul  of  the 
Russian  Revolution 

By  Moissaye  J.  Olgin 

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must  say  that  his  work  will  be  recognized  as  one  of  the  best  even  in  Russia." 

— Jewish  Daily  Forward 

"It  is  of  vital  importance  to  know  the  currents  of  democracy  and  revolution 
up  to  the  outbreak  of  1905,  and  from  that  time  to  the  present  day.  The 
author  has  true  dramatic  power,  and  he  treats  the  new  thought  and  new 
aspiration  of  Russia  as  living  forces."  — The  Outlook 

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CONTENTS 


A  STUDY  OF  AMERICAN  INTOLERANCE 
LETTERS  TO  UNKNOWN  WOMEN     .     . 

To  the  Slave  in  "Cleon." 

JOHN  BARRYMORE'S  IBBETSON  .  .  ,' 
To  RUPERT  BROOKE  .  .  Verse 
OUR  PARIS  LETTER  .  '.  .  •.  .  . 
ESTABLISHING  THE  ESTABLISHED  .  . 
A  VANISHING  WORLD  OF  GENTILITY  . 
DEMOCRACY  BY  COERCION  .... 
POETRY  vs.  POLITICS  IN  THE  UKRAINE 
" MILLION-FOOTED  MANHATTAN"  . 


223 
226 

227 
229 
230 
233 
234 
235 
238 
239 
241 
BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 243 

Voyages  on  the  Yukon  and  Its  Tributaries. — The  Life  and  Letters  of  Robert  Col- 
lyer. — The  Odes  and  Secular  Hymn  of  Horace. — A  Short  History  of  Rome. — 
Professionalism  and  Originality. — The  Art  of  George  Frederick  Munn. — Brah- 
madarsanam  or  Intuition  of  the  Absolute. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 246 

BRIEFER  MENTION 248 

COMMUNICATION 249 

Why  Critics  Should  Be  Educated. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 250 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  .  252 


Alfred  Booth  Kuttner 
Richard  Aldington     . 

Marsden  Hartley 
Maurice  Browne  .     . 
Robert  Dell     .     .     . 
Henry  B.  Fuller    .     . 
Randolph  Bourne 
Clarence  Britten   . 
Louis  Untermeyer 
Harold  Stearns 


THE  SOUL  OF  CIVILIANS  .     .     .     .     .     Myron  R.  Williams 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 

CONRAD  AIKEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


Contributing  Editor t 
VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 
PADRAIC  COLUM 
HENRY  B.  FULLER 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

H.  M.  KALLBN 
KENNETH  MACGOWAN 
JOHN  £.  ROBINSON 


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Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892,  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
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Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Marryn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
Secretary-Treasurer,  at  608  South  Dearborn  Street,  Chicago. 


222 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14,  1918 


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SL  Jfortnigfttlp  Journal  of  Criticism  and  SDi0cus0ion  of  Eitr  taturr  and  tllfje  fttt* 


Study  of  American  Intolerance 


PART  ONE:    THE  UNACKNOWLEDGED  HISTORICAL  BACKGROUND 


After  we  are  through  wringing  our 
hands  over  our  intolerance  we  shall  still 
have  to  face  the  fact.  We  shall  have  to 
answer  how  it  came  about  that  a  country 
which  claims  the  highest  development  of 
democracy  could  at  the  same  time  be  so 
crudely  and  often  so  savagely  intolerant. 
We  shall  have  to  answer  the  unpleasant 
question  of  how  mob  rule,  and  the  intel- 
lectual atmosphere  that  goes  with  it, 
should  suddenly  have  become  good  form. 
For  it  is  gravely  doubtful  if  even  the  most 
optimistic  of  us  can  agree  with  John  Dew- 
ey's  amiable  explanation.  We  cannot, 
after  all,  be  content  with  the  idea  that  our 
democratic  deterioration  is  merely  part 
of  that  swift  and  widespread  de-civiliza- 
tion which  invariably  accompanies  all 
wars.  Nor  can  we  accept  the  barren  con- 
solation which  tells  us  that  the  evil  is  only 
apparent — an  excess  of  our  youth  and 
inexperience  that  somehow  will  make  for 
our  ultimate  integration.  First  of  all,  too 
many  invidious  comparisons  can  be  made 
with  other  belligerents,  which,  as  Mr. 
Dewey  himself  testifies,  have  shown  con- 
siderably less  bitterness  and  savagery  than 
we.  Furthermore,  the  historical  evidence 
that  intolerance  is  perhaps  the  most  effec- 
tive agent  of  disintegration  in  a  common- 
wealth is  far  too  striking.  We  too  easily 
recall  that  it  was  the  disintegrative  force 
of  intolerance  in  European  countries 
which  helped  to  populate  these  shores. 

If  our  intolerance  were  merely  an  inci- 
dental unpleasantness  of  war-time,  as  too 
many  of  us  like  to  imagine,  the  urgency 
for  our  understanding  it  would  not  be 
great.  It  is,  however,  a  bad  heritage  and 
a  menace  for  our  future.  We  are  dealing 
with  something  much  more  than  the  nor- 
mal intolerance  to  be  expected  in  times  of 
war.  The  problem  is  really  a  specific  one 
to  be  treated  in  terms  of  the  social  and 
racial  conditions  that  exist  among  us.  Cer- 
tainly we  shall  miss  an  understanding  of 


the  situation  if  we  regard  it  as  merely  a 
thing  of  today.  The  war  has  simply 
brought  out  what  has  long  been  latent. 

We  are,  of  course,  inclined  to  sentimen- 
talize. We  like  to  look  back  romantically 
to  the  heyday  of  tolerance  and  free  speech 
of  the  New  England  town  meeting,  con- 
veniently forgetting  the  social  and  reli- 
gious intolerance  which  tainted  so  much 
of  our  early  history.  Yet  our  past  intol- 
erance never  really  mattered  so  much, 
because  the  issue  could  always  be  evaded. 
The  ultimate  test  of  tolerance  does  not 
come  until  people  are  compelled  to  live 
together  in  close  and  vital  relations.  The 
tolerance  that  is  worth  while  is  usu- 
ally found  in  mature  and  settled  and  fairly 
well  populated  communities  where  the  geo- 
graphical evasion  has  become  so  difficult 
that  it  is  no  longer  thought  of  except  as  a 
last  resort.  With  us  that  was  never  the 
case.  We  were  always  free  to  move  on 
if  social  conditions  did  not  suit  us;  or  if 
we  did  not  suit,  we  were  told  to  move  on. 
Just  as  the  intolerance  of  Europe  popu- 
lated our  Eastern  seaboard  in  the  first 
place,  so  our  own  intolerance  progressively 
populated  the  country  from  the  East  to 
the  Pacific  coast.  The  history  of  our 
Westward  movement  is  the  history  of 
people  who  moved  on  in  order  to  be  able 
to  do  what  they  pleased  not  only  econom- 
ically but  socially  and  in  religion.  Intol- 
erance is  notoriously  slow  in  teaching 
tolerance  to  the  persecuted.  In  every  new 
community  the  new  schismatists  moved  on 
in  turn.  Tolerance  did  not  become  an 
issue  with  us  until  the  country  had  filled 
up,  until  the  wave  turned  east  again. 

While  this  was  taking  place  two  social 
and  racial  factors  entered  into  our 
national  life  which  completely  upset  the 
natural  development  of  tolerance.  One 
was  the  aftermath  of  the  Civil  War  and 
the  other  was  the  sudden  large  influx  of 
diversely  alien  immigrants  which  began 


224 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


during  the  seventies  and  the  eighties  of  the 
last  century.  The  first  of  these  is  the  more 
fundamental,  and  to  a  great  extent  it 
explains  the  second.  The  Civil  War  gave 
us  the  negro  problem,  perhaps  the  great- 
est racial  problem  which  any  nation  has 
ever  had  to  face.  Before  the  negro 
acquired  a  civic  status  he  did  not  so  much 
live  with  us  as  under  us.  But  as  soon  as 
he  entered  our  lives  and  made  a  bid  for 
equality  we  began  to  develop  the  typical 
psychology  of  a  superior  race  in  intimate 
contact  with  an  inferior  one.  This  psy- 
chology is  well  known  in  every  European 
settlement  in  the  Far  East  and  finds  its 
most  complete  expression  in  the  attitude 
towards  the  Eurasian  on  the  part  not  only 
of  the  superior  race  but  also  of  the  inferior 
race — which,  of  course,  does  not  consider 
itself  inferior.  It  is  expressed  in  a  general 
tightening  up,  a  codification  of  the  forms 
of  social  intercourse.  Both  races  accept  a 
number  of  social  taboos  to  which  they 
strictly  adhere.  There  must  not  be  too 
much  intimacy  or  a  too  sympathetic  ex- 
change of  thoughts  and  emotions.  The 
restraint  falls  most  heavily  upon  all  forms 
of  social  intercourse  which  might  lead  to 
an  approach  between  the  sexes.  For  this 
is,  of  course,  the  great  danger  point  and 
represents  the  fear  of  absorption  on  the 
part  of  the  superior  race.  That  is  why 
the  Eurasian  is  treated  as  an  outcast. 

It  would  be  out  of  place  here  to  discuss 
the  ultimate  sanction  or  necessity  of  such 
an  attitude.  Its  effect  upon  tolerance, 
however,  is  unmistakable.  The  restraint 
imposed  upon  social  and  emotional  rela- 
tions is  bound  to  be  extended  to  the  intel- 
lectual sphere.  Where  men  go  about  with 
a  constant  check-rein  upon  their  spontane- 
ous social  instincts  the  atmosphere  can 
hardly  be  favorable  to  any  intellectual 
exchange.  New  and  vital  thought  upon 
religion,  democracy,  or  philosophy  is  not 
likely  to  flourish  in  such  a  divided  commu- 
nity. Religion  and  democracy  will  tend  to 
exclude  the  inferior  race,  and  philosophy 
will  be  perverted  to  justify  the  exclusion. 
Man  will  tend  to  become  harsh  and  intol- 
erant because  he  is  uneasy  and  unsure. 

It  is  not  now  difficult  to  see  how  these 
considerations  apply  to  our  negro  prob- 
lem, reluctant  as  we  may  hitherto  have 
been  to  admit  the  problem  in  this  light. 


Indeed,  we  have  been  loath  to  see  it  at  all 
and  have  put  a  taboo  upon  any  discussion 
of  it.  Acute  foreign  observers  have  not 
failed  to  remark  this  reticence.  They 
looked  upon  it  as  the  blind  spot  in  our 
social  thinking.  They  accused  us,  if  I  may 
fall  into  the  jargon  of  the  new  psychology, 
of  having  a  negro  complex.  It  was  very 
difficult  for  us  to  see  this  because  we  were 
so  hysterically  unaware  of  it. 

Generally  speaking,  we  do  not  think 
about  the  negro  problem  at  all ;  we  merely 
relieve  our  feelings  about  it.  Yet  we  can- 
not altogether  fail  to  observe  how  it  has 
tensed  the  whole  South,  imposed  an  incubus 
upon  social  progress  there,  and  made  for 
absolutism  in  morality.  It  is  an  attitude 
which  has  not  failed  to  infect  the  North 
wherever  similar  conditions  have  arisen, 
and  the  South  has  much  justification  for  its 
"tu  quoque."  The  emergence  of  the  negro 
race  problem  thus  marked  the  beginning 
of  a  new  intolerance  in  this  country  just  at 
the  time  when  the  fine  spirit  of  forgive- 
ness which  ended  so  disastrously  with  Lin- 
coln's death  seemed  about  to  inaugurate 
the  development  of  a  genuine  tolerance  in 
a  community  of  united  Americans. 

The  second  disturbing  influence  began 
almost  before  the  first  had  been  fully  de- 
veloped. The  influx  of  immigrants  af- 
ter the  Irish  and  the  German  tide,  was 
at  first  scarcely  noticed.  A  large  part  of 
them  remained  itinerant  and  roamed 
about  the  country  in  response  to  the  call 
for  labor,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Italian 
railroad  builders.  Few  of  them  were 
skilled  laborers  or  commercially  trained, 
so  that  they  were  not  impelled  to  settle 
down  at  once  in  the  cities,  like  the  Ger- 
mans or  the  sociable  Irish.  It  was  only 
after  they  became  part  of  the  urban  popu- 
lation and,  either  through  raising  their 
standard  of  living  or  becoming  tools  of 
the  political  machines,  entered  into  the 
community  life,  that  the  situation  grew 
more  acute.  A  good  many  of  these  immi- 
grants maintained  a  lower  standard  of  liv- 
ing than  ours  and  presented  differences  of 
race,  morals,  and  manners  which  a  more 
intimate  intercourse  could  not  avoid  bring- 
ing home  to  us.  The  alarm  caused  by  our 
inability  to  assimilate  the  alien  newcomer 
expressed  itself  in  a  movement  to  restrict 
immigration.  We  began  to  talk  of  "the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


225 


melting-pot,"  but  contented  ourselves  with 
a  metaphor  whose  aptness  we  never  under- 
took to  probe.  And  once  more  where  we 
failed  to  face  a  problem  our  community 
feeling  registered  a  change  of  attitude. 
We  tensed  ourselves  again  and  moved 
more  uneasily  than  before  against  a  back- 
ground of  explosive  racial  forces. 

For  this  attitude  towards  alien  races  may 
well  be  viewed  as  merely  an  extension  of 
the  psychology  which  the  negro  problem 
has  bequeathed  to  us.  Our  hostility 
towards  the  foreigner  was  fostered  by  a 
comparison  with  the  relations  already 
existing  towards  a  people  in  our  midst, 
who  were  infinitely  more  alien  to  us 
than  any  immigrant,  with  the  possible 
exception  of  the  Oriental,  could  ever  be. 
Our  instinctively  self-protective  attitude 
towards  the  negro  could  thus  be  readily 
extended  to  any  race  differing  from  us. 

And  the  situation  becomes  infinitely 
more  complicated  in  the  case  of  the  immi- 
grant. Our  attitude  towards  the  negro 
was  largely  instinctive  and  dealt  with 
primitive  racial  fears.  The  difference 
between  the  two  races  was  so  great  that 
there  could  never  be  anything  approach- 
ing a  direct  comparison.  It  is  otherwise 
with  the  immigrant.  He  often  represents 
a  different  civilization,  the  inferiority  of 
which  is  in  many  ways  debatable.  His 
coming  represents  a  challenge.  He  finds 
himself  in  a  country  in  which  everything, 
formally  at  least,  conforms  to  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  standard.  With  all  his  gift  for 
adaptation  he  also  exhibits  a  stubbornness 
which  is  not  entirely  to  his  discredit.  This 
tendency  to  assert  himself,  or  rather  not 
to  desert  everything  that  is  native  in  him, 
seeks  out  the  weak  spots  in  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  structure.  The  pressure  he  exerts 
is  a  criticism  which,  according  to  the  per- 
fect melting-pot  theory,  ought  to  become 
a  contribution.  It  does  not  always  work 
out  that  way.  Often  it  helps  merely  to 
increase  the  antagonism  of  the  dominant 
classes,  as  one  can  easily  ascertain  by  liv- 
ing in  the  atmosphere  of  a  New  England 
mill  town  where  foreign  immigration  has 
replaced  native  labor.  The  attack  which 
the  immigrant  was  thus  fated  to  make 
extends  to  law,  to  custom  and  manners,  to 
the  arts,  to  language — from  the  most  pro- 
saic to  the  most  intangible  things — and 


expresses  itself  in  constant  modifications 
of  unequal  value.  Sometimes,  to  take  a 
special  instance  from  law,  our  negro  com- 
plex and  the  influence  of  alien  races  may 
combine  to  bring  about  a  joint  result.  It 
is  entirely  plausible  that  the  almost  vested 
right  of  the  South  to  kill  negroes  and  the 
spread  of  crimes  of  passion  among  South 
Europeans  have  helped  to  establish  our 
unwritten  law,  a  development  essentially 
foreign  to  Anglo-Saxon  legal  traditions. 
The  whole  process  is  one  which  the 
upholders  of  an  entrenched  tradition  can- 
not view  with  equanimity,  and  their  resist- 
ance must  express  itself  in  intolerance. 

Considerations  such  as  these  do  not  pre- 
tend to  give  a  complete  explanation  of  our 
intolerance.  All  wars  breed  intolerance 
and  this  one  is  no  exception.  A  fuller 
treatment  of  the  subject  would  require 
further  discussion  of  those  specific  factors 
in  the  psychology  of  modern  war  which 
make  for  intolerance.  But  the  point  is 
that  what  I  have  called  the  normal  intol- 
erance of  war  fell  upon  fertile  ground. 
It  could  swell  to  such  fanatical  propor- 
tions only  with  the  aid  of  a  native  intoler- 
ance already  created  by  our  complex  social 
problems.  A  parallel  puts  the  matter  into 
simple  terms.  Just  as  the  world  war  may  be 
looked  upon,  from  one  psychological  point 
of  view,  as  a  struggle  for  Anglo-Saxon 
prestige,  so  our  domestic  war  of  intoler- 
ance is  really  a  struggle  for  prestige  on  the 
part  of  the  dominant  class  in  America 
which  consciously  and  by  inheritance  is 
Anglo-Saxon.  It  is  the  integration  issue 
in  its  most  fundamental  form,  and  the 
vehemence  of  its  champions  shows  that 
they  have  instinctively  recognized  that 
fact.  Their  resentment  and  alarm  look 
beyond  the  mere  handful  of  disloyal  Ger- 
man-Americans in  our  midst.  Their  feel- 
ing extends  to  all  who  in  spirit  or  in  race 
are  alien  to  them.  They  crave  a  national 
identity  which  we  have  not  yet  attained 
and  cry  with  an  arrogance  more  divine 
than  democratic  that  all  who  are  not  with 
them  must  be  against  them.  We  have 
thus  a  double  war  and  a  doubled  intoler- 
ance. It  is  a  task  fit  for  the  mettle  of 
statesmen  to  prevent  this  war  of  intoler- 
ance from  continuing  among  us  long  after 
the  world  war  shall  have  ceased. 

ALFRED  BOOTH  KUTTNER. 


226 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


Letters  to  Unknown  Women 


THE   SLAVE   IN      CLEON' 


To :  "One  lyric  woman,  in  her  crocus  vest." 

Helen  the  queen  and  Sappho  the  poet 
are  "unknown"  to  us  because  their  legends 
have  been  altered  and  overlaid  by  so  many 
men  of  different  personalities  that  we  have 
difficulty  in  deciphering  the  true  character 
from  the  additions.  Like  all  very  great 
people  they  have  become  what  men  wished 
them  to  be,  and  those  who  seek  the  truth 
about  them  must  search  for  it  among  a 
thousand  lies.  But  you  are  fresh,  unal- 
tered by  tradition,  clear  as  on  the  day  when 
the  poet's  brain  made  you  live  for  us. 

For  all  that,  we  know  little  about  you; 
save  that  you  were  beautiful,  that  you 
were  white,  that  you  were  a  slave  sent  by 
Protos  the  tyrant  with  a  cup  to  Cleon 
the  poet,  that  you  were  clothed  in  a  crocus 
vest  woven  of  sea-wools,  and  that  for  love 
you  turned  from  the  overwise  poet  to  the 
young  rower  with  "the  muscles  all  a  ripple 
on  his  back."  We  know  also  that  you 
lived  some  three  and  a  half  centuries  after 
Alexander.  For  the  rest  we  must  invent 
you. 

"Protos  in  his  tyranny"  can  only  have 
been  some  small  potentate  in  Lydia  or 
Cappadocia  or  some  other  inconsiderable 
semi-Asiatic  state.  We  will  make  you  a 
Lydian,  half  Greek,  half  Syrian,  like  the 
poet  Meleager,  who  lived  during  your 
lifetime.  We  can  think  of  you  as  being 
half  oriental,  like  Chryseis,  but  your  name 
shall  be  pure  Greek — Melitta. 

Melitta,  because  you  were  beautiful 
men  loved  you.  Protos,  the  king,  sent  you 
to  the  great  poet  as  his  choicest  gift.  Alas, 
Melitta,  that  kings  no  longer  send  such 
gifts  to  poets!  You  would  be  very  un- 
happy in  our  world,  more  unhappy  even 
than  when  King  Protos's  ship  carried  you 
away  from  the  lovers  and  friends  you 
had  in  Lydia.  But  if  we  could  recall  you 
for  a  few  hours  from  the  grave,  it  would 
give  us  a  pleasure  unique  and  marvelous 
to  hear  from  your  lips  what  life  was  led 
in  those  days  of  the  warm  sunset  of  Hellas, 
to  see  in  you  what  manner  of  loveliness 
it  was  that  refined  upon  the  beauty  of 
Cleon's  youth. 


We  do  not  pity  you  overmuch,  Melitta, 
for  being  a  slave;  we  are  all  slaves  in  our 
day  and  unhappily  we  do  not  have  philos- 
ophers as  masters.  We  pardon  Cleon  the 
sin  of  owning  you,  being  sure  that  a  Greek 
would  love  beauty  too  much  to  do  any- 
thing but  honor  it.  We  feel  sure  that  you 
lived  as  happily  as  a  woman  may,  with  no 
extravagant  desires  or  despairs,  in  that 
calm  philosophy  of  hedonism  we  cannot 
recapture,  and  that  the  gods  loved  you 
enough  for  you  to  die  while  you  were 
still  beautiful. 

We  think  of  you  as  a  child  in  Lydia, 
learning  the  art  of  beauty,  being  instructed 
in  the  modes  of  music,  in  the  meaning  of 
poetry,  in  the  significance  of  form;  per- 
haps, even,  you  were  not  unacquainted 
with  the  sacred  book  of  Elephantis.  Me- 
litta, if  you  could  but  return  to  us  and 
teach  us  something  of  what  you  knew,  we 
would  promise  to  distress  you  as  little  as 
possible  by  our  uncouth  ways  and  unre- 
fined manner  of  living! 

Then  we  think  of  you  as  a  girl  in  the 
king's  palace,  wearing  your  chiton  and 
peplum  folded  like  those  we  see  in  the 
little,  painted  figures  from  Tanagra,  and 
with  jewels  "heavy  with  weight  of  gold" 
— an  Attic  figure  in  the  midst  of  eastern 
luxury.  And  as  a  young  woman  you  cross 
the  sea  to  the  poet's  island,  clothed  in  your 
crocus  vest,  and  we  see  you  most  plainly 
at  this  moment  standing  wistfully  upon 
the  black  and  white  pavement,  gazing  back 
at  the  sea,  not  heeding  the  fluttering  of 
doves'  wings  in  the  warm  afternoon  air. 

You  cannot  conceive  how  vividly  your 
beauty  affects  us,  for  in  that  world  of 
beauty  yours  was  not  specially  remarkable ; 
but  we  are  so  starved,  so  utterly  alien  to 
our  time,  that  beside  the  memory  of  you 
the  living  women  we  know  become  as 
shadows.  That  is  why  we  wish  so  yearn- 
ingly to  bring  you  back  from  death — to 
know  if  indeed  the  beauty  we  dream  of 
did  exist,  to  hear  from  you  of  your  days 
and  nights.  We  are  curious  about  the 
life  which  Hellas  lived  in  its  wise  autumn; 
we  have  been  told,  it  is  true,  by  our  stoics 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


227 


to  consider  yours  an  age  of  decadence, 
but  for  all  that  we  are  anxious  to  know 
what  manner  of  life  it  was  in  those  days 
— days  which  always  seem  to  us  golden 
with  late  afternoon  sunlight,  heavy  with 
the  scent  of  grapes  and  musical  with  slow 
fountains. 

Our  wishes  are  unavailing;  we  cannot 
know  whether  you  indeed  realized  our  in- 
tense dream  or  whether  you  were  merely 
a  white  courtesan  with  a  trick  of  grace  un- 
known to  ours.  Forgive  us  our  scepticism, 


Melitta;  like  our  own,  yours  was  not  an 
age  of  faith,  but  we  will  persuade  our- 
selves that  you  were  that  loveliness  we 
imagine,  that  you  were  that  understanding 
we  covet.  The  flowers  of  our  land  are 
alien  to  you,  our  rites  for  the  dead  maimed 
and  full  of  promises  which  would  terrify, 
not  console,  you — but  we  strew  wild  roses 
and  hill  thyme  upon  your  unknown  grave, 
and  may  the  dust  of  earth  lie  lightly  upon 
your  frail  dust! 

RICHARD  ALDINGTON. 


John  Barrymore' s  Ibbetson 


The  vicissitudes  of  the  young  boy  along 
the  vague,  precarious  way,  the  longing  to 
find  the  reality  of  the  dream — the  heart 
that  knew  him  best — a  study  in  sentimen- 
tality, the  pathetic  wanderings  of  a  "little 
boy  lost"  in  the  dream  of  childhood,  and 
the  "little  boy  found"  in  the  arms  of  his 
loved  mother,  with  all  those  touches  that 
are  painful  and  all  that  are  exquisite  and 
poignant  in  their  beauty — such  is  the  pic- 
ture presented  by  John  Barrymore,  as 
nearly  perfect  as  any  artist  can  be,  in 
"Peter  Ibbetson."  Certainly  it  is  as  fin- 
ished a  creation  in  its  sense  of  form,  and 
of  color,  replete  with  a  finesse  of  rare 
loveliness,  as  gratifying  a  performance,  to 
my  notion,  as  has  been  seen  on  our  stage 
for  many  years.  Perhaps  if  the  author, 
recalling  vain  pasts,  could  realize  the  scum 
of  saccharinity  in  which  the  play  is  utterly 
submerged,  and  that  it  struggles  with 
great  difficulty  to  survive  the  nesselrode- 
like  sweetness  with  which  it  is  surfeited, 
he  would  recognize  the  real  distinction 
that  Barrymore  lends  to  a  role  so  clogged 
by  the  honeyed  sentimentality  covering 
most  of  the  scenes.  Barrymore  gives  us 
that  "quickened  sense"  of  the  life  of  the 
young  man,  a  portrayal  which  takes  the 
eye  by  "its  fine  edge  of  light,"  a  portrayal 
clear  and  cool,  elevated  to  a  fine  loftiness 
in  his  rendering. 

The  actor  has  accomplished  this  by 
means  of  a  nice  knowledge  of  what  sym- 
bolic expression  means  to  the  art  of  the 
stage.  He  is  certainly  a  painter  of  pic- 
tures and  moods,  the  idea  and  his  image 
perfectly  commingled,  endowing  this  medi- 


ocre play  with  true  charm  by  the  distinc- 
tion he  lends  it,  by  sheer  discretion,  and 
by  a  power  of  selection.  All  this  he  brings 
to  a  play  which,  if  it  had  been  written 
nowadays,  would  certainly  have  convicted 
its  author,  and  justly  too,  of  having  writ- 
ten to  stimulate  the  lachrymal  effusions  of 
the  shop-girl,  a  play  about  which  she 
might  telephone  her  girl  friend,  at  which 
she  might  eat  bon  bons,  and  powder  her 
nose  again  for  the  street.  No  artist,  no 
accepted  artist,  has  given  a  more  sugges- 
tive rendering  than  has  Barrymore  here. 
It  would  be  difficult  to  say  where  he  is  at 
his  best,  except  that  the  first  half  of  the 
play  counts  for  most  in  point  of  strength 
and  opportunity. 

A  tall  frail  young  man,  we  find  him, 
blanched  with  wonder  and  with  awe  at  the 
perplexity  of  life,  seeking  a  solution  of 
things  by  means  of  the  dream,  as  only  the 
dreamer  and  the  visionary  can,  lost  from 
first  to  last,  seemingly  unloved  in  the  ways 
boys  think  they  want  to  be  loved;  that  is, 
the  shy  longing  boy,  afraid  of  all  things, 
and  mostly  of  himself,  in  the  period  just 
this  side  of  sex  revelation.  He  is  the  neo- 
phyte— the  homeless,  pathetic  Peter,  per- 
plexed with  the  strangeness  of  things  real 
and  temporal — vision  and  memory  count- 
ing for  all  there  is  of  reality  to  him,  with 
life  itself  a  thing  as  yet  untasted.  Who 
shall  forget  (who  has  a  love  for  real 
expression)  the  entrance  of  Peter  into  the 
drawing-room  of  Mrs.  Deane,  the  pale 
flowery  wisp  of  a  boy  walking  as  it  were 
into  a  garden  of  pungent  spices  and  herbs, 
and  of  actions  so  alien  to  his  own?  We 


228 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


are  given  at  this  moment  the  keynote  of 
mastery  in  delicate  suggestion,  which  never 
fails  throughout  the  play,  tedious  as  it  is, 
overdrawn  on  the  side  of  symbolism  and 
mystical  insinuation. 

One  sits  with  difficulty  through  many  of 
the  moments,  the  literary  quality  of  them 
is  so  wretched.  They  cloy  the  ear  and  the 
mind  that  has  been  made  sensitive,  desir- 
ing something  of  a  finer  type  of  stimula- 
tion. Barrymore  has  evoked,  so  we  may 
call  it,  a  cole  method — against  a  back- 
ground of  what  could  have  been  over- 
heated acting  or  at  least  a  superabundance 
of  physical  attack — the  warmth  of  the 
play's  tender  sentimentalities;  yet  he  cov- 
ers them  with  a  still  spiritual  ardor  which 
is  their  very  essence,  extracting  all  the  del- 
icate nuances  and  arranging  them  with  a 
fine  sense  of  proportion.  It  is  as  difficult 
an  accomplishment  for  a  man  as  one  can 
imagine.  For  it  is  not  given  to  many  to 
act  with  this  degree  of  whiteness,  devoid 
of  off  colorings  or  alien  tones.  This  per- 
formance of  Barrymore  in  its  spiritual 
richness,  its  elegance,  finesse,  and  intelli- 
gence, has  not  been  equaled  for  me  since 
I  saw  the  great  geniuses  Paul  Orleneff  and 
Eleonora  Duse. 

It  is  to  be  at  once  observed  that  here  is 
a  keen  pictorial  mind,  a  mind  which  visu- 
alizes perfectly  for  itself  the  chiaroscuro 
aspects  of  the  emotion,  as  well  as  the  spir- 
itual, for  Barrymore  gives  them  with  an 
almost  unerring  felicity,  and  rounds  out 
the  portrayal  for  the  eye  from  point  to 
point.  It  is  a  portrayal  which  in  any  other 
hands  would  suffer,  but  Barrymore  has  the 
special  power  to  feel  the  value  of  reticence 
in  all  good  art,  the  need  for  complete  sub- 
jection of  personal  enthusiasm  to  the  force 
of  ideas.  His  art  is  akin  to  the  art  of  sil- 
ver-point, which,  as  is  known,  is  an  art  of 
directness  of  touch,  and  final  in  the  instant 
of  execution,  leaving  no  room  whatever 
for  accident  or  untoward  excitement  of 
nerve. 

We  shall  wait  long  for  the  silver  sug- 
gestiveness  such  as  Barrymore  gives  us 
when  Peter  gets  his  first  glimpse  of  Mary, 
Duchess  of  Towers.  Who  else  could  con- 
vey his  realization  of  her  beauty,  and  the 
quality  of  reminiscence  that  lingers  about 


her,  of  the  rapt  amaze  as  he  stands  by  the 
mantel-piece  looking  through  the  door 
into  the  space  where  he  sees  her  in  the 
midst  of  dancers  under  a  crystal  chande- 
lier somewhere  not  very  distant?  Or  the 
moment  when  he  finds  her  bouquet  neg- 
lected on  the  table  in  the  drawing-room, 
with  her  lace  shawl  not  far  from  his 
hands?  Or  when  he  finds  himself  alone, 
pressing  his  lips  into  the  depth  of  the 
flowers  as  the  curtain  gives  the  finale  to 
the  scene  with  the  whispered  "1'amour"  I 
These  are  moments  of  a  real  lyrist,  and 
would  match  any  line  of  Banville,  of  Ron- 
sard,  or  of  Austin  Dobson  for  delicacy  of 
touch  and  feeling,  for  freshness,  and  for 
the  precise  spiritual  gesture,  the  "intona- 
tion" of  action  requisite  to  relieve  the 
moments  from  what  might  otherwise  re- 
vert to  commonplace  sentimentality. 

Whatever  the  prejudice  may  be  against 
all  these  emotions  glace  with  sugary  frost- 
ing, we  feel  that  his  art  has  brought  them 
into  being  with  an  unmistakable  gift  or 
refinement  coupled  with  superb  style. 
How  an  artist  like  Beardsley  would  have 
reveled  in  these  moments  is  easy  to  con- 
jecture. For  here  is  the  quintessence  of 
intellectualized  aquarelle,  and  these 
touches  would  surely  have  brought  into 
being  another  "Pierrot  of  the  Minute" — 
a  new  line  drawing  out  of  a  period  he 
knew  and  loved  well.  These  touches 
would  have  been  graced  by  the  hand  of 
that  artist,  or  by  another  of  equal  deli- 
cacy of  appreciation,  Charles  Conder — 
unforgettable  spaces  replete  with  the  es- 
sence of  fancy,  of  dream,  of  those  farther 
recesses  of  the  imagination. 

Although  technically  and  historically 
Barrymore  has  the  advantage  of  excellent 
traditions,  he  nevertheless  rests  entirely 
upon  his  own  achievements,  separate  and 
individual  in  his  understanding  of  what 
constitutes  plastic  power  in  art.  He  has 
a  peculiar  and  most  sensitive  temper,  which 
can  arrange  points  of  relation  in  juxta- 
position with  a  keen  sense  of  form  as  well 
as  of  substance.  He  is,  one  might  say, 
a  masterly  draftsman  with  a  rich  cool 
sense  of  color,  whose  work  has  something 
of  the  still  force  of  a  drawing  of  Ingres 
with,  as  well,  the  sensitive  detail  one  finds 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


229 


in  a  Redon,  like  a  beautiful  drawing  on 
stone.  An  excellent  knowledge  of  dra- 
matic contrasts  is  displayed  by  the  broth- 
ers Barrymore,  John  and  Lionel,  in  the 
murder  scene,  one  of  the  finest  we  have 
seen  for  many  years,  technically  even, 
splendid,  and  direct,  concise  in  movement. 
Every  superfluous  gesture  has  been  elim- 
inated. From  the  moment  of  Peter's  lock- 
ing the  door  upon  his  uncle  the  scene  is 
wrapped  in  the  very  coils  of  catastrophe, 
almost  Euripedean  in  its  inevitability.  All 
of  this  episode  is  kept  strictly  within  the 
realm  of  the  imagination.  It  is  an  episode 
of  hatred,  of  which  there  is  sure  to  be  at 
least  one  in  the  life  of  every  young  sensi- 
tive, when  every  boy  wants,  at  any  rate 
somewhere  in  his  mind,  to  destroy  some 
influence  or  other  which  is  alien  or  hate- 
ful to  him.  The  scene  emphasizes  once 
again  the  beauty  of  technical  power  for 
its  own  sake,  the  thrill  of  discarding  all 
that  is  not  immediately  essential  to  simple 
and  direct  realization. 

Little  can  be  said  of  the  play  beyond 
this  point,  for  it  dwindles  off  into  senti- 
mental mystification  which  cannot  be 
enjoyed  by  anyone  under  fifty,  or  appreci- 
ated by  anyone  under  eighteen.  It  gives 
opportunity  merely  for  settings  and  some 
rare  moments  of  costuming,  the  lady  with 
the  battledore  reminding  one  a  deal  of  a 
good  Manet.  This  and,  of  course,  the 
splendid  appearance  of  the  Duchess  of 
Towers  in  the  first  act — all  these  touches 
furnish  more  than  a  satisfying  background 
for  the  very  shy  and  frail  Peter. 

This  performance  of  Barrymore  holds 
for  me  the  first  and  last  requisite  of  organ- 
ized conception  in  art — poise,  clarity,  and 
perfect  suggestibility.  Its  intellectual 
soundness  rules  the  emotional  extrava- 
gance, giving  form  to  what — for  lack  of 
form — so  often  perishes  under  an  excess 
of  energy,  which  the  ignorant  actor  sub- 
stitutes for  the  plastic  element  in  all  art. 
It  has  the  attitude,  this  performance, 
almost  of  diffidence  to  one's  subject-mat- 
ter, except  as  the  intellect  judges  clearly 
and  coolly.  Thus,  in  the  sense  of  aesthetic 
reality,  are  all  aspects  clarified  and  made 
real.  From  the  outward  inward,  or  from 
the  inward  outward,  surface  to  depth  or 
depth  to  surface — it  is  difficult  to  say 


which  is  the  precise  method  of  approach. 
John  Barrymore  has  mastered  the  evasive 
subtlety  therein,  which  makes  him  one  of 
our  greatest  artists.  The  future  will 
surely  wait  for  his  riper  contributions,  and 
we  may  think  of  him  as  one  of  our  fore- 
most artists,  among  the  few,  "one  of  a 
small  band,"  as  the  great  novelist  once 
said  of  the  great  poet. 

MARSDEN  HARTLEY. 


To  Rupert  Brooke 

I  give  you  glory,  for  you  are  dead. 

The  day  lightens  above  your  head; 

The  night  darkens  about  your  feet; 

Morning  and  noon  and  evening  meet 

Around  and  over  and  under  you 

In  the  world  you  knew,  the  world  you  knew. 

Lips  are  kissing  and  limbs  are  clinging, 
Breast  to  breast  in  the  silence  singing 
Of  unforgotten  and  fadeless  things, 
Laughter  and  tears  and  a  beat  of  wings 
Faintly  heard  in  a  far  off  heaven; 
Bird  calls  bird ;  the  unquiet  even 
Ineluctable  ebb  and  flow, 
Flows  and  ebbs ;  and  all  things  go 
Moving  from  dream  to  dream,  and  deep 
Calls  deep  again  in  a  world  of  sleep. 

There  is  no  glory  gone  from  the  air. 

Nothing  is  less.     Nay,  as  it  were, 

A  keener  and  wilder  radiance  glows 

Along  the  blood,  and  a  shouting  grows 

Fiercer  and  louder,  a  far-flung  roar 

Of  throats  and  of  guns;  and  your  island  shore 

Is  swift  with  smoke  and  savage  with  flame; 

And  a  myriad  lovers  shout  your  name, 

Rupert!  Rupert!  across  the  earth; 

And  death  is  dancing,  and  dancing  birth, 

And  a  madness  of  dancing  blood  and  laughter 

Rises  and  sings,  and  follows  after 

All  the  dancers  who  danced  before, 

And  dance  no  more,  and  dance  no  more. 

You  will  dance  no  more ;  you  will  love  no  more ; 
You  are  dead  and  dust  on  your  island  shore. 

A  little  dust  are  the  lips  where 

Laughter  and  song  and  kisses  were. 

And  I  give  you  glory,  and  I  am  glad 

For  the  life  you  had,  and  the  death  you  had  ; 

For  the  heaven  you  knew  and  the  hell  you  knew 

And  the  dust  and  the  dayspring  that  were  you. 

MAURICE  BROWNE. 


230 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


Our  *Paris  Letter 


(Special  Correspondence  of  THE  DIAL.) 

Nearly  four  months  ago — in  the  letter  pub- 
lished in  THE  DIAL  of  November  8 — I  said  that 
the  war  was  almost  forgotten  here.  That  is  still 
more  true  now.  The  papers  contain  hardly  a 
word  about  the  military  operations  except  the 
official  communiques  which  nobody  reads,  and 
one  rarely  hears  them  mentioned  in  conversation. 
There  are  so  many  other  subjects  to  talk  about. 
First  of  all  there  is  the  Caillaux  affair,  which 
has  been  the  chief  subject  of  conversation  since 
M.  Caillaux's  arrest  on  January  14  and  has  filled 
columns  of  the  newspapers.  Then  there  is  the 
trial  of  M.  Malvy  and  all  the  other  "affairs"  of 
treason  and  espionage.  These  lead  to  new  arrests 
every  other  day,  some  of  them  unexpected,  like 
that  of  M.  Hanau,  who  had  been  correspondent 
here  of  a  Genoese  paper  for  twenty  years  and 
has  been  given  a  vote  of  confidence,  since  his 
arrest,  by  his  Italian  colleagues. 

Questions  of  internal  politics  thus  hold  the 
field,  and  political  passions  run  very  high.  The 
acute  tension  in  the  country  was  reflected  in  the 
violent  scene  of  January  18,  when  Socialists  and 
Royalists  fought  on  the  floor  of  the  Chamber 
of  Deputies  and  a  Royalist  deputy  from  the 
tribune  aimed  his  revolver  at  the  Socialists. 
Those  whose  knowledge  of  the  Chamber  goes 
farther  back  than  mine  say  that  nothing  like  it 
has  been  known  since  the  stormiest  days  of  the 
Dreyfus  affair  some  twenty  years  ago.  There  is 
serious  unrest  in  the  labor  world  and  we  hear 
of  strikes  and  threatened  strikes  in  different  parts 
of  the  country. 

In  these  circumstances  it  will  be  understood 
that  a  war  which  has  lasted  three  years  and  a 
half  has  ceased  to  be  a  topic  of  conversation.  It 
is  again  that  lively  paper  the  "CEuvre"  which 
sums  up  the  situation  in  the  daily  side-note  that 
it  prints  alongside  its  title:  "The  war  must 
have  stopped  without  anybody's  noticing  it;  for 
nobody  talks  about  it  any  more." 

On  the  other  hand,  people  find  time  to  talk 
about  peace.  President  Wilson's  last  speech, 
with  its  definite  peace  conditions,  was  more  favor- 
ably received  by  the  public  than  it  appears  to 
have  been  by  the  Government,  for  M.  Pichon's 
references  to  it  during  the  debate  in  the  Cham- 
ber on  January  11  were  distinctly  reserved  and 
ambiguous,  and  M.  Clemenceau  refused  to  open 
his  mouth.  M.  Clemenceau  has  always  been 


hostile  to  any  idea  of  a  League  of  Nations  or 
international  organization,  which  he  ridiculed  in 
his  paper  up  to  the  moment  that  he  took  office, 
and  it  is  unlikely  that  he  has  changed  his  mind. 
There  can  be  no  indiscretion  in  noting  the  fact, 
since  the  press  of  the  Left  has  openly  discussed, 
and  regretted,  the  obvious  difference  of  opinion 
between  him  and  Mr.  Wilson — a  difference 
shown,  moreover,  by  the  failure  of  the  Allies  to 
agree  on  a  common  declaration.  The  peace  nego- 
tiations between  Russia  and  the  Central  Empires 
likewise  hold  public  attention.  The  surrender 
of  the  Ukraine  is  a  severe  blow  to  the  French 
Government,  which  had  given  the  Ukrainians  a 
loan  of  about  thirty  million  dollars  and  sent  last 
week  a  military  mission  to  carry  its  salutations 
to  the  Republic  of  the  Ukraine  and  to  accom- 
pany the  Ukrainian  army  in  its  expected  cam- 
paign under  Generals  Korniloff  and  Kaledines. 
The  fact  that  it  is  the  Maximalists  of  Petro- 
grad,  who  have,  after  all,  made  some  stand 
against  the  Central  Empires,  while  the  more 
moderate  Ukrainians  have  hastened  to  make  a 
separate  peace,  seems  to  confirm  M.  Marcel  Sem- 
bat's  view  that  it  was  a  mistake  to  refuse  to 
enter  into  contact  with  Lenine  and  Trotzky  and 
to  suggest  that  perhaps  M.  Clemenceau  and  M. 
Pichon  put  their  money  on  the  wrong  horse. 

The  various  "treason"  affairs  should  not  be 
taken  too  seriously  in  America,  at  any  rate  those 
in  which  prominent  politicians  are  concerned. 
Accusations  of  treason  are  very  easily  made  in 
France,  especially  against  political  opponents, 
because  the  French  public  has  a  traditional  ten- 
dency to  scent  treason  in  war-time  (and  some- 
times even  in  time  of  peace)  when  things  are  not 
going  quite  as  well  as  they  might.  Few  people 
have  probably  taken  the  trouble  to  read  the 
account  of  the  trial  of  Marshal  Bazaine.  I  went 
conscientiously  through  it  some  years  ago  and 
was  convinced  that  although  he  was  an  income- 
tent  general  and  had  made  grave  blunders,  he 
was  unjustly  convicted  of  treason.  Public  opin- 
ion demanded  a  scape-goat  in  1871.  Nearly 
thirty  years  ago,  at  the  time  of  the  Panama  and 
Cornelius  Hertz  scandals,  ninety-nine  out  of 
every  hundred  Frenchmen  firmly  believed  that 
M.  Clemenceau  was  a  traitor  to  his  country. 
For  three  years  (1889-92)  public  opinion  was 
just  as  hostile  to  him  as  it  is  now  to  M.  Cail- 
laux— indeed,  he  had  a  much  smaller  number 
of  defenders  than  has  M.  Caillaux,  on  whose 
side  are  the  whole  Socialist  party  and  the  Trade 
Union  organizations.  M.  Clemenceau  was  ac- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


231 


cused  of  being  bought  by  England,  which  was 
at  that  time  the  popular  enemy.  He  was  howled 
down  in  the  Chamber  and  driven  out  of  public 
life  for  some  years.  And  M.  Clemenceau  had 
in  fact  received  money  for  his  paper,  the 
"Aurore,"  from  Cornelius  Hertz,  who  did  not, 
like  Bolo,  see  the  inside  of  a  prison,  because  he 
fled  to  England  and  died  there.  Undoubtedly 
M.  Clemenceau  was  in  good  faith  and  did  not 
know  what  Hertz  was  doing,  but  the  fact  told 
against  him.  So  strongly  was  he  suspected  even 
later  by  the  Government  that  during  his  visits 
to  England  Waldeck-Rousseau,  who  was  prime 
minister  from  1899  to  1902,  had  him  watched 
by  French  detectives,  whose  reports  are  among 
the  papers  found  in  the  now  famous  safe  at 
Florence.  Yet  M.  Clemenceau  completely  recov- 
ered his  position  and  is  now  Prime  Minister  for 
the  second  time.  It  is,  therefore,  without  sur- 
prise that  on  opening  an  evening  paper,  "La 
Verite,"  I  find  the  title  of  its  leader  to  be  "If 
M.  Caillaux  Again  Became  Prime  Minister." 
Nobody  who  has  closely  followed  French  poli- 
tics for  many  years  would  be  surprised;  it  is 
never  possible  to  say  that  a  political  reputation  is 
ruined  in  France. 

As  in  all  these  cases,  the  feeling  against  M. 
Caillaux  is  vague  and  its  causes  are  complicated. 
The  public  is  in  a  mood  to  find  a  really  promi- 
nent traitor  and  M.  Caillaux  is  offered  to  it  as 
M.  Clemenceau  was  in  1889.  The  Bernstorff 
telegrams  have  had  little  effect;  the  French  are 
quick-witted  and  saw  at  once  that  if  M.  Cail- 
laux had  really  been  disposed  to  help  Germany 
in  France,  Count  Bernstorff  would  never  have 
urged  that  the  Araguaya  should  be  captured, 
for  M.  Caillaux  as  a  prisoner  would  have  been 
useless  to  Germany.  This  second  telegram  dis- 
counts the  secondhand  information  of  the  first, 
which  merely  reports  statements  alleged  to  have 
been  made  by  M.  Caillaux  to  anonymous  per- 
sons. Nobody  is  disposed  to  accept  Count  Lux- 
bourg's  word  as  gospel. 

The  real  reasons  for  M.  Caillaux's  unpopular- 
ity are  quite  different.  The  principal  ones  are 
that  he  is  supposed  to  be  enormously  rich  (which 
seems  unfounded),  that  Mme.  Caillaux  was  ac- 
quitted in  1914,  and  that  M.  Caillaux  is  a  little 
inclined  to  be  a  "craneur";  that  is,  to  put  on 
side.  The  alleged  contents  of  the  safe  at  Flor- 
ence have  attracted  far  more  attention  than  the 
Bernstorff  telegrams,  and  the  accounts  of  them 
in  the  papers  have  been  worthy  of  Gaboriau. 
For  the  last  couple  of  months  one  has  had  the 


impression  of  living  in  a  roman  feuilleton  poli- 
cier,  so  incredible  have  been  some  of  these  "trea- 
son" affairs,  in  which  it  has  been  difficult  to  dis- 
tinguish the  spy  from  the  counter-spy,  or  either 
from  the  agent  provocateur.  During  the  last 
week  "The  Mystery  of  the  Florentine  Safe"  has 
been  published  serially  in  the  newspapers.  M. 
Caillaux  appears  in  it  as  a  masked  conspirator 
of  the  operatic  stage.  We  have  been  told  of  his 
scheme  for  a  coup  d'etat,  with  the  list  of  emi- 
nent persons  that  he  proposed  to  remove,  which 
he  committed  to  paper,  no  doubt,  lest  he  should 
forget  any  of  them.  The  worthy  bourgeois,  see- 
ing the  guillotine  already  erected  on  the  Place 
de  la  Concorde,  has  shaken  in  his  shoes.  Then 
there  was  the  untold  wealth  that  M.  Caillaux 
had  taken  to  Italy  to  escape  his  own  income  tax ; 
the  amount  was  $400,000  according  to  some 
papers,  $600,000  according  to  others — it  must 
be  remembered  that  in  France  a  man  who  pos- 
sesses $200,000  is  called  a  "millionaire."  This 
allegation,  too,  does  not  seem  supported  by  the 
unromantic  facts.  The  question  of  the  money 
has  had  far  more  influence  on  public  opinion 
than  all  the  alleged  conversations  at  Buenos 
Aires  or  at  Rome,  although  it  has  nothing  at  all 
to  do  with  the  charges  against  M.  Caillaux. 
The  whole  affair  is  an  interesting  study  in  popu- 
lar psychology. 

If  the  war  is  in  the  background,  it  may  be 
imagined  that  literature  and  art  are  still  more 
so.  We  are  making  the  material  for  the  litera- 
ture of  the  future — not  perhaps  the  near  future, 
for  I  am  afraid  that  neither  literature  nor  art 
will  flourish  immediately  after  the  war.  A  period 
of  cataclysm  is  favorable  to  men  of  action  rather 
than  to  writers,  painters,  or  sculptors,  and  we 
are  entering  on  a  period  of  cataclysm  in  which 
most  European  governments  and  institutions 
seem  likely  to  be  swept  away;  the  Russian  revo- 
lution is  only  a  beginning.  One  has  the  sensa- 
tion of  living  at  the  end  of  a  regime  in  France; 
all  the  symptoms  that  heralded  the  break-up  of 
the  ancien  regime  are  recurring.  The  bourgeois 
Republic,  like  the  old  monarchy,  is  foundering 
in  a  whirlpool  of  scandals.  But  this  time  the 
change  will  be  far  more  profound,  for  it  is  the 
whole  economic  system  on  which  society  has  been 
based  since  the  Revolution,  that  is  threatened. 
And  the  rest  of  Europe  is  in  the  same  case. 

M.  Henri  Barbusse  has  revised  "L'Enfer," 
which  made  some  stir  when  it  was  first  pub- 
lished a  few  years  ago,  and  a  final  edition  of  it 
has  just  appeared  (Albin  Michel,  Paris).  It  is 


232 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


a  book  of  extraordinary  originality  and  insight 
into  human  nature,  which  explains  how  M.  Bar- 
busse  came  to  write  "Le  Feu,"  the  book  which 
shows  a  penetration  into   realities   unique  even 
among   those   who,    like   himself,    have   written 
about  the  war  from  personal  experience.     The 
idea  of  "L'Enfer"  is  itself  original :  it  is  the  his- 
tory of  a  room  in  a  hotel,  written  by  a  man  who 
had  the  room  next  to  it.     A  chance  hole  in  the 
partition   wall    enables   him   to   survey   all   the 
actions  and  hear  all  the  conversations  of  his  suc- 
cessive neighbors.     The  book  is  the  record.     It 
is  the  whole  human  tragedy  that  passes  before 
us — life,  love,  death,  joy  and  sorrow,  the  hopes 
of  youth  and  the  regrets  of  old  age.     The  new 
edition  reached  me  one  evening  and,  although  I 
had  read  it  before,  it  was  three  o'clock  in  the 
morning  before  I  could  put  it  down.     From  be- 
ginning to  end  it  holds  one  with  the  grip  of 
stern  reality.     It  is  not  a  "pleasant"  book;  how 
could  it  be?     Life  is  not  pleasant.     Many  read- 
ers will  say  of  it  what  many  of  the  audience  said 
at  the  first  performance  of  M.  Paul  Geraldy's 
"Noces    d'Argent"    at    the    Comedie    Franchise 
some  months  ago:  "C'est  dur."  Which    means 
that  the  author  leaves  us  no  illusions,  veils  no 
nudities,  however  shameful.     It  is  not  a  book 
for  boys  and  girls,  unless  they  are  too  young  to 
understand  it,  and  in  that  case  they  would  not 
read  it;  the  first  few  pages  would  put  them  off. 
It  is  a  psychological  study,  not  a  romance.    The 
puritan  should   avoid  it,   for  its  frankness  will 
shock  him  terribly.    But  the  man  or  woman  who 
will  face  life  as  life  is  will  find  it  of  poignant 
interest,  not  least  because  M.  Barbusse  reveals 
his  own  point  of  view  about  the  great  problems 
of  life.    Inevitably  it  recalls  Zola,  who,  if  he  be 
suffering  a  temporary  eclipse,   will  again  come 
into  his  own;  but  it  is  in  no  sense  an  imitation 
or  even  a  following  of  the  great  naturalist.     M. 
Barbusse  is  entirely  himself.    "L'Enfer"  is  beau- 
tifully written  in  a  limpid  French,  whose   de- 
ceptively easy  flow  covers  no  fatal  facility.    Like 
"Le  Feu,"  so  different  in  many  respects,  it  is  a 
great  book. 

In  "La  Question  Flamande  et  I'Allemagne" 
(Berger-Levrault,  Paris)  M.  Fernand  Passelecq 
gives  an  interesting  account  of  the  way  in  which 
Germany  had  tried  to  apply  in  Belgium  the 
maxim  "Divide  and  conquer."  Before  the  war 
the  Flemish  question  had  been  a  subject  of  keen 
political  strife  in  Belgium  and  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that  the  feeling  between  Flemings  and 
Walloons  was  a  grave  national  problem.  It  was 


made  more  acute  by  a  fact  which  M.  Passelecq 
does  not  mention,  namely  that  the  racial  and 
linguistic  division  coincided  to  a  great  extent, 
although  by  no  means  exactly,  with  the  religious 
and  political  division  of  the  country.  Although 
there  were  many  Catholic  and  Conservative 
Walloons  and  many  Socialist  and  Anti-clerical 
Flemings,  Flanders  was  the  stronghold  of  the 
Church  and  the  Conservative  party,  and  Wal- 
lonia  of  the  forces  of  the  Left.  Moreover  the 
Catholic  Flamingants  made  a  vigorous  campaign 
against  French  influence  and  French  literature, 
which  was  manifested  by  such  proposals  as  the 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  put  import  duties  on 
books  imported  from  France. 

Nevertheless    M.    Passelecq    shows    that    the 
German  thesis  that  there  is  no  Belgian  nation 
is  false  historically  and  actually.     His  historical 
chapters  will  be   found   particularly  interesting 
by  foreign  readers,  most  of  whom  have  not  an 
exact  knowledge  of  Belgian  history.     Artificial 
as  modern  Belgium  seems,  it  is  nevertheless  the 
creation  of  the  Belgians  themselves,  who  in  1830 
revolted  against  the  really  artificial  arrangement 
of  the  Congress  of  Vienna,  which  had  annexed 
them  to  the  kingdom  of  the  Netherlands.    The 
Germans,   during  their  occupation  of   Belgium, 
have  naturally  tried  to  exploit  the  racial  and  lin- 
guistic division   (more  linguistic  than  racial)  by 
the   administrative  division   of   the  country,   by 
the  "flamandisation"  of  Ghent  University,  and 
other    similar    measures.      M.    Passelecq    gives 
sound  reasons  for  his  opinion  that  the  Belgian 
Flamingants  who  have  supported  this  policy  are 
only  a  small  minority  and  that  the  policy  itself 
has  not  taken  root  and  has  had  very  poor  re- 
sults.     He   quotes   protests   from   such    leading 
Flamingants  as  M.   Camille   Huysmans,   Secre- 
tary of  the  International  Socialist  Bureau,  against 
the  German  policy  and  its  Belgian  supporters. 
Of  the  solution  of  the  Flemish   problem   after 
the  war  M.  Passelecq  takes  a  hopeful  view.    His 
book,  although  it  does  not  perhaps  meet  all  the 
difficulties  of   the  case,   gives  an  excellent   and 
on  the  whole  impartial  account  of  the  internal 
situation  in  Belgium  and  should  be  widely  read. 
Things  move  so  quickly  that  German  war  aims 
are  probably  not  quite  the  same   as  when  the 
book  was  written ;  for  it  seems  certain  that  Ger- 
many has  abandoned  all  intention  of  retaining 
a  "sphere  of  influence"  in  Belgium. 

ROBERT  DELL. 
Paris,  February  7,  1918. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


233 


Establishing  the  Established 

SOME  MODERN  NOVELISTS:  Appreciations  and  Es- 
timates. By  Helen  Thomas  Follett  and  Wilson 
Follett.  Holt;  $1.50. 

Recall  to  mind  the  forceful  and  absorbed 
youth  who,  at  street  fairs  or  in  summer  parks, 
buys  a  handful  of  balls  and  lets  fly  at  the  "nigger 
babies."  How  completely  he  concentrates  on 
the  target  provided!  With  what  docility  he 
accepts  that  row  of  puppets  as  a  be-all  and  end- 
all — as  constituting  the  established  and  recog- 
nized mark  at  which  he  is  to  fire!  He  never 
looks  about  him  to  notice  whether  other  puppets 
may  be  aspiring  for  recognition  and  for  a  place 
in  the  row — aspirants  who  might  even  reach  it 
if  he  would  only  give  a  little  friendly  help.  Still 
less  is  he  conscious  of  any  near-by,  inchoate  striv- 
ings amongst  rags,  paint,  and  stuffing  such  as 
might  evidence  the  struggle  to  achieve  form  and 
place — which  might  be  reached  would  he  but 
deign  to  cast  an  encouraging  eye.  No,  le  jeu  est 
fait,  and  he  continues  to  blaze  away  at  the  con- 
ventional target:  his  record  depends  on  his  suc- 
cess with  that,  and  just  that. 

So  with  the  Folletts — as  one  may  unceremo- 
niously call  them,  for  brevity's  sake.  Or,  if  the 
crude  simile  offends,  another  may  be  substituted 
for  it.  Let  us  figure  an  amiable  and  interested 
booklover,  standing  before  tiers  of  well-filled 
shelves.  The  books  are  by  "established  authors" 
— or  at  least  by  authors  who,  by  now,  have  been 
sufficiently  commented  upon  to  be  "ranged."  He 
takes  down  one  here  and  there,  ruffles  its  leaves, 
dusts  it  a  bit,  if  required,  and — puts  it  back 
about  in  the  same  place.  The  glorious  company 
of  leaf-rufflers  has  now  been  enlarged,  and  the 
established  authors  are  established  more  firmly 
than  ever. 

This  is  about  what  the  Folletts — still  speak- 
ing with  unceremonious  brevity — do.  To  be  per- 
fectly fair,  they  do  rather  more:  they  slightly 
shift  their  authors  to  bring  them  into  new  rela- 
tions, and  they  throw  upon  the  general  body  of 
them  a  different  and  novel  light.  Their  authors 
are  put  into  pairs  and  the  pairs  are  arranged  into 
groups ;  and  the  light  thrown  upon  them  all  is  the 
red  light  of  war. 

They  do  one  thing  more.  At  the  bottom  of 
the  rack,  by  way  of  appendix,  they  place  a 
younger  and  somewhat  inferior  row  of  babies, 
selected — save  for  one  brief  exception — from 
among  the  recent  fictionists  of  England.  This 
tends  to  depress  the  native  author.  It  seems  to 
tell  him  one  of  two  things :  either  that  the  Ameri- 


can fiction  of  the  day  is  slighter  than  the  British — 
which  it  may  be  in  depth,  density,  perspective 
and  background,  and  value  of  social  intention; 
or  that  our  present  critics  are  reluctant  to  waste 
good  work  (and  their  work  is  good)  on  people 
who  may  presently  turn  out  not  to  have  justi- 
fied it.  Safer  and  more  satisfactory  to  exercise 
oneself  on  standard  subjects. 

The  book  includes  a  dozen  reprinted  essays 
which  are  reshifted  and  relighted  by  means  of  a 
table  of  contents  and  an  introduction.  The 
table  of  contents  betrays  a  Gallic  hankering 
after  form,  however  come  by,  and  a  Gallic  love 
of  the  label  for  the  label's  own  sake.  It  is 
natural  enough  to  pair  Henry  James  and  Mr. 
Howells  under  the  head  "Cosmopolitan  and 
Provincial";  but  it  is  less  natural  to  bracket 
George  Meredith  and  George  Gissing  under  such 
a  head  as  "The  Will  to  Believe  and  the  Will 
to  Doubt."  On  the  other  hand,  some  pairings 
that  seem  especially  artificial  at  first  view  justify 
themselves  on  inspection.  To  bring  together 
Eden  Phillpotts  and  Arnold  Bennett  under  such 
a  caption  as  "The  Five  Counties  and  the  Five 
Towns,"  seems  like  a  mere  tricksy  piece  of  ver- 
balism; yet  it  works  out  in  a  way  to  satisfy  the 
sense  of  the  reader,  even  if  it  ends  by  outraging 
the  loyalty  of  Phillpotts's  followers.  But  to 
oppose  Hardy  as  "the  specialist  in  place"  to  De 
Morgan  as  "the  specialist  in  time"  comes  rather 
close  to  running  one's  system  into  the  ground. 

The  introduction  is  a  sheet  of  red  glass  run 
in  to  give  a  "timely"  new  coloring  to  old  mat- 
ter— or,  rather,  to  matter  produced  previously 
and  in  independence  of  its  aid.  On  what  ground 
it  asks,  can  one  justify  the  production  and  perusal 
of  fiction  in  such  days  as  these?  In  other  words, 
what  is  art's  place  in  the  world  ?  Well,  art  goes 
abreast  of  war,  as  all  history  shows — and  outlasts 
it.  Another  point  stressed  by  the  introduction 
is  the  growing  "sense  of  community,  the  social 
conscience,  human  solidarity" :  a  commonplace  of 
present-day  thought,  in  the  air  as  a  matter  of 
course.  New  social  forms  and  groupings  may 
arise  as  the  result  of  war — and  then  internal 
struggles  and  oppressions  return  with  the  coming 
of  peace. 

All  this,  however,  is  but  grudging  recogni- 
tion of  a  book  which,  essentially,  is  good  and 
sound.  In  fact,  one  feels  a  little  like  starting 
all  over  again.  "Dear  Sir  and  Madam:"  one 
would  say,  "your  twelve  essays  constitute  one 
of  the  best  books  of  literary  criticism  yet  pro- 
duced in  America.  You  might  indeed  have 
shown  a  slightly  sharper  awareness  of  the  im- 


234 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


mediate  Here  and  Now,  and  you  might  well 
have  dispensed  with  certain  vestibules  and 
facades;  but  your  house  is  a  house  of  life,  and 
save  for  these  certain  exceptions  we  are  com- 
pletely with  you.  You  enjoy  the  sound  bene- 
fits of  right  feeling  and  right  thinking.  Your 
diction,  even  if  more  to  be  noted  for  a  self- 
conscious  trimness  than  for  freedom  and  unc- 
tion, is  really  a  pleasure,  page  by  page;  your 
concern  with  form,  though  rather  overdone  in 
the  compilation  of  your  table  of  contents,  often 
comes  out  very  handsomely  in  the  papers  them- 
selves— quite  splendidly  in  your  remarkable  char- 
acterization of  the  four  principal  novels  of 
Galsworthy.  Your  sense  of  a  worthy  and  service- 
able relation  between  life  and  literature  is  im- 
manent everywhere — a  relation  varying  through 
the  years  and  through  your  varying  subjects — 
and  requires  no  supplementary  demonstration.  In 
short,  you  have  stepped  within  that  choice  circle 
of  criticism  which  contains  no  more  than  half-a- 
dozen  significant  writers,  all  told;  and  the  coun- 
try— so  far  as  it  concerns  itself  with  such  matters 
at  all — should  feel  gratified  with  you  and  your 
work.  Your  wine  is  good;  you  could  do  with 
less  bush  at  your  door." 

HENRY  B.  FULLER. 


A  Vanishing  World  of  Gentility 

THESE    MANY   YEARS.     By   Brander   Matthews. 
Scribners;  $3. 

What  more  cordial  welcome  could  the  re- 
viewer ask  than  this  "Que  pensez-vous  de  cette 
comedie?"  from  the  bookplate  designed  for  Mr. 
Matthews  by  Abbey,  and  reproduced  on  the 
cover  of  these  "recollections"?  The  bookplate, 
symbolizing  Mr.  Matthews  as  "an  American  in- 
terested in  the  drama,"  represents  an  Indian  gaz- 
ing into  the  face  of  a  Greek  mask.  Our  author 
will  scarcely  realize  how  much  better  a  joke  this 
is  than  any  contained  within  the  cover  of  his 
book.  For  anything  less  Indian  or  less  Greek 
than  the  particular  comedy  of  his  life  cannot 
well  be  imagined. 

Deliberately  and  expensively  bred  to  follow 
the  profession  of  millionaire,  he  was  released, 
just  as  he  came  of  age,  by  the  wiping-out  of  his 
father's  fortune,  for  the  profession  that  his  heart 
craved — that  of  writing  plays  and  seeing  them 
acted  on  the  stage.  His  unexpected  translation 
to  the  professorial  sphere  did  not  transform  him 
from  being  about  the  most  naively  worldly  soul 


who  ever  got  himself  recognized  as  a  man  of 
letters.  He  gazed  at  life  with  no  Indian  hau- 
teur, but  with  a  never  sated  enjoyment  in  the 
pleasant  comedy  of  clubs  and  theatres  and  liter- 
ary associations — equally  at  home  in  London, 
Paris,  and  New  York — incorrigibly  anecdotal, 
genial,  and  curious.  And  it  was  no  Sophoclean 
tragedy  upon  which  he  gazed,  but  the  second-rate 
imitations  of  Scribe  and  Augier,  and  the  cleverly 
turned  short-story,  and  the  wittiness  of  familiar 
verse.  Sarcey,  Coquelin,  divided  his  worship 
with  Austin  Dobson,  Bunner,  and  Locker-Lamp- 
son.  How  fortunate  he  was  to  live  in  the  era 
of  well-made  plays,  and  of  ballades  and  ron- 
deaux !  He  took  to  them  all  like  a  fish  to  water. 
And  he  recalls  his  own  half-dozen  acted  plays 
with  a  justifiable  pleasure  that  is  undimmed  by 
the  realization  that  no  one  now  remembers  that 
at  least  two  of  them  had  long  and  popular  suc- 
cesses. 

In  his  youth,  he  had  a  significant  era  of  skill 
as  an  acrobat  and  gymnast,  and  he  tells  with 
glee  of  his  being  invited  to  go  out  on  the  road 
"under  canvas."  It  was  always  the  acrobatics 
of  literature  that  Mr.  Matthews  responded  to, 
and  always  the  circus  of  the  social  and  literary 
world  which  enthralled  him.  He  achieved  a 
wide  acquaintance  among  the  lions,  and  he  prac- 
ticed all  the  tricks,  in  verse  and  play  and  story. 
But  he  is  so  completely  objective  that  scarcely 
one  of  the  writers  whom  he  knew  is  characterized 
with  any  precision  whatever,  except  perhaps 
Andrew  Lang,  for  whom  he  had  a  prodigious 
admiration,  and  W.  E.  Henley,  for  whose  at- 
tack on  Stevenson  he  has  an  unexpectedly  sym- 
pathetic word.  Otherwise  the  contacts  and  oc- 
casions pass  before  our  eyes  like  dates  in  Mr. 
Matthews's  diaries,  carried  along  by  his  own 
pleasure  in  their  abundance  and  their  notability. 
There  is  plenty  of  mild  gossip,  and  we  are  pres- 
ent at  the  founding  of  innumerable  clubs,  and  at 
least  one  Academy.  His  anecdotes  sound  better 
in  the  classroom.  The  compulsion  to  autobi- 
ography sprang,  in  Mr.  Matthews's  case,  less 
from  a  sense  of  personal  flavor  and  distinctive 
quality  in  what  he  saw  than  from  a  boyish  de- 
sire to  get  down  a  record  of  his  passing  life. 

Anyone  so  completely  extroverted  as  Mr.  Mat- 
thews could  not  be  immodest.  He  is  as  little  in- 
terested in  the  processes  of  his  own  soul  as  in  those 
of  the  brilliant  and  complex  peronalities  whom 
he  has  known.  He  does  not  think  of  himself  as 
an  absorbing  person,  to  be  detachedly  studied  and 
analyzed  as  a  type  of  man,  nor  as  a  person  of 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


235 


romantic  significance  to  be  interpreted  from  the 
innermost  core  of  his  soul.  His  diary  treatment 
of  life  is  so  pure  as  almost  to  make  these  "recol- 
lections" interesting.  But  there  are  too  many 
passages  such  as  this,  where  he  reflects  on  his 
university  life: 

So  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  form  an  opinion, 
there  is  no  university  in  the  United  States  where  the 
position  of  the  professor  is  pleasanter  than  it  is  at 
Columbia.  The  students,  graduate  and  undergradu- 
ate, are  satisfactory  in  quality;  and  their  spirit  is 
excellent.  The  teaching  staff  is  so  large  that  it  is 
generally  possible  for  each  of  us  to  cover  that  part 
of  his  field  in  which  he  is  most  keenly  interested.  Our 
relations  with  each  other  and  with  the  several  deans 
and  the  president  and  the  trustees  are  ever  friendly. 
So  long  as  we  do  our  work  faithfully  we  are  left 
alone  to  do  it  in  our  own  fashion.  And  we  have  all 
of  us  the  Lernfreiheit  and  the  Lehrfreiheit,  the  lib- 
erty of  the  soul  and  of  the  mind,  which  was  once  the 
boast  of  the  German  universities,  but  which  has  been 
lost  of  late  under  the  rigidity  of  Prussian  autoc- 
racy. 

"God    bless    us    every    one!"    said    little    Tim. 

Anyone  who  gets  the  full  flavor  of  this  pas- 
sage, recalling  all  there  is  to  be  said  on  these 
matters,  will  be  near  the  secret  of  that  American 
race  of  men  of  letters  of  whom  Mr.  Matthews  is 
one  of  the  naiver  specimens,  a  race  to  whom  litera- 
ture was  a  gesture  of  gentility  and  not  a  compre- 
hension of  life.  There  is  a  fascination  about  that 
brilliant  literary  world  of  the  seventies  and 
eighties  when  the  "Nation"  and  the  New 
York  "Tribune"  and  "World"  monopolized  the 
younger  generation  of  critical  talent.  But  what 
on  earth  can  a  younger  generation  of  today  do 
with  the  remains  of  this  gentility  ?  In  his  account 
of  the  atrocious  college  education  that  the  best 
of  money  could  buy  in  America  in  1868,  Mr. 
Matthews  gave  me  a  guess  at  the  secret  of  the 
continuance  of  this  genteel  tradition.  Was  it 
because  you  could  get  no  education  at  all  unless 
you  got  it  from  foreign  travel  or  from  cultivated 
relatives?  Only  the  genteel,  apparently,  had 
these  opportunities,  so  that  the  creation  of  a 
proletarian  man  of  letters  in  America  became 
automatically  impossible,  until  universities  and 
libraries  improved  and  diffused  the  raw  materials 
of  the  spirit. 

What  do  I  think  of  this  comedy?  I  like  the 
slight  pugnacity  with  which  Mr.  Matthews  went 
into  the  contest  for  the  copyright  bill  and  for 
simplified  spelling.  I  like  the  candor  with 
which  he  confesses  his  relief  at  being  freed  from 
the  dread  possibilities  of  practicing  the  profes- 
sion of  millionaire.  But  if  there  was  ever  a  man 
of  letters  whose  mind  moved  submerged  far  be- 
low the  significant  literary  currents  of  the  time, 


that  is  the  man  revealed  in  this  book.  He  seems 
to  have  known  everybody,  and  to  have  felt  noth- 
ing. His  genial  youthfulness  is  infectious.  But 
it  is  not  the  youth  of  idealism  and  aspiration, 
but  of  Peter  Pan,  writing  stories  of  treasure- 
trove  for  "St.  Nicholas."  I  know  there's  the 
"Moliere,"  and  the  "Shakespeare,"  and  the 
critical  essays.  But  that's  not  the  mind  that 
writes  "These  Many  Years."  Turned  on  itself, 
it  creates  a  tell-tale  commentary  of  a  literary  era 
that  never  grew  up.  The  puzzle  to  us  now  is 
that  these  bons  viveurs  have  not  made  life  more 
exciting,  that  these  dear  old  romancers  and  real- 
ists of  Mr.  Matthews's  generation  have  not  made 
life  more  romantic  and  realistic.  What  on  earth, 
I  repeat,  are  we  going  to  do  with  these  people 
who  blissfully  never  even  knew  what  a  world  of 
horizons  and  audacities  they  lived  in? 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


Democracy  by  Coercion 

FIGHTING  FOR  PEACE.  By  Henry  Van  Dyke.  Scrib- 

ners;  $1.25. 

THE  HIGH  CALL.    By  Ernest  M.  Stires.    Dutton; 

$1.50. 

THE  COMMONWEALTH  AT  WAR.    By  A.  F.  Pollard. 

Longmans,  Green;  $2.25. 

DEMOCRACY   AND   THE   WAR.     By  John    Firman 

Coar.    Putnams;  $1.25. 

At  first  glance  the  four  authors  here  grouped 
together  would  seem  to  have  little  enough  in 
common :  the  litterateur  who  was  for  three  years 
United  States  Minister  to  the  Netherlands,  the 
Rector  of  St.  Thomas's  in  New  York,  the  Pro- 
fessor of  English  History  in  the  University  of 
London,  and  the  Professor  of  German  in  the 
University  of  Alberta  at  Edmonton.  Yet  it  hap- 
pens that  for  the  moment  their  points  of 
resemblance  are  more  striking  than  their  wide 
differences  in  background. 

It  is  perhaps  least  important,  though  the 
reader  will  find  it  unsatisfactory  enough,  that 
all  four  books  are  of  the  nature  of  fugitive 
journalism.  Three-quarters  of  Dr.  Van  Dyke's 
volume  is  a  sketchy  account  of  the  origin 
and  the  earlier  course  of  the  war — not  vividly 
illuminated  by  the  reminiscences  of  one  who  in 
Antwerp  marveled  over  tennis-court  emplace- 
ments for  those  big  German  guns  which  Pro- 
fessor Pollard  assures  us  were  really  fired  from 
their  own  carriages;  another  eighth  is  devoted 
to  such  interludes  as  "A  Dialogue  on  Peace 
between  a  Householder  and  a  Burglar";  and  a 


236 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


residual  eighth  has  any  vital  bearing  upon  his 
subject.  "The  High  Call"  is  a  series  of  fourteen 
sermons  concerning  our  entry  into  the  war,  of 
which  two  or  three,  winging  the  serene  empyrean 
of  the  fashionable  church,  let  fall  feathery  ideas 
calculated  to  tickle  the  drowsy  layman.  Pro- 
fessor Pollard's  nineteen  reprinted  papers  (chiefly 
from  the  Thunderer's  "Literary  Supplement") 
are  dated  all  the  way  from  January,  1915  to 
August,  1917  and  contain  so  many  anachronisms 
and  ungrateful  flings  at  American  neutrality  that 
one  wonders  why  they  should  have  been  reprinted 
at  all,  or  being  reprinted  should  have  been  im- 
ported. Finally,  Professor  Coar  says  of  his  much 
more  coherent  book  that  it  "is  based  on  addresses 
delivered  in  the  United  States  and  Canada  since 
the  fall  of  1914."  Volumes  thus  assembled  can 
scarcely  develop  consistent  theses. 

More  significant  similarities  are  those  of  temper 
and  opinion.  A  newspaper  recently  announced 
a  new  serial  as  follows :  "She  married  a  German. 
Read  it!  It  will  make  you  mad!"  All  four  of 
our  authors,  though  in  descending  degrees,  have 
been  made  "mad"  by  what  they  have  read  or 
have  observed  about  the  Germans.  The  first 
dilates  upon  "the  Werwolf  at  large" ;  the  second 
tells  us  that  God  "sees  in  the  home  of  modern 
atheism  .  .  .  the  crucifixion  of  humanity"; 
the  third  discusses  "the  moral  insensibility  of 
Prussia,"  finds  not  one  vestige  "of  moral  scruple 
or  enlightenment"  in  the  history  of  the  Junkers, 
and  adds  that  "the  problem  before  the  civilized 
world,  during  and  after  this  war,  is  how  to  deal 
with  a  parvenu  who  declines  to  observe  any 
rules  in  the  society  into  which  he  has  thrust  his 
unwelcome  presence" ;  and  the  last  would  "grasp 
by  the  throat  and  throttle  to  death  the  autocratic 
beast  .  .  .  befouling  the  temple  of  human- 
ity." It  is  not  so  much  an  olive  branch  as 
an  olive  rod  that  is  thus  extended.  For  the 
authors  are  unanimous  in  their  insistence  upon 
the  knock-out  blow,  even  if  they  do  not  quite 
endorse  the  dictum  of  Marse  Henry  Watterson, 
that  perfect  jusquauboutiste:  "If  any  power  is 
left  intact  in  Germany  to  make  treaty  with  any 
other  power,  we  are  lost."  With  Dr.  Van  Dyke 
the  sine  qua  non  is  "repentance" — "to  talk  of 
any  other  course  is  treason,  not  only  to  our 
country  but  to  the  cause  of  true  Peace."  The 
Reverend  Mr.  Stires  insists  that  "the  beast 
.  .  .  must  be  conquered."  "When  once  the 
sword  has  been  drawn,"  says  Professor  Pollard, 
"the  day  of  persuasion  is  past.  .  .  It  is  a 
question  of  victory  or  defeat."  Professor  Coar  is 


explicit:  the  fall  of  the  Hohenzollerns  will  not 
be  enough ;  he  wants  us  to  reject  "courageously" 
all  peace  terms  that  may  be  proffered  before  the 
enemy  have  been  "converted  to  the  faith  of  the 
democratic  nations" ;  that  time  will  come  "when, 
and  only  when,  the  German  people  realize  that 
their  national  fate  lies  in  the  hands  of  the 
Allies";  before  that  time  the  Allied  forces  must 
break  the  last  line  of  defense  and  "penetrate  the 
heart  of  Germany's  industrial  activity,  the  Rhen- 
ish province  and  Westphalia." 

Yet  not  one  of  these  advocates  of  a  war  to 
the  bitter  end  purposes  at  its  close  a  "crushed" 
Germany!  All  are  deeply,  even  passionately, 
concerned  for  a  "right  conclusion"  to  the  war, 
a  just  and  (according  to  their  several  lights)  a 
democratic  peace,  and  after  peace  some  inter- 
national arrangement  for  the  forestalling  of  war. 
What  they  do  purpose  at  the  close  is  a  victorious 
democracy  magnanimously  bestowing  the  "pax 
humana"  upon  a  people  defeated  but  not  em- 
bittered, powerless  longer  to  do  wrong  and 
therefore  "free"  at  last  to  do  right — a  criminal 
punished,  penitent,  regenerate.  To  that  con- 
summation they  know  only  one  course. 

Let  our  authors  be  granted  the  dubious  pos- 
sibility of  a  peace  dictated  either  in  Berlin  or  in 
Paris — a  clear  cut  "victory  or  defeat."  Assum- 
ing that  their  course  to  a  democratic  peace  is,  if 
not  the  only  course,  at  least  one  that  is  open, 
can  we  avoid  seeing  the  impasse  at  which  they 
arrive?  It  is  a  dilemma  each  of  them  might 
have  foreseen  but  for  the  devious  meanderings 
of  the  journalistic  method.  For  (pace  Professor 
Pollard)  the  question  is  not  of  "victory  or  de- 
feat," but  of  victory  and  defeat.  The  proponents 
of  the  knock-out  blow  somehow  forget  that  the 
shield  of  peace  with  victory  has  for  reverse  peace 
with  defeat,  and  that  defeat  is  not  only  bitter 
but — as  witness  the  unreconstructed  South — em- 
bittering. Has  Dr.  Van  Dyke  reflected  that  the 
reverse  of  his  shield  of  "peace  with  righteousness 
and  power"  may  well  be  peace  with  ignominy 
and  impotence?  A  defeated  Germany  may  not 
seem  to  us  necessarily  crushed  and  ignominiously 
facing  annihilation,  but  she  will  seem  so  to 
herself.  Do  we  desire  for  partners  in  that 
international  democratic  experiment  to  which  we 
stand  committed — and  for  which,  as  Messrs. 
Stires  and  Coar  recognize,  we  are  ourselves 
none  too  fit — a  people  broken,  embittered, 
shamed,  and  consciously  dependent  upon  their 
military  masters  for  their  economic  existence? 
(That  would  be  anything  but  democracy!)  If 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


237 


the  German  people  are  not  now  ready  for  a 
democratic  peace — a  peace  negotiated  between 
equals  upon  clear  programmes  of  social  recon- 
struction— will  they  be  more  ready  when  the 
Allied  armies  are  in  Westphalia,  dictating  democ- 
racy from  the  mouths  of  cannon?  These  mili- 
tant gentlemen  who  have  assured  themselves  that 
the  German  people  are  not  ready;  who  would 
prevent  as  useless,  enervating,  or  downright 
treasonable  all  discussion  (except,  of  course,  this 
of  theirs)  that  looks  toward  clarifying  our  pro- 
gramme; who  to  that  degree  fail  to  get  behind 
the  President  in  his  attempts  to  elicit  our  aims, 
the  aims  of  our  allies,  and  the  aims  of  our 
enemies — are  they  not  retarding  the  very  creation 
they  desire?  A  victorious  peace  they  might  get, 
but  what  is  their  guarantee  that  it  will  be  the 
truly  democratic  peace  "that  alone  can  validate 
victory"  ? 

Obviously  the  Junkers  are  not  ready  for  a 
democratic  peace.  But  whether  there  is  in  Ger- 
many any  considerable  body  of  opinion  that  is 
ready  we  cannot  discover,  and  these  advocates 
of  international  understanding  would  prevent  us 
from  discovering.  Suppose  such  a  body  of 
liberal  opinion  does  exist — what  is  their  method 
of  encouraging  it?  First,  to  refuse  recognition 
of  its  existence;  and,  second,  to  bring  it  into 
existence  by  the  sword.  Theirs  is  the  method 
of  the  parent  who  tells  his  child,  "Now  that  the 
rod  has  been  drawn,  the  moment  of  persuasion 
is  past;  it  is  now  a  question  of  your  exhaustion 
or  mine."  They  would  retort  that  Germany 
has  had  ample  opportunity  to  respond  to  persua- 
sion. Perhaps — yet  that  is  far  less  important 
than  that  the  course  they  urge  upon  us  would 
postpone  any  further  persuasion  until  victory  is 
secured  and  persuasion  become  coercion.  With 
one  hand  they  would  close  all  the  avenues  to 
understanding,  while  with  the  other  they  would 
labor  to  increase  the  fear  that  now  most  prevents 
understanding.  For  the  Germans  know  that  a 
knock-out  blow  knocks  out,  and  that  a  bitter  end 
is  bitter.  If  these,  and  these  alone,  be  offered 
them  they  will  inevitably  concentrate  their  ener- 
gies upon  resistance. 

But  all  this  falls  in  a  blind  spot  in  the  vision 
of  these  authors,  whose  gaze  leaps  from  fighting 
for  peace  to  the  millennium  of  peace  secured 
and  democracy  enthroned.  As  if  democracy  were 
a  paradisal  consummation  instead  of  a  method, 
an  end  instead  of  a  means.  In  spite  of  Dr.  Van 
Dyke's  eulogy,  of  Mr.  Stires's  pious  hopes,  of 


Professor  Pollard's  learning  and  sound  critical 
habits,  and  of  Professor  Coar's  constructive  analy- 
sis, not  one  of  these  four  really  understands 
democracy;  otherwise  he  would  understand  that 
a  democratic  peace  must  be  a  peace  by  democracy 
if  it  is  to  be  a  peace  for  democracy. 

Failing  to  understand  democracy  in  this  essen- 
tial, the  four  naturally  fail  to  agree  in  what  they 
expect  of  it.  The  democracy  that  satisfies  Dr. 
Van  Dyke  is  a  childish  thing  beside  that  envisaged 
by  Professor  Pollard  in  his  view  of  a  world 
where  national  wars  are  no  more,  but  economic 
wars  forever  threaten.  The  democracy  that  the 
Reverend  Mr.  Stires  invokes  to  stay  the  greed 
of  socialism  and  make  the  world  safe  for  the 
bourgeoisie,  his  parishioners,  is  a  quaint  sister  to 
the  democracy  that  shall  build  Professor  Coar's 
towering  edifice  of  state  socialism.  Such  are  the 
relatively  unimportant  differences  between  the 
authors. 

Relatively  unimportant,  that  is,  as  against 
what  is  after  all  the  common  method,  temper, 
and  premise  of  their  books.  Nor  would  those 
common  denominators  be  of  much  significance  in 
our  more  considered  literature  on  the  subject  if 
they  were  not  pretty  generally  the  common  de- 
nominators of  the  man  in  the  street.  Like  these 
authors  the  man  in  the  street  thinks  in  journal- 
istic patches,  warms  his  thoughts  with  that  tem- 
per of  "righteous  indignation"  which  for  the 
purposes  of  war  behaves  exactly  like  hate,  and 
accepts  the  premise  that  the  war  must  be  won. 
But  by  winning  the  war  he  does  not  yet  mean 
all  that  his  more  cultivated  advisers  mean :  where 
they  emphasize  a  defeated  Germany,  he  em- 
phasizes a  democratized  Germany,  a  democratized 
world,  and  the  discrediting  of  war  forever.  Are 
the  proponents  of  military  victory,  then,  his 
only  advisers?  Might  he  not  listen  also  to  a 
British  soldier,  talking  in  his  dugout,  as  reported 
by  a  correspondent  to  the  London  "Nation"  ? 

A  victorious  war  (in  the  old-fashioned  sense)  still 
leaves  war  a  reasonable  thing,  a  thing  by  which  ends 
can  be  achieved.  A  stalemate  leaves  war  discredited. 
To  win  a  war  (in  the  old-fashioned  sense)  is  to  per- 
petuate war.  The  loser  would  say,  "Never  mind!  A 
war,  it  seems,  can  still  be  won.  We  will  win  the 
next."  But  let  it  be  clear  that  a  war  cannot  be 
"won"  nowadays  in  the  way  in  which  the  old  wars 
were  won,  and  you  really  have  ended  war.  Let  it  end, 
as  all  ugly  things  should  end,  in  collapse  and  squalor, 
and  the  thing  is  dead.  But  let  it  end  in  triumphant 
marches  through  cities,  in  proud  speeches,  in  the  ring- 
ing of  bells,  and  the  challenging  music  of  bands — 
and  war  is  still  on  its  pedestal. 

CLARENCE  BRITTEN. 


238 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


Poetry  vs.  'Politics  in  the  Ukraine 

SONGS  OF  UKRANIA.     Translated   by   F.  Randal 
Livesay.    Dutton;  $1.25. 

The  question  of  Russian  solidarity  has  become 
increasingly  vital.  Ever  since  the  most  fertile 
and  accessible  section  of  Russia  has  signed  a  sep- 
arate peace  with  the  Central  Powers,  the  atten- 
tion of  a  great  part  of  the  Western  world  has 
been  centred  in  the  Ukraine.  Is  the  Rada  really 
expressing  the  will  of  the  people?  we  ask.  Or 
are  the  masses,  under  the  threat  of  German 
domination,  becoming  more  and  more  socialistic? 
In  the  prevailing  atmosphere  of  revolution  has 
what  was  originally  a  nationalistic  movement 
been  turned  into  an  attempt  to  solve  a  provin- 
cial land  question?  No  one  can  yet  be  sure 
that  the  Ukraine  will,  as  the  New  York  "Trib- 
une" puts  it,  continue  to  isolate  itself  against  the 
contagion  of  restlessness  and  make  "a  bold  stand 
against  the  spread  of  anarchy."  Who  can  say 
whether  the  Ukrainians  will  be  slaves  or  masters 
in  their  own  home?  Whether  or  not  that  home 
will  be  eventually  incorporated  in  a  federal  Rus- 
sian republic?  Whether  or  not  the  Ukrainians' 
desire  for  the  "self-determination  of  peoples"  will 
end  in  self-extermination  as  the  dependent  mili- 
tary ally  of  the  Central  Powers? 

While  we  are  waiting  for  time  to  answer  these 
questions  with  something  more  definite  than  our 
desires,  it  might  be  informing  as  well  as  inter- 
esting to  turn  to  some  of  the  literature  produced 
not  by  the  politicians  of  the  Ukraine  but  by  the 
people.  And,  since  the  soul  and  aspirations  of  a 
nation  are  rooted  in  its  folk-poetry,  we  may 
come  somewhat  nearer  to  the  people  of  little 
Russia  by  a  consideration  of  "Songs  of  Ukra- 
nia,"  selected  and  translated  by  Florence  Randal 
Livesay  and  published  when  the  phrase  "self- 
determination  of  peoples"  was  nothing  except  the 
shibboleth  of  harmless  hack-writers,  presumably 
in  the  employ  of  the  Wilhelmstrasse. 

The  first  impression  is  disappointing.  There 
seems  to  be  little  that  is  deeply  indigenous  in 
this  collection,  little  that  is  racially  marked. 
There  is  much  talk  of  pagan  gods  and  goddesses ; 
of  Haidamaky  and  Oprishki,  the  Ukrainian 
Robin  Hoods;  of  the  sighs  of  the  married 
woman,  once  a  free  Cossachka,  now  the  slave  of 
her  husband,  with  no  rights  of  her  own;  of  the 
Dunai  listening  to  nuptial  revelry  or  to  a  young 
girl  confiding  her  loneliness  to  its  ripples.  And 
the  first  impression  persists.  There  is  no 
national  revelation  here.  With  the  exception  of 
a  few  kabatys,  hutzuls,  serdaks,  widra,  and 


other  untranslated  bits  of  the  vernacular,  these 
might  be  the  folk-songs  of  Bohemia,  or  of  Bes- 
sarabia, or  of  Baluchistan.  Such  poems  as  "Far 
and  high  the  cranes  give  cry,"  "Long  ago  when 
I  was  still  free,"  "Where  the  Tisza's  torrents 
through  the  prairies  swell,"  might  well  be  true 
types  of  Ukrainian  folk-literature — were  they 
not  three  of  the  most  characteristic  examples  of 
Hungarian  melodies  translated  by  J.  S.  of  Dale 
and  Francis  Korbay,  the  composer.  Had  some 
one  done  for  the  music  of  these  Ukrainian  songs 
what  Korbay  has  done  for  the  Hungarian  ones, 
we  might  have  had  a  more  valuable  document. 
For  it  is  in  the  emotional  quality  of  the  music, 
its  mixture  of  rudeness  and  tenderness,  its  savage 
impulse  singing  through  its  sad  and  even  senti- 
mental modulations,  that  is  more  expressive  than 
the  import  of  the  words,  which  for  the  most 
part  are  the  reflection  of  emotions  common  to  all 
countries.  The  greatest  of  all  Hungarian  folk- 
songs ("Mohac's  Field")  is  a  feeble  thing  con- 
sidered as  a  piece  of  written  literature.  But 
nothing  could  be  more  stark  and  stirring,  more 
revolutionary  and  somehow  resigned,  more  full  of 
national  cry  and  color  than  this  same  song  when 
it  is  given  with  the  vigorous  melody  that  is  its 
natural  accompaniment.  True  folk-songs  are  the 
perfect  blend  of  two  arts ;  it  is  impossible  to  sep- 
arate words  and  melody.  Whenever  this  separa- 
tion is  attempted,  as  in  the  present  volume,  we 
get  not  only  an  inadequate  half  but  a  misrepre- 
sentative  one.  I  have  never  heard  the  melodies 
that  are  played  on  the  kobza  and  sung  to  these 
Cossack  and  robber  songs,  but  I  am  certain  that 
they  create  sterner  feelings  than  are  evoked  by 
such  colorless  quatrains  as: 

On  the  blue  sea  waves  are  roaring, 

Mountain  high  they  tower. 
Crying  in  their  Turkish  dungeon 

Wretched  Cossacks  cower. 

"Why,  O  gracious  God,  this  torture? 

Two  years  now  we  lie  here; 
With  the  chains  are  hands  are  heavy — 
Wilt  Thou  let  us  die  here?" 

or  the  "Song  of  Victory — 1648,"  that  begins: 

Hai,  all  ye  good  people !  list  what  I  tell  ye, 

What's  done  in  Ukraina's  plain — 
There  under  Dashiev,  across  the  Soroka, 

What  numbers  of  Poles  now  lie  slain. 

Hai,  Perebiynees!     But  seven  hundred 

Cossacks  he  asked  for  that  day. 
Then  he  with  sabres  smote  the  Poles'  heads  off — 

The  rest  swept  the  river  away. 

The  wordless  dances  from  "Prince  Igor,"  the 
chant  of  the  Volga  boatman,  or  the  single 
"Hopak"  of  Moussorgsky  say  more  and  say  it 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


239 


far  more  clearly  than  a  hundred  such  stanzas. 
National  feeling  is  expressed  by  something  less 
definite  but  deeper  than  a  list  of  ancient  victories, 
faithless  lovers,  and  dreams  of  forgotten  king- 
doms. These  verses,  with  the  exception  of  the 
hints  of  quaint  rituals  and  superstitions  found  in 
the  wedding  songs  and  a  few  others,  tell  us  little 
that  is  distinctively  Ukrainian.  Or  rather,  they 
tell  us  only  of  the  Ukrainians  of  yesterday;  they 
reveal  nothing  of  what  has  come  between  them 
and  their  old  visions.  As  historical  memories, 
they  contain  many  points  for  the  statistician  but, 
lacking  their  original  impelling  magic,  they  are 
only  occasionally  informing  and  rarely  interpre- 
tative. After  all,  if  we  want  an  authoritative 
answer  to  the  Ukrainian  puzzle  we  shall  not  get 
it  through  Miss  Livesay.  We  are  far  more 
likely  to  get  it  through  the  Soviets. 

Louis  UNTERMEYER. 


'Million- Footed  Manhattan 


THE  BOOK  OF  NEW  YORK.    By  Robert  Shackleton. 
Penn  Publishing  Co.;  $2.50. 

A  LOITERER  IN  NEW  YORK.     By  Helen  W.  Hen- 
derson.   Doran;  $4.00. 

GREENWICH   VILLAGE.     By   Anna   Alice   Chapin. 
Dodd,  Mead ;  $2.50. 

No  city  seems  to  provoke  epigrams  from  its 
observers  so  readily  as  New  York.  Henry  James 
caught  its  many  physical  aspects  in  the  net  of 
his  sensitive  undulating  prose,  summarizing  its 
external  quality  in  his  description  of  the  long, 
shrill  city,  the  "jagged  city,"  with  its  skyscrapers 
like  the  teeth  of  a  colossal  hair-comb.  Who  for- 
gets Walt  Whitman's  paean:  "When  million- 
footed  Manhattan  unpent  descends  to  her 
pavement"?  Dickens's  mordant  caricatures  are 
forgotten,  yet  it  is  comforting  to  remember  that 
although  the  Harlem  goats  have  long  since  given 
up  their  feeding-grounds  to  duplex  apartment 
houses,  one  can  still  see  an  occasional  survivor 
cavorting  on  the  slopes  of  Bolton  Road  at  In- 
wood.  More  recently  the  epigrams  have  taken 
on  a  sociological  flavor.  Julian  Street  tells  us 
that  an  American  in  New  York  is  nowadays  at 
the  mercy  of  the  Greeks,  Italians,  Irish,  Rus- 
sians, French,  Germans,  and  Swiss — with  no 
American  consul  to  appeal  to!  And  a  less  amia- 
ble observer  hit  off  the  economic  and  social 
geography  of  the  city  when  he  wrote  of  New 
York,  "An  island  of  sin  and  misery  divided  by 
an  avenue  of  wealth." 

Perhaps  the  impulse  to  write  a  single  succinct 


phrase  about  New  York  and  chance  on  it  one's 
reputation  for  perspicacity  comes  from  a  dim 
recognition  that  details  will  confuse  the  im- 
pression. The  city  almost  invites  to  briskness. 
There  is  a  possibility  for  characterization,  one 
feels,  in  a  quick  glance  over  the  vast  jungle  of 
its  multiple  life.  But  a  long  acquaintance  will 
produce  a  kind  of  bewildered  literary  humility. 
The  voice  of  the  city,  which  even  so  fond  a  lover 
as  O.  Henry  could  not  help  making  seem  archaic 
today,  will  speak  not  only  in  siren-whistle  tones 
and  softer  accents,  but  in  many  strange  tongues 
and  alien  whisperings.  The  most  careful  explorer 
can  never  be  sure  there  are  not  some  clusters  of 
life  and  custom  and  speech  that  he  has  missed. 
Turn  East  from  the  Avenue  above  the  Plaza 
and  you  might  for  a  moment  believe  yourself  in 
Moscow.  Home-sick  travelers  in  the  most 
bizarre  cities  of  the  Near  East  may  comfort  them- 
selves with  the  reflection,  "I  have  seen  nothing 
so  much  like  Mulberry  Street  on  a  Saturday 
night."  Around  Washington  Square  there  are 
moments  when  it  is  easy  to  fancy  onself  in  Boston 
or  Paris  or  London.  Morningside  and  Columbia 
and  the  Drive — who  dares  to  say  this  is  as  dis- 
tinctively New  York  as  the  Avenue  between 
Thirty-Third  and  Fifty-Ninth  on  a  sunny 
October  day?  Weakly  we  accept  the  cliche  "a 
city  of  contrasts,"  and  evade  the  difficulty  of 
characterization.  For  hardly  any  hundred  know 
identically  the  same  New  York,  as  hundreds  of 
thousands  must  know  the  same  glamorous  Lon- 
don of  autumn  haze  and  the  same  gray  vistas 
and  wet,  shining  boulevards  of  Paris. 

There  are  coils  upon  coils  of  life  in  the  city 
that  sends  its  ships  out  so  proudly  to  the  old 
world  from  the  new.  Huddled  upon  the  lower 
island  is  the  new  America  of  triumphant  finance, 
arrogant  in  its  stone  and  steel  and  towering 
massiveness,  and  the  pathetic  remnants  of  an 
older,  more  gracious  colonialism — little  refuges 
in  the  teeming  swamps  of  the  new  immigrants, 
who  cling  together  for  protection  against  the  un- 
known and  build  their  churches,  their  theatres, 
their  market  places,  crowding  down  into  them 
from  the  vast  wilderness  of  tenements  and 
cluttering  the  streets.  There  are  here,  as  well, 
the  architectural  hints  of  other  cities,  the  inter- 
secting avenues  of  middle-class  commercial  Amer- 
ica, with  its  steam-heated,  bath-room  apartmented 
clientele,  the  dreary  wastes  of  factory  and  ter- 
minals, an  occasional  shame-faced  park  and 
aggressive  settlement  house.  Further  up  the 
island  are  the  Broadway  of  lights-of-love,  and 


240 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


lights  of  fiction,  the  Drive  and  the  Avenue,  both 
the  latter  distinctively  New  York.  Yet  if  you 
care  to  go  down  the  short  gridiron  streets  on 
either  side  to  the  two  rivers  you  can  find  Detroit 
or  Cleveland  or  Chicago  even,  in  little.  There 
are  microcosms  of  all  our  industrial  centres 
scattered  along  these  water-fronts.  And  due 
north  are  infinite  replications  of  all  our  homes, 
with  their  aura  of  families,  from  even  the  front- 
door shade  tree  to  the  box-like  "flat,"  and  from 
the  panoply  of  new  and  splendid  apartment 
houses  to  the  more  seemly  brown-stone.  Thread- 
ing this  strange  motley  the  New  Yorker,  tolerant 
yet  provincial,  unmoved  by  the  flux  of  heaving 
new  subways  and  the  perpetual  tearing-down  and 
building-up,  yet  curiously  conventional  in  his 
pleasures  and  rigid  in  his  beliefs,  finds  his  way  to 
the  fringe  of  real  American  suburbia  which  en- 
velops the  almost  denationalized  cluster  of  lives 
and  buildings  called  New  York.  It  smiles  down 
in  friendly  protection  from  the  Jersey  shores; 
stretches  through  the  wastes  of  Brooklyn  and 
Queens  to  the  further  Long  Island  of  medieval 
country  estates  of  the  uncomfortably  rich.  It 
reaches  down  from  the  lovely  rolling  landscape 
of  "up-State"  through  the  Bronx  and  Harlem 
to  the  island  itself,  where  the  rivers  ceaselessly 
wash  this  greatest  of  experiments  in  community 
life. 

What  author,  except  the  casual  visitor,  would 
have  the  presumption  to  attempt  to  harness  the 
kaleidoscope  of  all  this  in  a  few  phrases,  even 
in  a  single  book?  Who,  except  as  the  intuition 
from  a  brief  trip,  could  make  so  bold,  yet  so 
profoundly  wise,  a  comparison  between  our  two 
largest  cities  as,  "Chicago  is  self-conscious  and 
New  York  is  not"?  Miss  Chapin,  for  instance, 
in  her  attractively  illustrated  volume,  "Green- 
wich Village,"  avoids  the  problem  by  confining 
her  attention  to  one  of  the  many  little  com- 
munities of  New  York.  She  writes  of  the 
district  with  great  affection  and  a  rather  re- 
freshing naivete,  with  something  of  the  embar- 
rassed exhilaration  the  conventional  man  feels  on 
his  first  introduction  to  an  actress.  Yet  on  the 
whole  it  is  a  friendly  accent  after  the  over- 
featured  and  over-adjectival  publicity  of  indus- 
trious "special  story"  bandits,  who  do  their  best 
to  rob  our  cities  of  what  bloom  is  left  them,  by 
calling  too  shrill  attention  to  the  happier  sur- 
vivals. Miss  Chapin  calls  her  book  "the 
chequered  history  of  a  city  square,"  and  dwells 
on  the  gallant  days  of  "The  Green  Village,"  the 
career  of  old  Sir  Peter  Warren,  who  was  a  true 
villager  of  those  times  in  spite  of  achieving  the 
too  classic  distinction  of  being  buried  in  West- 


minster Abbey  and  having  his  epitaph  written  by 
none  other  than  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson.  There  is 
the  romantic  story  of  Richmond  Hill  and  Aaron 
Burr  and,  in  later  times,  of  "Tom  Paine,  Infidel," 
whose  shade  perhaps  hovers  hospitably  over  the 
merry  young  atheists  of  nowadays.  The  last 
part  of  her  book  Miss  Chapin  devotes  to  the 
villagers  of  today  and  to  their  many  restaurants, 
for  heavy  eating  and  light  talk  are  still  the 
favorite  in-door  amusements.  In  spite  of  Miss 
Chapin's  earnest  desire  to  be  friendly  and  to 
picture  the  villagers  as  impetuous,  but  youthful 
and  ambitious,  Arcadians  in  a  sort  of  play-world 
of  camaraderie,  I  think  she  has  really  missed 
the  point  of  the  modern  village.  It  is  true  that 
there  is  a  kind  of  youthful  eagerness  to  make  a 
personal  try  at  life  instead  of  accepting  anyone's 
say-so.  It  is  true  that  there  is  a  tolerance  (at 
least  in  speech  and  action),  an  easy  willingness 
to  forgive  mistakes,  a  sense  that  there  is  always 
another  day  coming,  a  kind  of  perennial  Micaw- 
ber  optimism.  But  there  is  little  real  intellectual 
life,  although  much  pretense  at  it  and  a  fierce 
dogmatic  passion  of  approval  for  any  idea  which 
has  the  pure-food  certificate  of  novelty.  And 
although  there  are  a  few  disorganized  creative 
forces  emerging  out  of  the  liberating  leaven  of 
the  Square,  they  quickly  transfer  their  centres  of 
gravity  to  other  sections  of  New  York  when  they 
gain  momentum  and  discipline.  For  Miss  Chapin 
seems  to  forget  that  although  all  Bohemia  is 
parochial  enough,  it  is  hardly  the  parochialism 
of  people  who  have  roots  and  a  natural  history. 
In  Bohemia  one's  origins  are  one's  disabilities; 
they  are  the  points  from  which  one  has  "reacted" 
or  rebelled.  It  is  the  creed  that  one's  future 
shall  be  tremulous  and  uncertain.  To  act  as  if 
moulded  by  any  end  greater  than  six  days  ahead 
is  rank  apostasy.  It  is  the  mood  of  adventurous- 
ness,  of  expectancy,  of  the  fun  of  repudiating 
tomorrow  what  one  cherishes  today,  the  thrill 
of  really  assuming  that  it  is  a  pluralistic  world, 
ecstasy  before  the  flux.  It  is  hardly  a  mood  for 
gray-beards  or  a  programme  for  the  ambitious. 
The  most  pathetic  people  in  Bohemia  are  the 
"real"  Bohemians — those  who  have  been  there  a 
long  time.  They  have  confused  a  mood  with  a 
career;  they  are  as  absurd  as  middle-aged  men 
with  the  chicken  pox  or  a  father  with  the  whoop- 
ing cough. 

Nor  does  Miss  Henderson  in  her  larger  and — 
in  appearance  only,  not  in  intention — more  pre- 
tentious volume,  with  its  slightly  ironical  title, 
"A  Loiterer  in  New  York,"  attempt  to  "do" 
New  York.  She  attempts  merely  to  chronicle 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


241 


the  more  conventional  art  and  architecture  of 
the  city,  with  just  enough  of  friendly  gossip  and 
historical  anecdote  and  background  to  clothe  the 
narrative  engagingly.  It  would  be  a  disconcert- 
ing lesson  in  appreciation  for  the  traditionally 
indifferent  and  unobserving  New  Yorker  to  read 
Miss  Henderson's  estimates  (and  the  estimates 
of  others,  for  the  author  is  generous  in  quotation) 
of  the  statuary  of  Macmonnies,  French,  Karl 
Bitter,  and  Augustus  Saint-Gaudens;  the  archi- 
tecture of  McKim,  White,  Nash,  Carrere,  La 
Farge,  and  Hastings;  the  many  treasures  of 
the  Museum;  the  paintings  of  Blashfield,  Par- 
rish,  Redfield,  and  John  La  Farge.  One  can 
easily  fancy  the  younger  men  sniffing  a  bit  at  these 
academic  names;  yet  after  all  it  is  from  these 
men  that  the  greater  number  of  New  York's 
citizens  get  their  fleeting  glimpses  of  art  and 
their  conceptions,  so  far  as  they  may  be  said  to 
have  any,  of  formal  beauty.  Such  a  study  has 
real  social  value  as  a  presentation  of  the  aesthetic 
background  of  the  majority.  Miss  Henderson's 
volume  gives  us  a  successful  and  entertaining 
performance  in  a  task  which  perhaps  few  others 
would  care  to  undertake.  It  may  be  many  years 
— now  that  the  war  has  made  art,  except  as  it 
ties  itself  to  the  chariot  wheels  of  belligerency, 
a  kind  of  capricious  irrelevance — before  New 
York  will  break  through  what  we  may  call  the 
external  shell  of  imported  excellence,  and  will 
develop  enough  of  its  own  particular  and  indi- 
vidual aesthetic  expression  to  justify  a  book. 

Even  Mr.  Shackleton  in  his  businesslike  and 
informative  volume,  "The  Book  of  New  York," 
does  not  attempt  himself  to  give  an  interpretation 
of  the  "soul"  of  New  York.  To  be  sure,  in  the 
course  of  his  narrative,  which  he  keeps  really 
interesting  throughout  by  a  shrewd  blend  of 
description  and  drama  and  history,  he  quotes 
many  summaries  of  the  essence  of  the  city  from 
men  of  literary  fame,  many  brilliant  insights. 
However,  he  makes  no  pretense  to  express  a 
coherent  and  highly  individualized  reaction  to 
New  York  as  a  whole,  the  kind  of  articulation 
which  comes  from  long  seeping  in  of  the  city 
and  from  loving  acquaintance  with  its  cross- 
currents of  life  (as  in  some  of  Lamb's  essays, 
for  instance,  London  itself  seems  to  be  exhaled 
from  the  pages).  That  kind  of  book  about 
modern  New  York  has  yet  to  be  written.  Mean- 
while any  one  of  these  highly  creditable  per- 
formances will  furnish  agreeable  hours  to  the 
many  of  us  who  never  tire  of  hearing  sung 
the  glories  of  our  beloved  Manhattan. 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


The  Soul  of  Civilians 

NINE  TALES.     By  Hugh  de   Selincourt.     Dodd, 
Mead;  $1.50. 

POTTERAT  AND  THE  WAR.     By  Benjamin  Valla- 
ton.     Dodd,  Mead;  $1.50. 

In  the  past  month  an  American  publishing 
house  has  brought  to  our  shores  two  works  of  fic- 
tion which  merit  a  cordial  welcome.  The  first 
of  these,  a  collection  of  stories  by  a  young  Eng- 
lish writer,  introduces  a  company  of  characters 
wholly  eligible  to  meet,  let  us  say,  those  in  Henry 
James's  "The  Better  Sort."  "Potterat,"  on  the 
other  hand,  serving  as  a  French  Mr.  Britling 
or  a  Mr.  Dooley,  introduces  us  to  the  point  of 
view  of  the  Swiss  bourgeoisie,  and  exhibits  the 
type  of  middle-class  philosophy  by  which  they 
explain  the  causes  and  interpret  the  events  of  the 
war.  Of  the  two  books,  Hugh  de  Selincourt's 
"Nine  Tales"  is  the  finer  piece  of  work.  The 
year,  indeed,  will  be  an  exceptionally  lucky  one 
if  for  charm  and  subtlety  it  sees  these  stories 
surpassed. 

The  work  of  Mr.  de  Selincourt,  so  far  edi- 
torially unrecognized,  for  the  most  part,  in  this 
country,  is  of  the  type  and  format  customarily 
attributed  to  a  "young  Englishman."  By  this 
one  is  led  to  expect  stirring  stories  of  contem- 
poraries, told  with  a  kind  of  satiric  realism 
which  suggests  an  Oxford  fluency  in  Greek  and 
Latin,  the  languages  and  the  literatures.  The 
expectancy  is  gratified,  and  the  book  reads  like 
brilliant,  offhand  table  talk  by  the  old  gods,  who 
yet  have  their  fingers  in  the  latest  pie. 

That  America's  contribution  to  literature  is 
the  short-story  is  a  lesson  not  likely  to  be  for- 
gotten. The  proof  begins  with  Irving,  Poe, 
Hawthorne,  and  ends  with  O.  Henry — four  in- 
ventors of  four  types.  It  seems  probable  that 
Mrs.  Wharton's  name  will  be  added,  both  be- 
cause of  her  distinguished  work  and  because  fol- 
lowers have  made  her  special  method  into  an 
invention.  Candidly,  Mrs.  Wharton  is  now  al- 
most the  only  presentable  member  of  the  family 
to  send  to  the  front  door.  We  are  so  busy  with 
our  own  concerns,  reading  and  collating  maga- 
zine stories,  that  like  Mark  Twain's  islanders 
we  are  eking  out  a  precarious  livelihood  by  tak- 
ing in  one  another's  washing. 

On  our  opening  "Nine  Tales,"  any  resentment 
toward  a  possible  usurper  turns  to  admiration 
for  a  friend.  For  these  stories  are  what  may 
be  termed  "pleasant,"  and  most  soundly  so.  One 
exception,  "The  Sacrifice,"  because  its  powerful 
theme  makes  it  the  most  striking  in  the  collec- 
tion, deserves  to  be  retold.  Of  Mr.  Wellfield, 


242 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


the  first  character,  the  author  says  that  his  all- 
absorbing  love  for  Shakespeare  was  based  on  two 
motives — gratitude  and  patriotism.  "Other  things, 
however,  undoubtedly  told;  such  as  the  suste- 
nance of  the  reputation  which  he  had  gained  for 
apt  quotation,  and  the  size  of  the  volumes, 
which  happened  to  fit  perfectly  into  the  book- 
rest  of  his  armchair." 

On  this  morning  the  squire,  sustained  by  a 
patriotic  quotation  from  Richard  II.  and  pleased 
by  good  news  from  his  son  at  the  front,  allowed 
Rosa,  carrying  her  child  in  her  arms,  to  pass  on 
up  the  road  after  a  perfunctory  offer  of  alms, 
which  she  refused.  Rosa  had  left  her  husband, 
and  her  lover  had  been  killed  a  few  days  before. 
Next,  the  vicar,  thrilled  by  a  regiment  of  recruits 
and  then  by  the  sight  of  Rosa  and  her  baby, 
preached  her  a  sermon  on  patriotic  sacrifice.  This 
he  terminated  by  calling  her  "blessed  among 
women,"  but  made  only  another  offer  of  assist- 
ance. Eventually  Rosa,  physically  wearied  and 
mentally  unstrung  by  fatigue  and  the  vicar's 
rather  heady  eloquence,  determined  to  sacrifice 
her  baby  by  strangling  him  with  her  bootlace. 
That  scene  of  mad  renunciation  stands  out,  with 
a  similar  one  from  "Jude  the  Obscure,"  as 
among  the  most  genuinely  pathetic  in  English. 
The  story  ends — but  not  at  this  point — with  "a 
sense  of  rhythm  and  inevitableness  which  is  al- 
ways indicative  of  genius,"  as  Mr.  George  Moore 
defines  a  short-story. 

The  distinguishing  qualities  of  Mr.  de  Selin- 
court's  style  are  his  unforgettable  characteriza- 
tions and  his  restraint  in  permitting  the  reader 
to  preach  his  own  sermons.  "Here  is  a  char- 
acter; this  happened"  is  enough.  This  ecce 
homily  method  gives  the  tales  an  extraordinary 
sense  of  finish  and  finality.  For  brief  characteri- 
zation, none  is  better  than  this  from  "The  Sense 
of  Sin."  "He  had  lately  bought  a  complete  edi- 
tion of  the  works  of  William  Morris,  the  pages 
of  which  it  gave  him  great  pleasure  musingly 
to  cut  with  an  immense  ivory  paper-knife,  very 
smooth  and  cool  to  the  cheek." 

The  change  now  to  M.  Vallaton's  book  is  like 
the  change  from  chess  to  checkers.  Quite  as 
good  a  game  in  its  way,  but  the  lay-out  of  the 
board  is  not  the  same  and  the  rules  differ.  Here 
an  ample  personality  dominates  the  book,  after 
the  manner  of  nineteenth  century  novelists.  It 
is  the  author's  purpose  to  summarize  the  popular 
feeling  of  the  Swiss  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war 
in  the  persons  of  Potterat,  retired  superintendent 
of  police,  and  his  friends.  It  would  be  an  enter- 
prising subject  for  investigation,  by  the  way,  to 


trace  the  influence  of  De  Cassagnac's  historical 
exploit  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century,  along 
through  his  imitators,  down  to  our  own  Mr. 
Dooley.  But  "Potterat"  also  is  fiction.  The 
novel  consists  of  a  series  of  chapters  in  which 
the  genial  old  optimist  is  seen  tending  his  bees, 
working  in  his  garden,  fishing  with  his  cronies 
on  the  lake,  and  gossiping  with  his  neighbors  in 
the  lake-side  country  to  which  he  had  retired 
after  thirty  years  of  service.  The  encroachments 
of  a  real  estate  boom  eventually  sent  him  back  in- 
to the  town  of  Lausanne  and  an  apartment  house 
there.  The  old  man's  comic  misery  in  the  taw- 
dry luxury  of  Madame  Potterat's  new  drawing- 
room  is  no  less  human  than  his  very  genuine 
sorrow  at  leaving  Eglantine  Cottage.  It  was  in 
their  town  quarters  that  the  outbreak  of  the  war 
and  the  orders  for  mobilization  overtook  the 
family,  sending  them  in  company  with  hordes 
of  fellow  townsmen  scurrying  for  stores  of  food 
in  the  face  of  the  impending  famine.  From  the 
first  the  cry  was,  "The  Germans,"  and  in  the 
three  official  letters  which  Potterat  wrote  just 
before  his  death  the  same  note  of  alarm  and 
patriotic  resistance  is  repeated.  Little  master- 
pieces of  common  sense  are  these  letters:  one  to 
General  Joffre,  one  to  King  Albert,  and  one  to 
the  supreme  federal  council  of  Switzerland. 
"Neutrality,"  as  Potterat  said  to  his  little  son,  "is 
a  sort  of  Labyrinth;  you  go  in,  but  you  can't 
come  out  again.  A  month  ago  you  were  neu- 
tral, but  you  didn't  know  it." 

The  value  of  this  novel,  the  last  in  a  series  of 
three  in  which  Potterat  is  the  central  figure,  lies 
in  its  description  of  the  thoughts  and  emotions 
of  a  people  threatened  with  invasion.  It  em- 
phatically cannot  be  considered  as  embodying  un- 
officially the  sentiments  of  the  Swiss  nation  as 
a  whole.  It  must  be  remembered  that  this  is 
the  point  of  view  of  a  French  Swiss,  for  both 
Potterat  and  M.  Vallaton  are  Vaudois.  Re- 
peated and  melancholy  evidences  imply  the  domi- 
nation in  Switzerland  of  the  German  Swiss. 
Chiding  the  supreme  council  for  inaction  at  the 
invasion  of  Belgium,  it  is  Potterat  himself  who 
writes:  "It  is  William  Tell's  country,  and  no 
other,  which  ought  to  take  the  lead  in  doing 
the  right  thing;  for  no  one  will  ever  convince 
me  that  our  neutrality  absolves  us  from  the 
claims  of  humanity.  .  .  There  are  thousands 
of  people  who  think  as  I  do,  especially  amongst 
the  mass  of  the  people,  who  are  the  backbone 
of  the  nation."  The  diction  of  this  anonymous 
translation  is  most  agreeably  fluent  English. 
MYRON  R.  WILLIAMS. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


243 


BRIBFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


VOYAGES  ON  THE  YUKON  AND  ITS  TRIBU- 
TARIES. A  Narrative  of  Summer  Travel  in 
the  Interior  of  Alaska.  By  Hudson  Stuck. 
With  maps  and  illustrations.  Scribners; 
$4.50. 

Readers  who  followed  the  Archbishop  of  the 
Yukon  across  the  white  wastes  of  wintry  Alaska 
in  his  "Ten  Thousand  Miles  in  a  Dog  Sled" 
will  be  eager  to  ship  with  him  on  his  "Voyages 
on  the  Yukon."  They  will  recognize  old  friends 
of  the  snowy  trails,  and  meet  anew  the  ever- 
present  and  never-solved  problem  of  the  corrod- 
ing and  disintegrating  influence  of  our  vaunted 
civilization  upon  the  simple  and  sturdy  savages 
— so-called — of  Alaska's  forests  and  steppes.  The 
lure  of  gold  brings  the  adventurer  whose  mush- 
room cities  linger  on  the  map  long  after  the 
weight  of  the  winter's  snows  has  crushed  to  the 
earth  vacated  saloon  and  flimsy  dance  hall,  and 
summer's  floods  have  washed  away  the  litter 
with  which  the  birds  of  passage  have  fouled  the 
wilderness.  But  changing  seasons  bring  no  re- 
lief to  the  native  peoples  from  the  ills  which 
the  white  man  has  left  in  the  village,  nor  will 
the  lapse  of  centuries  redeem  the  now  mongrel 
stock.  Bishop  Stuck  portrays  Alaska  as  it  is,  a 
land  where  nature  and  man  alike  are  elemental 
and  at  times  catastrophic.  The  sordid  and  the 
heroic  mingle  here  and  crowd  one  another,  for 
not  all  men  have  gone  to  Iditarod  and  Circle 
City  for  gold  alone.  The  book  is  well  illus- 
trated, and  full  of  interest  from  cover  to  cover. 
It  is  revealing  for  one  who  plans  a  summer  in 
Alaska  for  business  or  pleasure  and  should  be 
read  by  every  one  who  concerns  himself  with  our 
national  obligations  to  the  people  of  this  much 
neglected  country. 

THE  LIFE  AND  LETTERS  OF  ROBERT  COLL- 

YER.      By  John    Haynes    Holmes.      Dodd, 

Mead ;  $5. 

On  first  opening  these  inviting  volumes,  so  full 
of  interests  and  ideals  calculated  to  induce  a 
blessed  if  momentary  forgetfulness  of  our  present 
subjection  to  the  tyranny  of  war,  one  found 
this  passage:  "We  are  full  of  the  war.  The 
whole  country  is  a  great  camp  and  drill  ground. 
The  spirit  that  has  been  called  out  ...  is 
the  grandest  thing  ever  seen  in  the  country,  per- 
haps in  the  world."  And  more  in  similar  strain. 
Of  course  it  is  the  Civil  War  that  is  re- 
ferred to,  and  most  heartily  did  the  "blacksmith 
preacher"  throw  himself  into  the  cause  of  free- 
dom, as  he  doubtless  would  to-day,  were  he  alive, 
into  that  of  a  vastly  larger  emancipation.  Hero- 
ism and  romance  were  not  wanting  to  that  full 
and  varied  life,  with  its  successive  experience  of 
the  Yorkshire  moors  and  unlovely  manufacturing 


villages,  of  Pennsylvania  farms  and  their  tillers, 
of  strenuous  Chicago  in  its  marvelous  growth, 
and  of  the  great  and  bewildering  metropolis  with 
its  cosmopolitan  population.  This  heroism  and 
this  romance  are  set  forth  with  literary  skill, 
and  also  with  the  charm  of  homely  reality,  in 
the  biography  faithfully  compiled  from  abundant 
autobiographical  and  other  authoritative  sources 
by  the  famous  preacher's  colleague  in  the  closing 
years  of  his  long  ministry.  Fortunate  is  the 
biographer  to  whom  is  assigned,  as  to  Mr. 
Holmes  was  assigned  by  the  Collyer  family,  so 
worthy  and  inspiring  a  theme;  and  fortunate  is 
he  whose  life-story  is  told  with  so  warm  a  sym- 
pathy and  so  true  an  understanding  as  have 
been  brought  to  the  present  task. 

THE  ODES  AND  SECULAR  HYMN  OF 
HORACE.  Translated  by  Warren  H.  Cud- 
worth.  Knopf;  $1.50. 

To  most  readers  Horace  means  two  things. 
He  is  the  amiable  prophet  of  a  genial  philosophy ; 
and  he  is  the  writer  of  verse  never  surpassed  in 
grace,  dignity,  and  point.  An  English  translation 
of  Horace  is  successful  so  far  as  it  preserves 
at  once  his  formal  perfection  and  the  spirit  of 
his  philosophy.  Mr.  Cudworth  has  set  himself 
a  high  standard  of  formal  execution,  to  which 
he  adheres  to  a  remarkable  degree.  Though  he 
does  not  keep  the  metres  of  the  original  poems, 
he  systematically  substitutes  for  them  strophes 
which  usually  approximate  in  effect  the  Latin 
forms,  and  he  wisely  makes  use  of  rhyme  with 
unvarying  accuracy.  He  demonstrates,  what 
many  would  not  have  believed,  that  English  verse 
is  capable  of  as  great  compactness  and  brevity 
of  phrasing  as  is  Latin  verse.  In  some  cases 
however  Mr.  Cudworth  has  been  unfortunate 
in  his  choice  of  metres;  his  unrelieved  iambic 
lines  are  too  heavy  to  carry  the  effect  of  the 
Sapphic  and  the  Alcaic  strophes;  one  waits  in 
suspense  for  the  tripping  dactyls  which  one  asso- 
ciates with  the  originals. 

Perhaps,  indeed,  it  is  Mr.  Cudworth's  faith- 
fulness to  his  principles  that  has  at  times  pre- 
vented him  from  conveying  the  tone  of  Horace. 
"There  are  occasions,  as  every  scholar  knows," 
writes  Martin,  "where  to  be  faithful  to  the  let- 
ter is  to  be  most  unfaithful  to  the  spirit  of  an 
author."  Mr.  Cudworth  has  by  no  means  been 
unfaithful  to  Horace;  but  he  might  with  advan- 
tage have  allowed  himself  a  little  more  elasticity 
of  treatment.  His  rendering  of  the  first  strophe 
of  "Integer  Vitae"  is  as  near  the  words  of  Horace 
as  is  that  of  Martin;  it  is  perhaps  more  fluent 
English : 

The  man  of  upright  life  and  conduct  clean 
Needs  neither  Moorish  javelin  nor  bow, 

Nor  quiver,  Fuscus,  stuffed  with  arrows  keen 
Whose  tips  with  venom  flow. 


244 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


Yet  its  movement  does  not  suggest  so  well  that 
of  the  original  as  does  Martin's  version: 

Fuscus,   the    man   of   life    upright   and    pure 

Needeth  nor  javelin,  nor  bow  of  Moor, 
Nor  arrows  tipped  with  venom  deadly-sure, 
Loading  his  quiver. 

It  is  of  course  unfair  to  judge  either  translation 
by  a  quotation  of  four  lines;  but  Mr.  Cudworth's 
work  sustains  such  an  even  level  that  one  may 
turn  almost  at  random  for  examples  that  illus- 
trate both  his  merits  and  his  short-comings.  In 
a  field  where  success  can  at  best  be  only  rela- 
tive, he  has  in  large  measure  attained  success; 
where  he  has  fallen  short,  the  defect  has  been 
in  part  inevitable,  and  has  been  the  result  of  his 
rigid  adherence  to  a  preconceived  notion. 

The  prefatory  sonnet  "To  Horace"  shows 
sympathy  with  the  poet.  It  is  a  pity  that  it  con- 
tains the  noun  "uplifts" — that  word  of  unhappy 
memory.  Horace,  though  in  his  way  a  moralist, 
would  not  have  relished  the  word  with  its  pres- 
ent associations. 

A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  ROME.     By  Gugli- 

elmo  Ferrero  and  Corrado  Barbagallo.    Vol. 

I:   The  Monarchy  and  the  Republic.     Put- 

nams;  $1.90. 

In  this  first  volume  Ferrero  and  Barbagallo 
present  us  with  a  brilliant  and  coherent  account 
of  the  history  of  Rome  from  the  foundation  of 
the  city  to  the  death  of  Julius  Caesar.  Many 
readers  who  are  familiar  with  Ferrero's  larger 
work  will  be  interested  by  the  attitude  which 
he  now  adopts  towards  the  traditional  records. 
With  few  exceptions,  he  defends  the  tradition 
against  the  conjectural  emendations  which  have 
been  so  popular  with  the  Germans  and  with 
Ferrero's  own  compatriot  Ettore  Pais;  and  per- 
haps the  only  startling  novelty  for  which  he  is 
partly  responsible  is  his  suggestion  that  Rome 
under  the  later  kings  "ardently  pursued  a  com- 
mercial career."  If  this  expansion  of  Schweg- 
ler's  theory  is  sound,  and  if  it  is  true  that  the 
establishment  of  the  republic  was  caused  by  a 
reaction  of  the  Latin  aristocracy  against  the  com- 
mercial policy  of  Etruscan  kings,  we  should 
indeed  have  a  partial  explanation  of  the  slight 
amount  of  Greek  influence  discernible  in  the 
first  centuries  of  the  republic. 

Ferrero  devotes  some  of  his  best  pages  to  the 
discussion  of  the  reasons  which  at  the  beginning 
of  the  second  century  B.C.  made  Rome  averse 
to  the  further  extension  of  her  empire.  Such  a 
policy  is,  as  Ferrero  says,  almost  incomprehen- 
sible to  those  who  are  accustomed  to  the  "insa- 
tiable lust  of  territory  which  for  two  hundred 
years  has  possessed  the  states  of  Europe  and 
America";  and  his  account  of  the  relation 
between  corruption  and  progress  proceeds  with 
great  dramatic  power  down  to  the  time  when 


there  was  no  longer  a  commonwealth  sustained 
by  a  body  of  citizens,  but  instead  a  chaos  out  of 
which  emerged  an  autocrat  supported  by  an 
army.  One  wishes  that  more  space  might  have 
been  given  to  the  peculiarly  subversive  effects 
of  Greek  thought  upon  the  traditions  of  Rome, 
both  political  and  religious;  but  the  limitations 
imposed  upon  a  single  volume  are  severe,  and 
the  composition  as  a  whole  is  admirable.  Mr. 
George  Chrystal,  the  translator,  has  done  his 
work  well. 

PROFESSIONALISM  AND  ORIGINALITY  :  With 

an  Appendix  of  Suggestions  on  Professional, 

Administrative,    and    Educational    Topics. 

By  F.  H.  Hayward,  D.Lit.,  B.Sc.     Open 

Court;  $1.75. 

Life,  Dr.  Hayward  argues,  is  a  series  of  im- 
pulsions and  compulsions.  Some  spark  of  genius 
is  in  each  of  us,  while  even  the  greatest  genius 
cannot  entirely  escape  the  commonplace.  The 
antinomy  is  most  evident  in  those  pursuits  which 
have  become  most  highly  specialized  and  in 
which  society  is  wont  to  repose  most  faith.  The 
professions — law,  medicine,  teaching — are  exam- 
ples of  such  departmentalized  compulsions.  The 
professional  ethics  is  designed  to  protect  the 
member  of  the  profession  against  those  blunders 
for  which  the  public  should  hold  him  responsible. 
Worse  still,  by  its  insistence  on  the  common- 
place in  its  "Specialists"  it  tends  to  strangle  orig- 
inality and  hamper  progress.  The  original  man 
is  one  who  responds  most  alertly  to  those  impul- 
sions not  shared  by  his  fellows  and,  because  he  is 
different  and  apart  from  them,  is  frowned  upon 
as  an  innovator  and  an  enemy  to  the  common 
cause.  So  true  is  this  that  his  merited  recog- 
nition comes  only  with  posthumous  fame;  the 
present  generation  cannot  recognize  the  stigmata 
of  genius  possessed  by  its  contemporaries.  By 
way  of  reform  let  the  various  professions  formu- 
late their  respective  programmes  and  express  defi- 
nitely the  tenets  of  their  faith,  the  goals  of  their 
efforts.  This  will  at  once  sweep  away  the  cob- 
webs of  mysticism  that  now  conceal  their  real 
missions  and  will  admit  an  understanding  criti- 
cism from  which  they,  as  well  as  a  larger  society, 
will  reap  a  benefit. 

Mr.  Hayward  shows  his  own  originality  in 
his  incisive  and  sometimes  caustic  arraignment 
of  his  own  as  well  as  other  professions,  but  his 
uniform  way  of  pigeon-holing  his  data  is  a  det- 
riment to  the  presentation.  The  elfishness  of  a 
genius — of  a  Shaw,  for  example — would  have 
shattered  these  formal  classifications  and  offered 
a  more  varied  and  enticing  argument.  But  the 
criticism  is  usually  solid,  the  thought  is  original 
at  many  angles,  and  the  arraignment  of  profes- 
sionalism contains  many  practical  suggestions  for 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


245 


reform.  Though  its  tone  may  not  make  it  popu- 
lar with  professional  men,  the  professions,  should 
they  heed  its  counsels,  would  certainly  gain  in 
popularity  with  the  uninitiated. 

THE  ART  OF  GEORGE  FREDERICK  MUNN. 
Edited  by  Margaret  Crosby  Munn  and 
Mary  R.  Cabot.  With  an  introduction  by 
Sir  Johnston  Forbes-Robertson.  Button; 
$2.25. 

It  seems  odd  to  read  the  biography  of  an 
American  artist  of  the  present  generation,  who 
received  his  art  education — or  the  greater  part  of 
it — in  London  instead  of  in  Munich  or  Paris, 
and  whose  earliest  formative  influences  were 
those  of  Ruskin  and  the  South  Kensington  Art 
Schools  rather  than  of  the  boulevard  and  the 
atelier.  It  is  true  that,  as  Sir  Johnston  Forbes- 
Robertson  tells  us  in  his  brief  but  sympathetic 
introduction,  Munn,  a  fellow-student  of  Frank 
Dicksee  and  Percy  Macquoid  among  others,  be- 
came dissatisfied  with  the  opportunities  offered  by 
the  Academy  Schools  and  went  to  Paris.  There 
he  pursued  his  studies  for  a  time  at  Julien's  and 
Munkacsy's  studios;  but  he  soon  returned  to 
London,  where  he  attracted  the  attention  of 
G.  F.  Watts  (as  he  had  previously  of  Leighton), 
who  gave  him  work,  and  his  associations 
remained,  on  the  whole,  with  English  art  and 
artists,  as  long  as  his  health,  permanently  broken 
by  an  attack  of  typhus  in  Venice  in  1883,  per- 
mitted him  to  live  abroad.  Yet  he  never  entered 
wholly  into  the  English  tradition.  His  strong 
admiration  for  Velasquez  and  Whistler  saved 
him  from  that.  There  is  a  literary  flavor  to  much 
of  his  work — it  was  the  poetic  sentiment  of  his 
"In  Chancery"  that  appealed  to  Hon.  Stephen 
Coleridge,  one  of  his  principal  patrons — but  he 
consciously  eschewed  the  anecdote;  and  in  land- 
scape he  early  came  under  the  spell  of  the  great 
Barbizon  painters,  the  spirit  of  whose  work  he 
interpreted  in  his  own  naive,  naturalistic,  Ameri- 
can manner.  Yet  his  paintings  often  have  also 
a  fine  decorative  feeling.  Most  of  his  pictures  are 
owned  in  England;  so  that,  in  spite  of  one 
memorial  exhibition  in  New  York,  shortly  after 
his  premature  death  in  1907  at  the  age  of  fifty- 
six — he  had,  however,  long  ceased  to  produce 
— there  has  been  little  opportunity  for  his  powers 
to  be  recognized  in  his  own  country.  But  the 
late  Russell  Sturgis  contributed  a  warm  appre- 
ciation of  him  to  "Scribner's  Magazine"  in 
1908;  and  this,  reprinted  in  its  entirety,  with  a 
brief  memoir  giving  the  essential  facts  of  his 
brilliant  promise  and  his  broken  career,  might 
have  served  Munn's  posthumous  fame  better  than 
the  present  book,  with  its  rather  miscellaneous 
and  turgid  tribute  to  his  art,  character,  con- 
versation, and  personal  charm. 


BRAHMADARSANAM  OR  INTUITION  OF  THE 
ABSOLUTE.  By  Sri  Ananda  Acharya.  Mac- 
millan;  $1.25. 

Western  culture  has  shown  a  singular  lack  of 
interest  in  the  philosophy  of  ancient  India.  This 
has  been  due  partly  no  doubt  to  linguistic  ob- 
stacles, but  partly  also  to  Western  provincialism. 
Aside  from  books  by  missionaries  who  were  ob- 
viously special  pleaders  for  the  occidental  plan 
of  salvation,  Hindu  philosophy  was,  until  re- 
cently, practically  inaccessible  to  all  but  a  few 
linguistic  experts  and  those  who  could  read  the 
language  of  the  commentators.  Of  late,  however, 
books  dealing  with  the  characteristically  Hindu 
view  of  life,  written  by  native  scholars  and  in- 
tended for  laymen  in  the  western  world,  have 
been  making  their  appearance  in  gratifying  num- 
bers. Sri  Ananda  Acharya's  "Brahmadarsanam" 
belongs  to  this  class. 

In  spite  of  one's  more  or  less  vague  appre- 
ciation of  the  age  of  the  civilization  of  the  far 
East,  one  is  surprised  to  find  well-developed 
Hindu  systems  of  thought  many  centuries  before 
the  rise  of  philosophy  in  Greece.  And  one  is 
pleased  to  come  upon  the  germs  of  doctrines  with 
which  one  has  been  long  familiar  in  their  devel- 
oped form.  The  author  of  the  present  volume 
thus  does  the  reader  a  genuine  service  by  pre- 
disposing him  to  examine  further.  He  also 
succeeds  in  showing  that  underneath  external 
differences  of  approach,  terminology,  and  style 
of  argument,  Hindu  philosophy  concerns  itself 
with  one  problem,  employs  one  method,  and 
comes  to  one  conclusion.  The  central  problem 
is  the  escape  from  the  prison  of  finitude;  its 
method  is  concentrated  introspection;  the  solu- 
tion is  the  vision  of  the  self  as  one  with  the  soul 
of  the  infinite. 

In  spite  of  its  excellencies,  however,  the  book 
fails  to  arouse  enthusiasm.  Like  our  own  his- 
torians of  philosophy  the  author  feels  it  necessary 
to  say  something  about  so  many  things  that  he 
can  say  only  a  little  about  anything.  Then,  too, 
his  words  often  lack  flesh  and  blood  meanings. 
The  introduction  of  numerous  Hindu  terms,  to- 
gether with  their  definitions,  adds  to  the  diffi- 
culty of  reading  intelligently,  for  one  can  hardly 
digest  the  ordinary  philosophic  terminology,  and 
consequently  one  leaves  the  book  with  one's  mind 
in  a  confused  state.  The  author  is,  moreover,  in- 
clined to  mistake  vigorous  assertion  for  logical 
demonstration,  and  his  assertions  regarding  West- 
ern philosophies  and  philosophers  often  rest  upon 
nothing  more  solid  than  a  string  of  ambiguities. 
Nevertheless,  the  reader  of  the  book  carries  away 
a  distinct  feeling  of  the  age  of  Hindu  specula- 
tion and  of  the  significance  of  soul  in  Hindu 
philosophy — perhaps  just  what  the  author  in- 
tended to  accomplish. 


246 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


WAR      OFFERS       SMALL       OPPORTUNITY      FOR 

laughter,  but  the  zeal  with  which  certain  gen- 
tlemen have  undertaken  their  self-appointed  task 
of  censorship  has  reached  a  pitch  which  brings 
their  activities  almost  into  the  realm  of  opera 
bouffe.  One  of  the  most  amusing  recent  in- 
stances is  that  of  Mr.  Henry  A.  Wise  Wood, 
chairman  of  the  Conference  Committee  on  Na- 
tional Preparedness,  who  exhibited  a  bad  attack 
of  hysteria  in  the  New  York  "Tribune."  Mr. 
Wood  sent  the  "Tribune"  a  statement  denounc- 
ing "The  Nature  of  Peace,"  by  Thorstein  Veb- 
len,  as  "the  most  damnable  piece  of  pro-German 
propaganda  that  the  Federal  authorities  have 
overlooked" !  This  misrepresentation  he  fortified 
with  a  series  of  quotations  so  clearly  divorced 
from  the  context  that  one  can  only  marvel  at  the 
spectacle  of  his  intellectual  blindness.  It  is  no 
secret  that  Mr.  Veblen's  book  is  an  extremely 
ingenious  and  powerful  argument  for  the  theory 
that  until  the  menace  of  German  militarism  has 
been  utterly  destroyed  it  is  not  possible  to  think 
of  world  peace.  A  similar  spectacle  is  furnished 
by  one  Dr.  William  H.  Hobbs,  of  the  University 
of  Michigan,  whose  highly  strung  nerves  caused 
him  to  publish  in  the  Detroit  "Free  Press" 
equally  unwarranted  and  perverse  conclusions 
concerning  "The  Nature  of  Peace."  A  few  days 
after  publishing  Mr.  Wood's  letter  the  New 
York  "Tribune,"  in  retracting,  sadly  observed 
that  the  incident  had  caused  them  to  lose  faith  in 
the  intuitive  habit  of  thought.  It  is  to  be  hoped 
that  this  and  similar  incidents  will  cause  a  long 
patient  public  also  to  lose  faith  in  these  "in- 
tuitive" zealots,  who  seem  to  have  determined 
that  nobody  except  themselves  shall  say  anything. 
The  country  ought  soon  to  be  thoroughly  weary 
of  these  half-baked  alarmists. 


IN  GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW'S  RECENT  RE- 
view  of  "The  Free  Press,"  by  Hilaire  Belloc,  he 
concludes  with  the  following  characteristically 
provoking  paragraph: 

My  own  most  polemical  writings  are  to  be  found 
in  the  files  of  the  "Times,"  the  "Morning  Post,"  the 
"Daily  Express,"  the  "World,"  and  the  "Saturday 
Review."  I  found  out  early  in  my  career  that  a  Con- 
servative paper  may  steal  a  horse  when  a  Radical 
paper  dare  not  look  over  a  hedge,  and  that  the  rich, 
though  very  determined  that  the  poor  shall  read  noth- 
ing unconventional,  are  equally  determined  not  to  be 
preached  at  themselves.  In  short,  I  found  that  only 
for  the  classes  would  I  be  allowed,  and  indeed  tacitly 
required,  to  write  on  revolutionary  assumptions.  I 
filled  their  columns  with  sedition;  and  they  filled  my 
pockets  (not  very  deep  ones  then)  with  money.  In 
the  press,  as  in  other  departments,  the  greatest  free- 
dom may  be  found  where  there  is  least  talk  about  it. 

Why  provoking?    Because  although  this  may  be 
quite  true  of  Shaw  and  his  experiences,  it  can 


hardly  be  so  easy  for  the  smaller  fry.  If  you  are 
brilliant  and  amusing  you  may  talk  atheism  in  a 
theological  seminary,  write  in  the  most  conserva- 
tive and  patriotic  magazine  something  that  would 
land  a  less  clever  author  in  jail  for  disloyalty,  or 
discuss  the  social  value  of  sabotage  in  the  "Wall 
Street  Journal."  Give  us  Shaw's  wit  and 
dramatic  sense  and  intellect,  and  we  guarantee 
that  we  could  advocate  polygamy  in  a  staid  relig- 
ious weekly  or  non-resistance  in  the  report  of 
the  National  Security  League.  To  be  unham- 
pered in  what  you  say,  it  is  only  necessary — to  be 
as  clever  as  Shaw.  But  for  most  of  us,  who  are 
duller  and  probably  less  serious,  the  number  of 
magazines  that  will  welcome  our  polemic  writ- 
ings will  never  seem  so  large  as  to  furnish  an 
embarrassment  of  journalistic  riches. 


WlLL    THE    PEDAGOGUES    LEAVE    US    NO    COZy 

corners  in  the  house  of  letters,  neither  closet  nor 
attic  to  explore  and  lounge  in  unoppressed  by 
some  prim  guide  to  the  world's  best  literature? 
Is  there  to  come  a  time  when  no  good  old  book 
can  be  reprinted  without  the  editorial  meddling 
of  a  diplomaed  mentor,  long  on  culture  but  short 
on  "juice  de  vivre,"  whose  foreword,  hindword, 
notes,  and  bibliography — quaintly  paginated  in 
lower-case  Roman — must  needs  obscure  the  text 
they  pretend  to  illumine?  These  queries  are 
prompted  by  a  recent  pedagogical  invasion  of  that 
last  intimate  retreat  where  children  might  forget 
the  impertinence  of  school — "Alice  in  Wonder- 
land." William  J.  Long  conducts  this  drive, 
munitioned  by  Ginn  &  Co.  and  reluctantly  con- 
voyed by  Oliver  Herford,  who  (to  do  him  jus- 
tice) has  no  stomach  for  the  sorry  business.  The 
illustrator's  heart,  one  conjectures  from  his  prefa- 
tory "Apology"  in  verse,  is  in  Tenniel's  boots 
along  with  his  feet.  But  the  editor  is  shameless 
in  spoliation  of  Carroll's  province.  There  he 
turns  things  topsy-turvy,  installing  on  page  iii  a 
"Finale"  and  on  page  205  a  "Foreword."  Then 
he  violates  the  good  don's  Oxford  privacy  and 
pulls  from  its  decent  niche  the  skeleton  of  Car- 
roll's double  life.  Meanwhile,  inevitably,  there 
have  been  "notes" — "Notes  and  Harmonies,"  an- 
nounces the  editor.  Listen  to  a  few  of  the  sweet 
harmonics  with  which  Mr.  Long  accompanies 
Lewis  Carroll: 

A  hookah  is  a  kind  of  machine  or  thingumajig  which 
the  Turks  use  for  smoking.  .  .  Like  most  wild  sea 
birds,  the  dodo  was  quite  tame.  Still,  he  was  never, 
as  you  might  say,  a  dodomestic  bird.  .  .  They 
call  one  creature  a  tortoise  because  he  has  crooked 
feet,  and  another  creature  they  call  a  porpoise  be- 
cause he  looks  something  like  a  porcus  or  hog.  And 
sailors  twist  the  twisted  tortoise  till  he  becomes  turtle, 
but  they  can't  twist  the  untwisted  porpoise  till  he 
becomes  purple. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


247 


This  is  not  nonsense;  nonsense  is  always  serenely 
unconscious  that  it  is  not  the  whole  sense.  Any 
child  will  at  once  recognize  this  for  a  stilted, 
patronizing  imitation  by  a  self-conscious  "Olym- 
pian" and  will  politely  draw  away  from  it,  at  the 
same  time  (more's  the  pity!)  drawing  away  from 
Wonderland.  Nor  is  it  education,  of  which  our 
editor  spreads  a  hopeful  report : 
Language  is  queer;  there's  no  telling  what  some 
words  really  mean.  .  .  It's  just  a  fashion  of  speak- 
ing, with  no  sense  to  it.  .  .  If  a  child  ate  too 
many  [comfits],  there  might  come  fits.  Hence  the 
name,  to  scare  you  properly.  But  you  will  not  find 
any  such  reasonable  explanation  in  the  dictionary. 
If  you  bother  with  such  books,  you  may  have  to 
learn  [our  italics]  that  "to  comfit"  means  to  pre- 
serve. .  .  Nowadays,  in  proper  schools,  he  [the 
Mouse]  would  read  five  or  six  history  books,  all 
different,  and  not  learn  anything  in  particular;  which 
is,  you  see,  the  great  advantage  of  modern  education. 

Yet,  after  all,  the  heinous  crime  of  "Alice's" 
editor  is  to  spoil  transparent  nonsense  with  silly 
explanations  and  to  rub  the  bloom  off  words  of 
glamor  which  children  love  because  they  only 
half  understand  them.  Criticizing  Carroll  for 
parodying  "Star  of  the  Evening,"  Mr.  Long 
quotes  a  stanza  of  the  mawkish  original  and  adds, 
"Some  things  should  be  let  alone,  especially  things 
that  have  the  two  virtues  of  being  old  and  being 
good."  They  should  indeed!  THE  DIAL  be- 
speaks for  this  outrage  the  attention  of  the  So- 
ciety for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Children. 
If,  while  yet  in  school,  its  officers  had  "Robinson 
Crusoe,"  "The  Pilgrim's  Progress,"  "The  Child's 
Garden,"  and  alas!  how  many  other  golden  books 
thus  tarnished  for  them,  they  will  find  a  way  to 
deal  with  these  insatiable  pedagogues. 


THB  "BELLMAN"  RECENTLY  LAUNCHED  A 
tirade  against  the  selfish  publishers  who  want  to 
have  repealed  the  War  Revenue  Act  of  October 
3,  1917 — the  so-called  "Zone  System"  measure — 
solely  because  the  new  postal  rates  rob  them  of 
profits.  Of  course,  in  so  far  as  publishers  as  a 
class  are  trying  to  evade  their  just  contributions 
to  the  cost  of  the  war,  they  merit  all  the  invec- 
tive which  can  be  hurled  at  them.  No  one  wants, 
any  more  than  the  "Bellman,"  to  see  poor  maga- 
zines "subsidized"  by  the  Post  Office.  But  it  is  a 
singularly  ungracious  remark  of  the  editor's  that 
it  would  be  a  good  thing  if  half  the  magazines  in 
the  country  were  put  out  of  business.  Perhaps 
they  should  be ;  we  should  be  the  last  to  sing  their 
literary  or  intellectual  merits.  Yet  undesirable 
as  it  may  be  that  certain  publishers  should  get 
what  might  be  called  strategic  profits,  or  that 
trivial  magazines  should  flourish  in  the  land,  it 
is  far  more  important  that  America  should  not 
see  introduced  the  principle  of  discrimination. 


For  once  magazines  come  to  be  discriminated 
against  on  the  ground  of  their  intrinsic  merit, 
who  is  going  to  be  the  judge?  The  literary  man 
who  dislikes  trade  journals?  The  business  man, 
who  thinks  that  the  "movies"  already  take  up 
enough  of  his  employees'  time  without  devising 
for  them  further  distractions  from  their  job  in 
magazines  with  pictures  and  "stories"  of  their 
favorite  heroines?  The  conservative  who  dis- 
likes all  radicalism?  or  the  radical  who  would 
cheat  us  from  the  pleasure  of  seeing  the  "North 
American  Review"?  Really,  none  of  us  would 
be  safe  in  such  a  capricious  world,  and  who  can 
say  whether  or  not  the  "Bellman"  itself  might 
not  be  excommunicated?  Perhaps  the  censor,  if 
exceptionally  intelligent,  would  rule  that  a  maga- 
zine could  attack  anything  it  wished  so  long  as  it 
was  just  to  its  opponents.  Under  that  test  the 
"Bellman"  would  not  fare  any  too  well.  For  it 
does  not  even  touch  the  real  objection  to  the 
"Zone  System,"  which  is  simply  the  ancient  one 
of  freedom  of  communication,  guaranteed  by  the 
Government.  Is  it  necessary  in  this  day  of  en- 
lightenment to  point  out  that  the  true  function 
of  the  Post  Office  is  not  to  ape  a  corporation,  in- 
terested primarily  in  dividends,  but  to  provide  a 
cheap  and  easy  means  for  the  interchange  of  ideas 
and  the  free  circulation  of  opinion?  Democracy 
grows  on  its  foolishness  almost  as  much  as  on  its 
wisdom.  Until  people  have  been  interested  in 
reading  soap  advertisements  and  sentimental 
stories,  they  can  hardly  be  expected  to  be  inter- 
ested in  the  kind  of  literature  the  "Bellman" 
would  wish  to  see  them  reading.  It  is  through 
this  kind  of  progress  that  we  gradually  emerge 
from  petty  localism  into  a  broader  tolerance,  a 
better  taste,  and  a  more  general  spread  of  ideas. 
The  "Zone  System"  would  tend  to  keep  us  pro- 
vincial. 

•          *          • 

"IT  IS  WELL  TO  BE  CAUTIOUS  IN   STATEMENT 

about  any  contemporary  book."  "A  half-truth 
is  often  of  extreme  simplicity;  but  the  whole 
truth  is  usually  of  such  complication  that  the 
utmost  effort  is  necessary  in  order  merely  to  state 
it."  THE  DIAL  might  safely  offer  a  large  prize 
to  the  first  reader  to  guess  the  author  of  these 
sentiments.  Some  backward  looking  doctor  of 
deliberation?  Some  hesitant  meticulous  assem- 
bler of  metaphysical  gear?  Dear  reader,  not  at 
all.  Those  words  were  written  by  none  other 
than  our  national  apostle  of  the  contemporary 
and  practitioner  of  the  snap- judgment,  the  Hon. 
Theodore  Roosevelt.  They  may  be  found  in  a 
recent  "Outlook"  in  a  "notice" — which  some- 
how escaped  being  a  preface — of  Henry  Fair- 
field  Osborn's  "Origin  and  Evolution  of  Life." 


248 


THE   DIAL 


[March  14 


BRIEFER  MENTION 


A  unique  little  volume  of  its  kind  is  an  "In- 
troduction to  Political  Philosophy,"  by  H.  P.  Farrell 
(Longmans,  Green;  $1.25),  outlining  the  mas- 
terpieces of  political  thinking  from  the  days  of 
Plato  through  the  historical  and  ethical  schools  of 
the  past  generation.  Aside  from  a  brief  introduc- 
tory chapter,  there  is  little  comment  by  the  author, 
the  greater  part  of  the  text  being  taken  up  with  a 
remarkably  lucid  outline  of  the  theories  of  Plato, 
Aristotle,  Hobbes,  Locke,  Rousseau,  and  the  analyti- 
cal and  historical  jurists.  At  one  point  the  author  de- 
parts somewhat  from  this  method  in  criticizing 
rather  sharply  the  "great  error  in  political  phil- 
osophy" perpetrated  by  the  contract  theorists.  As 
a  handbook  and  guide  the  volume  is  valuable,  but 
the  diligent  student  will  wish  to  go  much  farther 
afield,  especially  into  modern  theories  of  society 
and  the  state. 

Greenwich  Village  runs  true  to  form  in  "The 
Lady  of  Kingdoms"  (Doran;  $1.50),  the  newest 
novel  by  Inez  Haynes  Irwin.  Disguising  a  zeal- 
ous dose  of  feminism  under  a  veil  of  modern 
romance,  Mrs.  Irwin  guides  the  reader  through 
500  pages  of  alternate  thrills  and  heart-searching 
conversations  to  a  triumphant  conclusion.  There 
seems  to  be  a  subtle  conviction  in  the  mind  of 
every  Village  Dweller,  no  matter  how  kindly,  that 
he  or  she  is  divinely  appointed  to  open  the  eyes  of 
the  plodding  conservative;  and  to  this  end  we  are 
bidden  to  watch  the  antics  of  their  almost  plaus- 
ible puppets.  These,  in  the  present  instance,  are 
happily  provided  with  money,  clothes,  looks,  edu- 
cation, and  docile  relatives,  and  they  dance  very 
gracefully  into  each  other's  arms,  or  out  of  them, 
without  mishap.  Two  young  ladies  in  a  Cape  Cod 
hamlet,  each  with  a  sex  problem,  are  the  principal 
actors.  To  them  are  added,  during  a  summer 
holiday,  the  Real  Villagers;  the  problems  are 
brought  forward,  discussed,  and  solved  by  the  un- 
fettered City  Dwellers,  and  at  the  end  of  the 
book  everybody  has  developed  into  superman  be- 
hind the  gloriously  falling  curtain.  The  effort 
of  sustaining  two  stories  of  almost  equal  interest 
proves  here,  as  often,  too  great.  The  effect  is 
patchy,  and  each  career  loses  verisimilitude.  De- 
scriptions of  scenes  and  occasions  are  varied  and 
striking,  though  the  recurrence  of  "butter-colored 
lace"  and  taxis  "boiling  up  to  the  curb"  palls  upon 
the  reader. 

James  Lane  Allen's  "Kentucky  Warbler" 
(Doubleday  Page;  $1.25)  is  a  pallid  attempt  at 
a  reproduction  of  the  crystallizing  point  of  ado- 
lescence. This  delicate  feat  is  reserved  for  the  very 
few  to  accomplish  with  anything  like  perfection; 
Mr.  Allen's  sun-parlor  methods  leave  the  reader 
convinced  that  no  serious  encroachments  have  been 
made  on  hallowed  ground.  The  book  contains  a 
very  interesting  biography  of  Alexander  Wilson, 
the  naturalist,  around  which  the  story  itself  is 
built,  and  there  is  effective  vocational  material 
there  for  those  who  can  use  it. 

Private  Dubb,  whose  exploits  at  camp  have  been 
delighting  the  devotees  of  newspaper  comics,  now 
shows  his  insouciant  baby  stare  between  boards  in 


"That  Rookie  from  the  13th  Squad,"  by  Lieut. 
P.  L.  Crosby  (Harpers;  75  cts.).  These  cartoons 
would  make  a  Rookie's  Progress  from  initial  re- 
veille to  appointment  as  private  of  the  first  class 
(with  increased  pay),  but  for  one  fact — Mr.  Dubb 
does  not  progress.  It  was  in  October  that  he 
hung  two  bright  stars  on  either  shoulder  because 
he  thought  they  looked  "awfully  snappy"  on  an 
officer  he  had  seen;  in  January  he  was  found  in 
possession  of  a  full  line  of  officers'  insignia — "I 
heard  there  was  going  to  be  some  promotions  and 
I  want  to  be  ready  for  such  emergencies."  Sentry- 
go  he  cannot  master.  In  October  he  offered  to 
shake  hands  with  a  colonel  he  had  halted;  in 
December  he  halted  and  unhorsed  a  mounted 
colonel,  though  nobody  had  posted  him  in  the  road 
— he  was  "just  practicing";  and  only  the  other 
night  he  kept  the  officer  of  the  post  waiting  in  the 
rain  while  he  vainly  tried  to  remember  what  fol- 
lows "Advance  and  be  recognized!"  in  the  sentry's 
ritual.  Not  that  Dubb's  life  is  monotonous.  On 
parade,  in  barracks,  at  mess,  under  the  pup  tent, 
at  the  hospital,  on  the  rifle  range,  in  bayonet  or 
grenade  or  gas  mask  drill,  encountering  the  fair 
sex  while  on  duty  or  on  leave,  and  trotting  to  head- 
quarters to  "be  measured  for  a  horse,"  Dubb  suf- 
fers every  mischance  that  simplicity  can  invite, 
enduring  all  with  a  fetching  good-nature — not  un- 
mixed with  wonder. 

American  financial  administration  has  been  like 
that  of  a  spendthrift  with  superabundant  resources. 
A  necessary  war  economy  will,  however,  popularize 
a  demand,  hitherto  confined  to  observant  individ- 
uals, for  a  complete  reform  in  our  system  of 
governmental  estimates,  appropriations,  and  expen- 
ditures. While  we  cannot  blindly  adopt  a  foreign 
system  of  financial  administration,  an  understand- 
ing of  the  excellencies  in  English  methods  will 
afford  a  proper  basis  for  the  reconstruction  of  our 
own  methods.  William  F.  and  Westel  W.  Wil- 
loughby  and  S.  M.  Lindsay,  the  authors  of  "The 
System  of  Financial  Administration  of  Great  Brit- 
ain" (Appleton;  $2.75),  are  thoroughly  conversant 
with  American  governmental  methods  and  are  con- 
sequently well  fitted  to  conduct  an  investigation 
of  the  English  system.  They  have  succeeded  in 
stating  their  results  in  non-technical  language  and 
in  a  form  intelligible  to  the  general  reader.  They 
discuss  the  fundamental  principles  which  underlie 
public  finance.  They  then  trace  the  financial  pro- 
cedure of  Great  Britain,  beginning  with  depart- 
mental preparation  of  estimates,  describe  the 
subsequent  incorporation  of  these  in  a  general  par- 
liamentary budget,  the  action  of  the  House  of 
Commons  upon  the  same,  the  functions  performed 
by  the  Bank  of  England,  and  finally  the  methods  of 
expenditure  and  accounting.  In  a  concluding  chap- 
ter of  the  book  the  results  of  the  investigation  are 
summarized  with  direct  reference  and  application 
to  American  conditions.  Another  important  finan- 
cial book  is  "Foreign  Exchange  Explained,"  by 
Franklin  Escher.  (Macmillan;  $1.25.)  A  practical 
and  at  the  same  time  a  sound  economic,  and  not 
too  academic,  discussion  of  foreign  exchange  has 
long  been  needed,  and  this  book  by  one  acquainted 
both  with  actual  business  and  with  university 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


249 


teaching  must  prove  of  value  to  the  economic  stu- 
dent and  to  the  business  man  as  well.  Its  value 
lies  in  the  fact  that  it  elucidates  the  underlying 
principles  of  foreign  exchange  as  well  as  the  actual 
conditions  existing  today.  The  most  valuable  chap- 
ters in  the  book  are  perhaps  those  on  international 
banking,  pars  of  exchange,  principal  rates  of  ex- 
change, the  foreign  exchange  market,  gold  and  its 
movement,  and  bankers'  long  bills.  The  question 
is  discussed  whether  or  no  the  dollar  is  to  replace 
the  pound  sterling  as  the  dominant  factor  in  world 
exchange.  Not  the  least  valuable  part  of  the  book 
is  an  appendix  in  which  is  given  in  outline  the 
monetary  systems  of  the  world.  A  book  of  this 
kind  is  a  sign  of  the  times  and  shows  that  the 
trade  of  the  United  States  is  rapidly  becoming 
international  in  scope. 

"State  Sanitation,"  by  George  Chandler  Whipple 
(Harvard  University  Press;  $2.50),  is  a  chrono- 
logical series  of  reprints  and  abstracts  of  papers 
selected  by  the  editor  from  the  annual  and  special 
reports  of  the  Massachusetts  State  Board  of 
Health.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  this  board  was 
a  pioneer  in  this  country  in  undertaking  thorough- 
going and  scientific  work  in  public  health  and  sani- 
tation, the  papers  constitute  a  series  of  classics 
on  the  subject.  The  volume  contains  articles  on 
water  supplies,  sewage  disposal,  stream  pollution, 
filtration,  microorganisms  of  water  and  air,  typhoid 
fever,  diphtheria,  and  infantile  paralysis.  Addresses 
on  the  relation  of  the  state  to  public  health;  on 
the  liquor  problem;  on  milk,  food,  and  drug  in- 
spection; and  on  preventive  medicine  and  kindred 
topics  in  the  social  relations  of  medicine  are  to 
be  found  here  from  men  eminent  as  authorities  and 
contributors  to  medicine  and  sanitation.  Municipal 
and  sanitary  engineers,  physicians,  public  health  of- 
ficials, and  others  having  responsibilities  in  these 
fields  will  find  both  information  and  incentive  in 
these  carefully  selected  and  informing  treatises. 

The  lines  in  "Verses  of  Idle  Hours,"  by  O.  Ches- 
ter Brodhay  (Frederick  C.  Browne,  Chicago;  $1.), 
are  said  to  have  been  written  in  the  "idle  hours" 
which  the  author  has  snatched  "from  his  active 
duties  in  the  business  world."  They  are  not,  it  is 
true,  the  effusions  of  the  well-known  T.  B.  M.; 
but  the  platitudinous  thoughts  expressed  in  stere- 
otyped phrases,  the  cloying  sentimentality,  and  the 
poor  workmanship  support  the  view  that  the  man 
in  the  street  has  never  been  able  to  tame  Pegasus. 
The  technique  is  slip-shod:  rhymes  like  "born" 
and  "storm"  abound;  and  a  scheme  as  loose  as  the 
following  is  not  rare:  a,  B,  c,  D,  e,  d,  f,  d,  g,  D, 
h,  B — the  capitals  signifying  the  use  of  the  same 
word.  Here  is  a  couplet  typical  in  form  and 
content : 

What  happy,  happy  days,   gentle  Mary  dear! 
Memory  has  not  failed  me  through  many  a.  year. 

A  reader  opening  the  book  at  random  might  be 
tempted  to  consider  it  satirical,  but  careful  perusal 
of  its  pages  discloses  a  solemn  puritanism  and  such 
cloudy  metaphysics  as  no  keen  ironist  could  imagine. 
In  one  long  ode,  an  ambitious  "transposition"  of 
"Thanatopsis,"  the  author  declares  that  "Life  is 
God,  the  One  Intelligence,  the  only  Power."  Sub- 


sequently he  remarks  that  "our  greatest  thoughts 
are  seldom  known,"  and  concludes  that  these  me- 
teorites are  "God's  presence."  This  curious  and, 
it  would  almost  seem,  unconscious  denial  of  the 
intellect  is  repeated  less  rhetorically  in  the  various 
sentimental  jingles  of  which  the  book  is  full.  It 
is  probably  at  the  root  of  the  author's  belief  that 
poetry  can  be  the  work  of  idle  hours,  that  it  can 
do  with  anything  less  than  the  complete  fusion  of 
emotion  and  intellectual  passion. 


COMMUNICATION 


WHY  CRITICS  SHOULD  BE  EDUCATED. 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

For  the  information  of  those  of  your  readers 
who  may  have  read  Mr.  Untermeyer's  article  in 
your  issue  of  February  14,  permit  me  to  state  that 
most  of  the  verses  in  my  "First  Offering"  were 
written  before  I  had  any  connections  with  a  uni- 
versity. I  don't  know  where  your  critic  obtained 
his  information  that  I  have  been  "brought  up  at  a 
university";  however,  he  should  be  congratulated 
upon  having  picked  out  for  quotation  as  a  speci- 
men of  my  art  the  worst  eight  lines  I  have  ever 
written.  He  could  not  possibly  have  done  better. 

Mr.  Untermeyer  argues  that  a  poet  should  not 
be  educated.  Certainly  he  has  not  permitted  an 
education  to  spoil  his  own  work,  and  his  method 
of  criticism  is  an  eloquent  argument  on  "Why 
Critics  Should  Be  Educated."  It  is  really  unnec- 
essary to  offer  a  defense  of  scholarship  in  Poetry: 
it  would  be  as  superfluous  to  emphasize  that  as  to 
emphasize  the  need  of  a  knowledge  of  the  sea  in 
the  training  of  a  sailor.  Mr.  Untermeyer  belongs 
to  a  curious  group  of  writers  who  possess  what 
one  might  call  a  talent  for  self  assertion,  which, 
in  the  absence  of  a  vigorous  art,  has  been  accepted 
as  literary  genius.  This  group  has  even  attained  a 
certain  yellow-press  distinction.  Mr.  Untermeyer 
writes  vigorously  in  defense  of  his  group;  but  no 
amount  of  such  argument  will  make  their  temporary 
prestige  tenable  in  the  presence  of  the  development 
of  a  real  poetic  art  in  this  country. 

SAMUEL  ROTH. 

[EDITORS'  NOTE:  Mr.  Roth  may  properly  feel 
aggrieved  that  his  book  of  verse,  "First  Offering," 
should  have  been  judged  by  Mr.  Untermeyer  as 
a  post-University  product  instead  of  as  an  ante- 
University  product,  which  it  really  was,  although 
the  intrinsic  merit  of  the  volume  is  not  in  any 
way  lowered  or  raised  by  this  irrelevant  fact. 
And,  as  Mr.  Roth  himself  tacitly  admits,  Mr.  Un- 
termeyer's judgment  was  not  wholly  incorrect;  he 
does,  indeed,  congratulate  his  critic  on  selecting 
for  quotation  "the  worst  eight  lines  I  have  ever 
written."  In  other  words,  what  Mr.  Roth  dis- 
closes in  his  letter  may  be  somewhat  damaging  for 
Mr.  Untermeyer's  paradoxical  theory,  but  it  hardly 
makes  out  a  case  against  Mr.  Untermeyer's  taste. 
As  for  the  amiable  weakness  of  blowing  one's  own 
horn,  which  has  been  commonly  supposed  to  be  a 
characteristic  of  poets  in  general,  would  Mr.  Roth 
contend  that  he  departs  from  the  normal  in  this 
particular?] 


250 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


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When  I   Was   Little  .75 

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NOTES  AND 


Alfred  Booth  Kuttner,  who  contributes  the  first 
of  two  articles  on  American  intolerance  to  this 
issue  of  THE  DIAL,  is  a  graduate  of  Harvard  and 
the  author  of  many  essays  and  studies  which  have 
appeared  in  various  newspapers,  magazines,  and 
technical  journals.  He  has  long  been  a  student  of 
psychological  problems,  especially  of  the  so-called 
"Freudian  psychology,"  and  most  of  his  writing 
has  been  in  the  nature  of  an  exposition  of  the 
new  psychological  method  of  approach  and  the 
implications  of  this  approach  for  conventional  esti- 
mates in  literature,  art,  and  politics.  His  home 
is  in  New  York  City. 

Richard  Aldington,  one  of  the  leaders  of  the 
English  Imagist  group,  is  represented  in  the  vari- 
ous Imagist  anthologies  and  is  the  author  of  "Im- 
ages Old  and  New"  (Four  Seas;  60  cts.).  Much 
of  his  work,  especially  in  the  "Egoist"  and  the 
"Little  Review,"  has  consisted  in  verse  and  prose 
evocations  of  the  spirit  of  antiquity.  His  letter  to 
the  Slave  in  "Cleon"  in  this  issue  is  the  first  of  a 
series  of  "Letters  to  Unknown  Women"  which 
THE  DIAL  will  print  from  time  to  time.  Succeed- 
ing "Letters"  will  be  addressed  to  Helen,  Sappho, 
Heliodora,  Amaryllis,  and  La  Grosse  Margot. 

Marsden  Hartley,  who  contributes  the  lyrical 
appreciation  of  John  Barrymore's  acting  in  "Peter 
Ibbetson,"  has  had  several  of  his  appreciative  and 
descriptive  essays  published  in  periodicals.  Be- 
sides his  literary  work  he  is  a  painter  of  consider- 
able distinction,  especially  of  landscapes,  and  the 
effect  of  this  artistic  work  upon  his  prose  style  is 
clearly  discernible.  He  travels  in  search  of  sub- 
jects for  his  brush,  but  his  present  residence  is  in 
New  York  City. 


"Special  Libraries"  for  February  contains  a  list 
of  dictionaries  of  commercial  commodities  and  sim- 
ilar books. 

E.  Phillips  Oppenheim's  novel  of  German  in- 
trigue, "The  Pawns  Count,"  will  be  issued  March 
27  by  Little,  Brown  &  Co. 

The  George  H.  Doran  Co.  have  in  preparation  a 
new  book  by  Frank  Swinnerton — "Nocturne,"  to 
which  H.  G.  Wells  has  contributed  a  critical  in- 
troduction. 

The  Boston  "Evening  Record"  has  been  sold  by 
Francis  W.  Bird  to  a  syndicate  headed  by  Louis 
Coues  Page,  president  of  The  Page  Co.,  publishers. 
It  will  be  continued  as  a  Republican  newspaper. 

The  Four  Seas  Co.  will  issue  this  spring  an- 
other volume  of  poems  by  Conrad  Aiken,  whose 
"Nocturne  of  Remembered  Spring"  they  recently 
published.  It  will  be  called  "The  Charnel  Rose." 

The  Grolier  Club,  of  New  York  City,  is  now 
installed  on  East  60th  Street,  where  its  new  rooms 
have  been  arranged  to  give  the  effect  of  a  library 
in  an  English  college. 

"Ambulance  464,"  by  Julien  H.  Bryan;  a  book 
of  stories  by  Alice  Brown,  "The  Flying  Teuton"; 
Professor  John  Spencer  Bassett's  "The  Lost  Fruits 
of  Waterloo";  and  "War  Time  Control  of  In- 
dustry," by  Howard  L.  Gray,  are  among  the  forth- 
coming Macmillan  volumes. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


251 


Harper  and  Brothers  are  about  to  publish  "A 
Flying  Fighter,"  by  Lieut.  E.  M.  Roberts,  R.F.C.; 
"The  Road  that  Led  Home,"  by  Will  E.  Inger- 
soll;  "Long  Ever  Ago,"  by  Rupert  Hughes;  and 
"Skinner's  Big  Idea,"  by  Henry  Irving  Dodge. 

Among  the  books  announced  for  immediate  issue 
by  D.  Appleton  &  Co.  are:  "The  War  Cache,"  a 
novel  by  W.  Douglas  Newton;  "American  Women 
and  the  World  War,"  by  Ida  Clyde  Clarke;  and 
"The  Great  Sioux  Trail,"  by  Joseph  A.  Altsheler. 

This  spring  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  will  publish 
the  companion  volume  to  "Jerusalem,"  by  Selma 
Lagerlof— "The  Holy  City,"  translated  by  Velma 
Swanston  Howard.  The  present  book  deals  with 
the  Dalecarlians  in  Jerusalem,  where  they  work 
with  the  Gordon  Colony  of  Americans. 

The  John  Lane  Co.  announce  that  March  22 
they  will  issue  the  second  of  Lieut.  Coningsby 
Dawson's  three  war  books,  "The  Glory  of  the 
Trenches."  The  third  will  be  called  "Out  to  Win" 
and  will  discuss  the  entry  of  the  United  States 
into  the  war.  "Carry  On:  Letters  in  War  Time" 
was  the  first  volume  of  the  trilogy. 

The  Dutton  list  for  early  March  includes  "Use 
Your  Government,"  by  Alissa  Franc,  and  "State 
Services,"  by  George  Radford — two  books  that 
deal  with  the  services  of  the  state  to  the  individual. 
The  former  is  an  exposition  of  the  government 
departments  of  the  United  States;  the  latter,  a 
plea  for  the  nationalization  of  certain  factors  of 
national  wealth  in  England. 

March  15  Boni  &  Liveright  will  publish  a  trans- 
lation of  "Men  in  War,"  by  Andreas  Latzko,  an 
Austrian  army  officer.  Other  books  on  their  March 
list  are:  "The  Unbroken  Tradition,"  by  Nora 
Connolly,  daughter  of  James  Connolly — a  record 
of  her  experiences  during  the  Irish  rebellion,  which 
led  to  her  father's  execution;  "The  Hand  of  the 
Potter,"  Theodore  Dreiser's  four-act  play  which 
is  to  be  produced  in  New  York  this  month;  "Mari- 
ana," by  the  Spanish  dramatist  Jose  Echegary; 
"Erdgeist"  and  "Pandora's  Box,"  by  Frank  Wede- 
kind;  "The  Sanity  of  Art,"  by  George  Bernard 
Shaw;  and  (by  arrangement  with  the  American- 
Scandinavian  Foundation)  "Marie  Grubbe,"  a  his- 
torical romance  of  the  seventeenth  century,  by  Jens 
Peter  Jacobsen. 

Egmont  Arens  is  publishing,  at  the  Washington 
Square  Book  Shop,  New  York,  the  "Flying  Stag 
Plays  for  the  Little  Theatre."  This  series,  he 
announces,  will  include  the  best  one-act  plays  pro- 
duced by  the  Washington  Square  Players,  the 
Provincetown  Players,  the  Greenwich  Village  Play- 
ers, and  other  companies.  The  numbers  now  issued 
are:  "The  Chester  Mysteries,  a  Passion  Play," 
as  played  on  Christmas  Eve  by  the  Greenwich  Vil- 
lage Players;  "The  Sandbar  Queen,"  by  George 
Cronyn,  as  played  by  the  Washington  Square 
Players;  and  "Night,"  by  James  Oppenheim,  as 
played  by  the  Provincetown  Players.  Those  in 
preparation  are:  for  March,  "The  Angel  Intrudes," 
by  Floyd  Dell;  for  April,  "Barbarians,"  by  Rita 
Wellman;  for  May,  "The  Slave  with  Two  Faces," 
by  Mary  Caroline  Davies — all  from  the  repertoire 
of  the  Provincetown  troupe.  The  price  is  35  cts. 
an  issue  (monthly)  and  $3.  a  year. 


Books  of  the  Moment 

Principles  of  American 
Diplomacy 

By  John  Bassett  Moore 

Do  you  know  where  your  own  country  stands  on 
the  great  questions  of  international  relations?  Per- 
haps you  think  that  this  has  nothing  to  do  with 
you.  But  in  these  days  when  the  eyes  of  the  whole 
world  are  turned  upon  America,  when  everyone  is 
relying  upon  her  to  stem  the  Teuton  tide,  surely 
you  should  know  the  place  she  has  taken  in  the 
council  of  nations.  Prof.  Moore's  book  will  give  you 
a  clear  understanding  of  our  relations  with  foreign 
powers.  $2.00 

National  Progress,  1907-1917 

By  Frederic  Austin  Oi>»,  Ph.D. 

Have  you  a  clear  idea  in  your  mind  of  the  various 
steps  America  has  taken,  as  a  nation,  during  the 
last  ten  years  ?  Are  you  familiar  with  the  policies 
of  the  three  Presidents  who  were  in  office  during 
that  time?  The  governmental  problems?  The  rela- 
tions of  the  United  States  in  the  Pacific,  the  Carib- 
bean and  elsewhere? 

In  this  book  Prof.  Ogg  has  given  us  information 
on  every  phase  of  national  advancement,  even  as 


far  back  as   1900. 


$2.00 


TRAVELING  UNDER  ORDERS 

A  Guide-Book  for  Troops  en  route  to  France 

By  Major  William  E.  Dunn,  N.  A. 

Before  you  start  for  the  front — buy  this  book !  It 
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It  tells  you  what  you  need  to  equip  yourself  for 
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looked. 16mo.  Khaki  Cloth,  60  cents 

In  Our  First  Year  of  War 

By  Woodrow  Wilson 

That  the  public  desires  to  possess  in  permanent 
form  these  important  State  papers  is  proved  by  the 
success  of  "Why  We  Are  At  War,"  and  by  the 
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volume  of  the  President's  messages  which  have  ap- 
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A  French-English  Military 
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to  the  officer  going  abroad.  Crown  8vo.  Cloth,  $4.00 


Harper  £  Brothers  E"'ffihed  New  York 


252 


THE    DIAL 


[March  14 


GREAT   WAR,   BALLADS 

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THE  WAR. 

Wonderful  Stories.  Winning  the  V.  C.  in  the  Great 
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&  Co.  $2.50. 

The  Great  Crime  and  Its  Moral.  A  Connected  Nar- 
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Deductions  from  the  Great  War.  By  Baron  von 
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The  Story  of  the  Salonica  Army.  By  G.  Ward  Price. 
With  an  introduction  by  Viscount  Northcliffe. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  311  pages.  Edward  J. 
Clode.  $2. 

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In  Our  First  Year  of  the  War.  Messages  and  Ad- 
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With  frontispiece,  16mo,  166  pages.  Harper  & 
Bros.  $1. 

Two  War  Years  In  Constantinople.  By  Dr.  Harry 
Stuermer.  Translated  from  the  German  by  E. 
Allen  and  the  author.  12mo,  292  pages.  George 
H.  Doran  Co.  $1.50. 

First  Call.  By  Arthur  Guy  Empey.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  369  pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  $1.50. 

The  Canteeners.  By  Agnes  M.  Dixon.  Illustrated, 
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Trapped  in  Black  Russia.  By  Ruth  Pierce.  16mo, 
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Soldier  Men.  By  "Yeo."  12mo,  238  pages.  John 
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The  German  Terror  in  France.  By  Arnold  J.  Toyn- 
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The  New  Spirit  of  the  New  Army.  By  Joseph  H. 
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That  Rookie  From  the  13th  Squad.  By  Lieut.  P.  L. 
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Traveling  Under  Orders.  By  Major  William  E. 
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The  Fourth  Year  in  Belgium.  How  Help  is  Reach- 
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Cross.  By  Paul  U.  Kellogg.  12mo,  32  pages. 
American  Red  Cross,  Paris.  Paper. 

FICTION. 

The  Bag  of  Saffron.  By  Bettina  von  Hutten.  Il- 
lustrated, 12mo,  451  pages.  D.  Appleton  &  Co. 
$1.50. 

Sunshine  Beggars.  By  Sidney  McCall.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  302  pages.  Little,  Brown  &  Co.  $1.50. 

An  Orkney  Maid.  By  Amelia  E.  Barr.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  308  pages.  D.  Appleton  &  Co,  $1.50. 

The  Hope  Chest.  By  Mark  Lee  Luther.  With 
frontispiece,  12mo,  334  pages.  Little,  Brown 
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The  Biography  of  a  Million  Dollars.  By  George 
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The  Best  in  Life.  By  Muriel  Hine.  12mo,  365  pages. 
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My  Two  Kings.  By  Mrs.  Evan  Nepean.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  473  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Lucky  Seven.  By  John  Taintor  Foote.  12mo, 
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The  Long  Trick.  By  "Bartimeus."  12mo,  278  pages. 
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Twinkletoes.  By  Thomas  Burke.  12mo,  259  pages. 
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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


253 


W.  E.  Ford.  A  Biography.  By  J.  D.  Beresford  and 
Kenneth  Richmond.  12mo,  318  pages.  George 
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The  Key  of  the  Fields  and  Boldero.  By  Henry  Mil- 
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The  GoHBtp  Shop.  By  J.  E.  Buckrose.  12mo,  317 
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The  Man  with  the  Black  Cord.  By  Augusta  Groner. 
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The  Return  of  the  Soldier.  By  Rebecca  West.  Il- 
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Kitty  Canary.  By  Kate  Langley  Bosher.  With 
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POETRY. 

The  Broadway  Anthology.     By  Edward  L.  Bernays, 

Samuel    Hoffenstein,    Walter    J.    Kingsley,    and 

Murdock   Pemberton.     12mo,   60   pages.     Duffield 

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The  Dramatic  Records  of  Sir  Henry  Herbert.  Edited 
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Hearts  of  Controversy.  By  Alice  Meynell.  12mo, 
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Lincoln  in  Illinois.  By  Octavia  Roberts.  Illus- 
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Theories  of  Social  Progress.   By  Arthur  James  Todd. 

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THE    ARTS. 

Giotto,  and  Some  of  Mis  Followers.  By  Osvald 
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Francisco  de  Zurbaran.  His  Epoch,  His  Life,  and 
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158  pages.  Frederic  Fairchild  Sherman  (pri- 
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Japanese  Art  Motive's.  By  Maude  Rex  Allen.  Illus- 
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Rubens  t  The  Story  of  His  Life  and  Work.  By 
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Allan  Robertson.  Illustrated,  8vo,  234  pages. 
University  of  Chicago  Press. 

The  Divine  Comedy  of  Dante  Alighieri.  With  a 
translation  in  blank  verse  and  a  commentary. 
By  Courtney  Langdon.  Volume  I.  "Inferno." 
8vo,  397  pages.  Harvard  University  Press.  $2.50. 

The  Greek  Anthology.  With  an  English  translation 
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Plautus.  With  an  English  translation  by  Paul 
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1918]  THE    DIAL  255 


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256  THE     DIAL  [March  14,  1918 


THE  UNWILLING  VESTAL 

A  Tale  of  Rome  under  the  Caesars 
By  EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE,  Author  of  "El  Supremo. "    Net,  $1.50 

No  institution  of  any  country  or  period  was  more  notable,  more  peculiar  or  more  interesting  than  that  of 
the  Order  of  Vestal  Virgins  of  Ancient  Rome.  The  book  embodies  all  the  existing  information  concernins 
the  Vestals  and  their  life,  and  anyone  reading  this  book  will,  without  effort,  merely  in  the  process  of  reading  an 
absorbing  story,  assimilate  all  the  extant  knowledge  relating  to  these  wonderful  princesses  of  a  vanished  democ- 
racy, their  powers  and  privileges,  and  the  Roman  beliefs  and  customs  which  created  and  maintained  the  order. 


MY   TWO    KINGS.      A  Novel  of  the  Stuart  Restoration. 

By  MRS.  EVAN  NEPEAN  Net,  $1.50 

The  most  brilliant  historical  novel  of  recent  years.  The  author  is  certain  that  she  is  the  present  day  re- 
incarnation of  a  certain  Charlotte  Stuart,  cousin  of  the  "Merry  Monarch,"  and  that  there  have  come  to  her  in 
this  life  details  of  events  and  conversations  from  her  earlier  one.  Thus  her  story  has  the  impression  of  vivid 
reality  which  only  comes  from  an  actual  personal  narrative,  and  the  reader  sees  King  Charles,  the  beautiful 
-.vomen  of  his  court,  the  ill-fated  Duke  of  Monmouth  and  the  rest,  play  out  their  parts  in  the  tragic  comedy  of 
their  day. 


GREATER  THAN  THE  GREATEST 

By  HAMILTON  DRUMMOND  Net,  $1.50 

A  tale  of  the  thirteenth  century  struggle  between  emperor  and  Pope.  It  is  not  a  story  of  men  and  women 
whose  lives  merely  touched  the  great  events  of  the  time  but  of  those  great  events  themselves  and  the  people 
who  actually  played  the  leading  part  in  them.  Across  the  stage  of  Mr.  Drummond's  book  go  Pope  and  emperor, 
cardinal  and  warrior  of  mediaeval  Rome. 


TO  ARMS!    (La  Veillee  des  Armes) 

Translated  from  the  French  of  Marcelle  Tinayre  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey. 
Introduction  by  John  Finley.  Net,  $1.50 

Philadelphia  Press  says:  "The  picture  is  deftly  painted.  She  leads  the  reader  from  one  phase  of  Pari- 
sian life  to  another,  pointing  briefly  to  this  and  that  typical  episode,  laying  just  the  right  shade  of  empha- 
sis, here  a  bit  of  simple  dialogue,  there  a  brief  character  sketch — until  the  details  blend  imperceptible  into 
one  panoramic  conception  of  a  people  tried  and  proved  at  a  critical  hour. 


THE   LOST   NAVAL   PAPERS.      A  Story  of  Secret  Service 

By  BENNET  COPPLESTONE  Net,  $1.50 

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system. 

Richmond  Times-Dispatch  says:  "Thoroughly  exciting  spy  stories  bound  into  a  single  narrative  by  the 
personality  of  a  remarkable  detective  of  an  entirely  new  type,  whose  methods  and  character  are  refreshingly 
up-to-date,  audacious  and  ingenious." 


CHILDREN  OF  PASSAGE 

By  FREDERICK  WATSON  Net,  $1.50 

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interest,  than  these.  Nor  have  we  often,  since  Scott  himself,  read  a  Scottish  romance  pitched  in  a  more 
masterful  key  than  this.  There  is  humor,  always  spontaneous  and  racy ;  there  is  pathos  that  seems  to 
wring  blood  drops  from  the  reader's  heart,  yet  never  becomes  morbid  or  maudlin ;  and  there  is  heroism  that 
thrills  the  soul  with  wild  elation,  yet  never  is  bombastic  or  melodramatic.  It  is  a  book  to  be  reckoned 
with  in  casting  up  the  sum  of  enduring  fiction  of  our  time." 


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Fortnightly  Journal  of 

CRITICISM  AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


Volume  LXIV. 
No.  763. 


CHICAGO,  MARCH  28,  1918 


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IN  THIS  ISSUE 


Traps  for  the  Unwary 


By  RANDOLPH  BOURNE 


Superstition  Become  Respectable 


By  JOSEPH  JASTROW 


IMPORTANT  WAR  BOOKS  OF  THE  EARLY  SPRING 

IN  THE  HEART  OF 
GERMAN  INTRIGUE 


TRAPPED  IN 
"BLACK  RUSSIA" 

By  Ruth  Pierce 

The  thrilling  experiences  of 
an  American  girl  in  wartime 
Russia.  One  of  the  great  "hu- 
man documents"  of  the  war. 

$1.25  net 

SERBIA 
CRUCIFIED 

By  Lieut.  M.  Krunich 

A  Serbian  officer  describes 
with  consummate  power  some  of 
the  tragic  episodes  of  the  Ger- 
man invasion.  $1.50  net 

OVER  PERISCOPE 
POND 

By  Esther  Sayles  Root  and 
Marjorie  Crocker 

A    joyous    war    book    by    two 

young  American   girls — war 

workers  in  France.         $1.50  net 

Ready  in  April 


By  Demetra  Vaka 

The  story  of  die  attempt 
of  an  American  girl,  a  Greek 
by  birth,  to  reconcile  Venize- 
los  and  King  Constantine  and 
save  Greece  for  the  Allies. 
An  amazing  record  gathered 
first-hand  from  kings,  min- 
isters, generals,  master  spies, 
that  uncovers  the  trail  of  in- 
trigue and  corruption  stretch- 
ing down  the  centre  of 
Europe  and  illuminates  for 
the  first  time  some  of  the 
most  important  episodes  of 
the  war. 

Illustrated.     $2.00  net 

WARFARE 
OF  TODAY 

By  Lieut.  Col.  Paul  Azan 

An  authoritative  and  non-techni- 
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ern warfare  by  one  of  the  most 
famous  French  officers  now  in  this 
country.  Illustrated  from  photo- 
graphs. $2.50  net  Ready  in  April 


CAMPAIGNS  AND 
INTERVALS 

By  Lieut.  Jean  Giraudoux 

"For  subtlety  of  observation, 
for  poetry  of  conception  and  for 
sheer  beauty  of  expression  this 
book  stands  quite  unequaled  in 
the  war  literature  of  today." — 
Philadelphia  Press.  $1.50  net 


Boston 


HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 


By  Hugues  Le  Roux 

"The  spirit  of  France — ex- 
alted, unconquerable,  is  in  this 
book." — Boston  Herald. 

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THE  COLLAPSE 
OF  SUPERMAN 

By  William  Roscoe  Thayer 

"It    assumes   rank    with    'The 

Pentecost    of    Calamity1    as    one 

of     the     pocket-thunderbolts     of 

the  war." — Philadelphia  Record. 

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New  York 


258 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


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ON  THE  STAIRS 

By  Henry  B.  Fuller 

Against  a  background  of  the  kaleidoscopic  years  between  1875  and  1916  in  Chicago,  Mr. 
Fuller  has  set  this  story  of  two  men — the  son  of  a  coachman  and  the  son  of  the  coachman's 
master,  telling  how  one  went  up  the  ladder  of  fortune  as  the  other  came  down.  The 
theme,  which  is  typically  American,  is  worked  out  with  an  ironic  humor  and  richness  of 
implication  that  will  give  it  a  distinguished  place  among  contemporary  novels.  $1.50  net 


Oh,  Money!  Money! 

By  Eleanor  H.  Porter 

The  romance  of  a  New  England  Cinderella  and  a 
Western  millionaire.  Poor  Maggie,  the  heroine,  will 
rank  with  "Pollyanna"  and  "David"  as  one  of  the 
most  lovable  characters  Mrs.  Porter  has  ever  created. 

Illustrated.     $1.50  net 

Impossible  People 

By  Mary  C.  E.  Wemyss 

Lovers  of  that  most  charming  of  novels  "The  Pro- 
fessional Aunt"  will  welcome  Mrs.  Wemyss's  story 
of  an  English  curate  and  his  wife  who  seemed  "im- 
possible" merely  because  they  were  unconventional 
and  delightfully  human.  $1.50  net 

The  Melody  of  Earth 

An  Anthology  of  Garden  and  Nature  Poems 

from  Present-Day  Poets  Selected 

by  Mrs.  Waldo  Richards 

Among  the  poets  represented  are  Robert  Frost, 
William  Sharp,  John  Masefield. 

Cloth,  $1.50  net.    Limp  leather,  $2.25  net 

The  Door  of  Dreams 

By  Jessie  B.  Rittenhouse 

A  volume  of  short  and  singing  love  poems  by  the 
editor  of  "The  Little  Book  of  Modern  Verse." 
"  'The  Door  of  Dreams'  opens  into  a  magic  land 
that  will  well  repay  exploration." — Springfield  Union. 

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Miss  Pirn's  Camouflage 

By  Lady  Stanley 

A  British  spinster,  possessor  of  the  unique  gift  of 
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to  her  government  and  is  sent  on  an  important  mis- 
sion to  Germany.  The  tale  of  her  experiences  makes 
one  of  the  most  entertaining  of  war  stories. 

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The  Finding  of  Norah 

By  Eugenia  B.  Fro  thing  ham 

A  war  story  that  has  been  called  "the  most  elo- 
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appeared."  "It  has  wit  and  beauty  and  brilliance." 

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Lincoln  in  Illinois 

By  Octavia  Roberts 

Profusely  illustrated  by  Lester  G.  Hornby 

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In  Audubon's  Labrador 

By  Dr.  Charles  W.  Townsend 

An  entertaining  account  of  a  summer  cruise  along 
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Creating  Capital 

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Higher  Education  & 
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uce Market 

By  Edwin  G.  Nourse 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


259 


THE  UNWILLING  VESTAL 

A  Tale  of  Rome  under  the  Caesars  Net,  $1.50 

By  EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE,   author  of  that  wonderful  historical    novel  "El   Supremo" 

No  institution  of  any  country  or  perio_d  was  more  notable,  more  peculiar,  or  more  interesting  than  that 
of  the  Order  of  Vestal  Virgins  of  Ancient  Rome.  This  book  embodies  all  the  existing  information  concern- 
ing the  Vestals  and  their  life,  and  any  one  reading  this  book  will,  without  effort,  merely  in  the  process  of 
reading  an  absorbing  story,  assimilate  all  the  extant  knowledge  relating  to  these  wonderful  princesses  of  a 
vanished  democracy,  their  powers  and  privileges,  and  the  Roman  beliefs  and  the  customs  which  created  and 
maintained  the  order. 


GREATER  THAN  THE 
GREATEST 

By  HAMILTON  DRUMMOND  Net,  $l.so 

New  York  Times  says :  "A  tale  of  the  thirteenth- 
century  struggle  between  Emperor  and  Pope.  It  is 
not  a  story  of  men  and  women  whose  lives  merely 
touched  the  great  events  of  the  time,  but  of  those 
great  events  themselves  and  the  people  who  actually 
played  the  leading  part  in  them.  Across  the  stage 
of  Mr.  Drummond's  book  go  Pope  and  Emperor, 
cardinal  and  warrior,  of  mediaeval  Rome." 


MY  TWO  KINGS 

A  Novel  of  the  Stuart  Restoration 

By  MRS.  EVAN  NEPEAN  Net.  $l.SO 

N.  Y.  Herald  says :  "A  remarkably  interesting 
book,  not  only  because  of  its  subject  matter,  but 
because  of  the  extraordinary  claims  which  the  author 
makes  that  she  is  the  reincarnation  of  a  certain 
Charlotte  Stuart,  cousin  of  Charles  II.  It  is  a  magic 
carpet  that  carries  the  reader  back  to  those  days 
and  keeps  him  entertained  and  amused  from  the  be- 
ginning to  the  end  of  its  well  written  pages." 


OVER  THERE  AND  BACK 

A  Pen  Picture  of  the  Front 

By  LIEUT.  JOSEPH  S.  SMITH,  Author  of  "Trench  Warfare"  Net,  $1.50 

Get  the  human  side  of  the  war  from  this  young  American  who  served  three  years  as  an  officer  and 
private  with  the  Canadian  and  the  British  armies  and  is  now  "Somewhere  in  France"  as  an  officer  in 
the  American  Expeditionary  Force.  A  simple  human  story  of  every-day  life  at  the  front  and  such  as  any 
American  soldier  will  experience  in  France. 


A  CRUSADER  OF  FRANCE 

Translated  from  the  French  of  Captain  Ferdi- 
nand Belmont  Net.  $1.50 

An  Introduction  by  Henry  Bordeaux 
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CHILDREN  OF  PASSAGE 

By  FREDERICK  WATSON  Net,  $1.50 

New  York  Tribune  says:  "We  are  not  sure,  in- 
deed, that  we  have  for  many  a  year  met  with  charac- 
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individual,  more  thoroughly  vital  with  human  sym- 
pathy and  interest,  than  these.  Nor  have  we  often, 
since  Scott  himself,  read  a  Scottish  romance  pitched 
in  a  more  masterful  key  than  this.  There  is  humor, 
always  spontaneous  and  racy ;  there  is  pathos  that 
seems  to  wring  blood  drops  from  the  reader's  heart, 
yet  never  becomes  morbid  or  maudlin ;  and  there  is 
heroism  that  thrills  the  soul  with  wild  elation,  yet 
never  is  bombastic  or  melodramatic.  It  is  a  book 
to  be  reckoned  with  in  casting  up  the  sum  of  enduring 
fiction  of  our  time." 


TO  ARMS!  (La Veillee  des  Armes) 

Translated  from  the  French  of  Marcelle  Tinayre 
by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey  Net,  ft. SO 

An  Introduction  by  Dr.  John  Pinley 

Philadelphia  Press  says:  "The  picture  is  deftly 
painted.  She  leads  the  reader  from  one  phase  of 
Parisian  life  to  another,  pointing  briefly  to  this  and 
that  typical  episode,  laying  just  the  right  shade  of 
emphasis,  here  a  bit  of  simple  dialogue,  there  a 
brief  character  sketch — until  the  details  blend  im- 
perceptibly into  one  panoramic  conception  of  a  peo- 
ple tried  and  proved  at  a  critical  hour." 

THE  LOST  NAVAL  PAPERS 

By  BENNET  COPPLESTONE  N.t.  $1.50 

Philadelphia  Press  says:  "Dawson  has  a  person- 
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of  Sherlock  Holmes.  He  is  dogged,  persistent,  re- 
lentless in  his  search  to  uncover  the  ramifications 
of  the  spy  system." 

Richmond  Times-Dispatch  says :  "Thoroughly  excit- 
ing spy  stories  bound  into  a  single  narrative  by  the 
personality  of  a  remarkable  detective  of  an  entirely 
new  type,  whose  methods  and  character  are  refresh- 
ingly up  to  date,  audacious,  and  ingenious." 


FRONT  LINES 


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These  stories  again  deal  with  the  various  branches  of  the  Service — Infantry,  Artillery,  Tanks,  R.  A.  M.  C., 
Army  Service  Corps,  and  Flying  Corps — and  each  story  and  incident  related  gives  a  vivid  impression  of  front- 
line fighting,  of  the  horrors  and  heroisms  of  modern  war.  The  sombre  picture  is  lightened  by  those  extraordi- 
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MUNICIPAL  HOUSECLEANING 


By  WM.  PARR  CAPES  and  JEANNE  D.  CARPENTER 


Net,  $3.00 


Introduction  by  the  Hon.   Cornelius  F.  Burn* 

War  accentuates  city  waste  problems — conservation  and  economy  are  supplanting  loose  methods  and  wasteful- 
ness in  all  municipal  activities.  No  field  offers  greater  opportunity  for  wartime  ecomomy  and  efficiency  than  the 
collection  and  removal  of  municipal  waste — ashes,  sewage,  garbage,  rubbage,  and  street  refuse.  To  eliminate 
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cleaning  embraces  in  a  small  compass  a  fund  of  authoritative  information  about  waste  problems  which  the 
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USE  YOUR  GOVERNMENT 

By  ALISSA  FRANC  Net,  $i.so 

Today,  perhaps  more  than  any  other  time  in  our  natural  existence,  every  American  citizen  is  keenly  alert  as 
to  the  immediate  relation  of  the  government  to  the  people.  Miss  Franc's  book  is  eminently  suitable  to  intro- 
duce the  American  government,  as  it  operates  today,  to  every  man,  woman  and  child  within  its  protection. 

The  book  is  not  a  stereotyped  manual  of  civics.  In  adopting  the  arrangement  of  her  material  Miss  Franc  has 
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MAN'S  SUPREME  INHERITANCE 


By  F.  MATTHIAS  ALEXANDER 


mum  of  effort,  and  complete  adaptability  to  an  ever  changing  environment. 


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practical  system  of  physi- 
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THEORY  AND 

MYSTICISM  Neti$J.so 

By  REV.  CHARLES  MORRIS  ADDISON,  D.D. 

A  series  of  lectures  originally  given  to  a  class  of 
students  for  the  ministry,  now  brought  together 
and  printed  in  book  form  by  request  of  many  who 
admired  the  simplicity  of  the  treatment  of  the  sub- 
ject and  the  clearness  with  which  the  author  points 
out  that  mysticism  is  not  an  abnormal,  but  a  normal 
function,  and  up  to  a  certain  point  can  be  obtained 
by  anyone  willing  to  devote  time  and  care  to  the 
improvement  of  his  own  power  of  mental  concen- 
tration. Ready  April  1st 


FOSTER  ON  AUCTION  Net.  $2.00 

By  R.  F.  FOSTER,  author  of  "Pirate  Bridge" 

This  is  an  entirely  original  and  remarkably  simple 
system  of  ascertaining  the  number  of  tricks  that  any 
given  hand  will  produce  in  play,  under  any  condi- 
tions of  declaration.  The  chapters  on  assisting  bids 
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experts.  In  three  parts :  The  Bidding,  The  Play,  The 
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DISEASES  OF  TRUCK  CROPS 
AND  THEIR  CONTROL 


By  J.  J.  TAUBENHAUS 


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This  timely  and  important  volume  covers  the 
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all  the  principal  truck  crops  of  the  American  market, 
including  melons,  sweet  potatoes,  spinach,  lettuce, 
artichokes,  cabbage,  turnips,  mushrooms,  corn, 
squash,  mint,  asparagus,  onions,  beans,  tomatoes, 
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est shortage  of  food  in  its  history,  this  book  is  of 
unusual  value.  Ready  May  1st 


STUDIES  IN  CHRISTIANITY 

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mate Belief"  Net,  $1.25 

A  daring  and  brilliant  piece  of  writing,  which 
all  thinking  people,  reilgious  or  atheistic,  will  enjoy. 
In  an  unusually  convincing  manner  the  author  shows 
the  beauty  and  truth  of  Christ  and  Christianity  when 
freed  from  all  man-made  piety  and  conventional 
dogmatism.  A  book  both  stimulating  and  lovable. 

THE  ECONOMY  COOK  BOOK 

By  MARIA  McILVAINE  GILLMORE,  author  of 
"Meatless  Cookery."  Net,  £7.00 

This  is  a  cook  book  which,  originating  in  war  needs 
and  the  sacrifices  necessary  in  an  era  of  high  prices, 
will  be  of  permanent  value  because  the  author  gives 
hundreds  of  palatable  and  nourishing  recipes  which 
are  made  without  the  high-priced  ingredients,  and 
many  of  them  without  eggs  or  meat.  It  is  clearly 
and  directly  written  and  now  at  this  time  especially 
should  be  added  to  every  housekeeper's  private  shelf. 

Ready  April  1st 

DRINK 

A  new  and  revised  edition  of  "Drink  and  Be 
Sober"  by  Vance  Thompson,  author  of  "Eat 
and  Grow  Thin."  Net,  f  1.00 

The  nation-wide  interest  in  the  struggle  over  the 
pending  Prohibition  Amendment  to  the  Federal  Con- 
stitution makes  this  book  especially  timely.  All 
workers  for  temperance  will  discover  in  it  a  mar- 
velous treasure  house  of  material  and  all  who  are 
interested  in  any  way  on  either  side  of  the  question 
will  find  it  most  suggestive  and  illuminating. 


Pottage  Extra  At  AU  Bookstores 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


261 


AMERICAN  PROBLEMS  OF  RECONSTRUCTION 

Their  Economic  and  Financial  Aspects.     Editor,  Elisha  M.  Friedman.  Ready  May  is 

A— GENERAL  ASPECTS.     I.  Introduction.     II.  Reconstruction  Abroad.     The  Editor. 

B— ECONOMIC  ASPECTS.  I.  Some  After  War  Economic  Problems.  Mr.  Eugene  Meyer,  Jr.  II.  The  Ameri- 
can of  Tomorrow.  Mr.  George  W.  Perkins.  III.  The  Relations  of  Capital,  Labor,  and  the  State.  Mr.  Louis 
B.  Wehle.  IV.  Factors  in  the  Readjustment  of  Our  Industries.  (Peace  Uses  of  War  Plants.)  (a)  Steel. 
Mr.  Chas.  M.  Schwab,  (b)  Chemicals.  Dr.  Bernard  C.  Hesse.  V.  The  Conservation  of  Natural  Resources.  Hon. 
Gifford  Pinchot.  VI.  Our  Mineral  Reserves.  Dr.  Geo.  Otis  Smith.  VII.  Scientific  Management,  (a)  The  Benefit 
to  the  Community.  Col.  H.  K.  Hathaway,  (b)  The  Benefit  of  Labor  and  Capital.  Maj.  Frank  Gilbreth.  (c)  The 
Human  Factor  as  a  Condition.  Mr.  John  B.  Frey.  VIII.  Concentration  and  Control  of  Industry.  Mr.  Wad- 
dill  Cutchings.  IX.  Transportation.  Mr.  Ray  Morris.  X.  International  Commerce  and  the  Tariff.  Com.  Frank 
W.  Taussig.  XI.  Opportunities  in  Foreign  Trade.  Dr.  Edwin  E.  Pratt.  XII.  Foreign  Government  Aids  to 
Trade.  Mr.  Chauncey  D.  Snow.  XIII.  Shipping  Problems.  Prof.  J.  Russell  Smith.  XIV.  The  Free  Port. 
Dr.  Edwin  A.  Clapp.  XV.  Technical  Research,  (a)  Chemical.  Prof.  Allen  Rogers,  (b)  Engineering.  Prof. 
A.  A.  Potter. 

C — FINANCIAL  ASPECTS.  I.  Some  After  War  Financial  Problems.  Mr.  Alex  D.  Noyes.  II.  National 
Thrift.  Mr.  Frank  A.  Vanderlip.  III.  Public  Debt  and  Taxation  After  the  War.  Prof.  E.  R.  A.  Seligman. 
IV.  The  Budget  and  a  System  of  Financial  Administration.  Prof.  F.  A.  Cleveland.  V.  The  Rate  of  Interest. 
Prof.  E.  W.  Kammerer.  VI.  Standardizing  the  Dollar.  Prof.  Irving  Fisher.  VII.  Trade  Acceptances.  Mr.  Bev- 
erly D.  Harris.  VIII.  Financing  Our  Foreign  Commerce.  Mr.  Henry  E.  Cooper.  IX.  A  Federal  Reserve  Foreign 
Bank.  Sen.  Robert  L.  Owen.  X.  Foreign  Exchange  Rates.  Mr.  Fred  L.  Kent.  XI.  Foreign  Investments.  Mr. 
Francis  H.  Sisson.  XII.  The  Function  of  Produce  Exchanges  and  the  Distribution  of  Agricultural  Products. 
Chas.  J.  Brand. 


REPRESENTATIVE  PLAYS  BY 
AMERICAN  DRAMATISTS 

Edited  by  MONTROSE  J.  MOSES 

3  Vol». ,  Each,  Net,  $3.  OO 

The  first  volume  (1765-1819)  just  published.  Second 
volume  in  preparation.  Containing  full  authentic 
texts  of  the  most  important  and  distinctive  plays 
by  American  playwrights  from  1765  to  the  present. 

THE  LIMITS  OF  PURE 
DEMOCRACY 

By  W.  H.  MALLOCK  Ready  April  15 

This  thesis  is  illustrated  by  the  problems  of  war, 
and  discussed  in  direct  reference  to  modern  socialistic 
movements,  so  that,  in  the  course  of  the  argument, 
the  entire  field  of  modern  politics  is  reviewed  and 
estimated.  The  survey  is  so  thoroughly  up-to-date 
as  to  include  the  recent  evolution  in  Russia. 

THE  BUSINESS  OF  FINANCE 

By  HARTLEY  WITHERS  Ready  April  is 

Finance  is  a  form  of  human  activity  that  is  essen- 
tially based  on  steadfast  and  well  ordered  social  con- 
ditions, and  its  work  and  progress  are  thus  warped 
with  a  special  violence  by  war.  Nevertheless  the 
glare  of  war  has  shown  light  on  finance  and  brought 
out  its  strength  and  weaknesses  in  strong  relief. 
The  object  of  this  book  is  to  show  where  that 
strength  lies  and  show  how  it  can  best  be  used. 


HOURS  OF  FRANCE 

By  PAUL  SCOTT  MOWRER  Net,  $1.25 

A  book  of  lyrics  touching  nature  and  the  war, 
of  _  singing  rhythm  and  a  simple  winning  sweetness. 
With  the  vision  of  a  true  poet,  he  sees  beauty  every- 
where and  raises  the  commonplace  to  the  level  of 
his  vision — the  ideal.  Ready  April  1 


THE  SOCIAL  PLAYS  OF 
ARTHUR  WING  PINERO 

Edited  by  CLAYTON  HAMILTON 

4  Volt.,  Each,  Net,  $2.00 

Authorized  Library  Edition  to  be  in  four  volumes. 
Volume  I,  containing  the  second  Mrs.  Tanqueray  and 
The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebbsmith,  just  issued ;  other 
volumes  in  preparation. 

THE  TEMPLE.  A  Book  of  Prayers 
By  the  REV.W.  E.  ORCHARD,  D.D. 

Introduction  by  Dr.  Frank  Crane  Net.  fl.OO 

Dr.  Orchard  has  in  this  simple  little  volume  shown 
to  us  some  of  the  wonderful  struggles  of  his  inner 
soul  in  his  effort  to  achieve  the  spiritual  life.  We 
know  of  no  book  of  prayers  so  illuminating  to  the 
mind  and  soul  of  those  seeking  the  very  presence 
of  God. 

THE  REALITY  OF  PSYCHIC 
PHENOMENA 

By  W.  J.  CRAWFORD  Net,  $2.0O 

The  author,  a  Professor  of  Science  in  an  Irish 
University,  undertook  to  examine  and  measure  by 
physical  apparatus  the  actual  size  and  directions  of 
the  forces  employed  in  the  levitation  of  tables  and 
kindred  phenomena. 

His  results,  tabulated  and  precise,  have  the  author- 
ity of  definitely  proven  scientific  data,  and  are  not 
only  important  but  astounding  in  the  light  they 
throw  on  the  mechanics  of  table  turning  and  levi- 
tation. Ready  April  15 

ORGANIZING  GIRLS 

By  HELEN  J.  FERRIS  Ready  May  1 

This  book  will  be  of  invaluable  service  to  all  who 
are  interested  in  the  problems  of  girls  who  work 
either  in  the  office  or  the  factory. 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  UNSEEN 


By  SIR  WILLIAM  F.  BARRETT 


Net,  $2.50 


New  American  Edition  just  published  with  an  Introduction  by  JAMES  H.  HYSLOP,  Secretary  of  the  American 
Society  of  Psychical  Research.  [ 

James  H.  Hyslop  says  in  his  introduction :  "It  is  the  best  work  of  the  kind  that  has  ever  appeared  in 
English.  Every  aspect  and  difficulty  of  the  subject  is  canvassed  and  evidence  produced  for  the  claims  made 


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War 


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The  Making  off  a  Modern  Army 

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General  Radiguet,  a  divisional  commander,   and   three  years   on   the   French   front, 
tells  how  a  large  army  is  made  up  in  the  last  quarter  of  the  year  1917. 

Tactics  and  Duties  for  Trench  Fighting 

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An  illuminating,  intensely  interesting  account  of  these  new,  most 
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Militarism  and  Statecraft 

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Call'  explains  how  our  objects  may  be  gained." — N.  Y.  Sun. 

A  "Temporary  Gentleman"  in  France 

Introductory  Chapters  by  Capt.  A.  J.  Dawson 

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Very   human,    amusing,    and   entertaining  letters  from  the  front,  written  by  a  regi- 
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The  Secret  of  the  Marne 

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Sea  Dogs  and  Men-at-Arms 

J.  E.  Mlddleton 

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Fragments  from  France 

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NEW  McCLURG   BOOKS 

"Holding  the  Line"  By  Sergeant  Harold  Baldwin 

"Holding  the  Line"  is  the  story  of  a  brave  little  Canadian  who  "went"  with  the  first 
contingent  of  enlisted  men,  and  "did  his  bit"  in  some  of  the  most  awful  fighting  of  the 
war.  It  is  more  than  thrilling,  this  narrative  of  how  the  men  from  Canadian  prairies, 
outnumbered  and  outgunned,  with  little  ammunition,  and  scarcely  any  artillery,  by  des- 
perate valor  alone  held  at  bay  Germany's  vast  army  and  blocked  the  drive  to  Calais,  which, 
had  it  been  successful,  would  have  brought  the  entire  world  under  the  iron  fist  of  des- 
potism. Especially  vivid  is  the  author's  pen  picture  of  the  second  battle  of  Ypres,  when 
the  line  held  against  the  furious  assaults  of  the  Germans. 

Sergeant  Baldwin  is  fearless  and  candid  in  his  portrayal  of  life  in  the  trenches.  He 
holds  nothing  back.  He  tells  what  modern  army  life  is  like  in  all  its  phases.  His  book 
is  one  of  the  most  vital  human  documents  yet  produced  of  the  war.  Illustrated. 

Price,  $1.50 

Tarzan  and  the  Jewels  of  Opar 

By  Edgar  Rice  Burroughs 

In  one  of  his  early  exploits  Tarzan  visited  the  mysterious  ruined  city  of  Opar,  that 
flourished  in  the  days  of  a  bygone  civilization  now  inhabited  by  a  strange  horde  of  blood- 
thirsty, apelike  priests  headed  by  La,  the  beautiful  high-priestess  of  the  flaming  God.  At 
that  time  he  brought  back  a  very  small  portion  indeed  of  the  immense  store  of  ingots  of 
treasure  which  he  discovered.  The  present  story  tells  why  Tarzan  returned  to  the  mys- 
terious city  and  what  he  found  there.  It  is  every  bit  as  good  as  any  previous  Tarzan 
tale.  It  has  the  same  breathless  interest,  the  thrills  and  the  fascination.  Illustrated  by 
J.  Allen  St.  John.  Price,  $1.35 

Long  Heads  and  Round  Heads      By  Dr.  w.  s.  Sadler 

Or,  What's  the  Matter  With  Germany 

By  her  infamous  and  ruthless  conduct  of  the  war  and  her  utter  disregard  of  truth, 
honor  and  the  ethics  of  civilization,  Germany,  the  nation  which  we  aforetime  regarded  so 
highly,  stands  before  the  world  today  a  moral  bankrupt. 

Why  is  this  and  how  did  it  happen?  Dr.  Sadler  says  Anthropology  gives  the  correct 
answer.  Germany  today  is  peopled  by  a  docile,  round-headed  race  with  an  inherited  ten- 
dency to  cruelty,  viciousness,  and  with  no  more  morals  than  a  wolf.  He  claims  they  are 
Alpines,  an  inferior,  stupid  and  non-progressive  race,  and  are  not  real  Teutons,  having 
nothing  whatever  in  common  with  that  long-headed,  progressive  and  intelligent  race.  "Long 
Heads  and  Round  Heads"  is  the  most  interesting  side  light  yet  thrown  upon  the  psy- 
chology of  the  war.  Illustrated.  Price,  $1.00 

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Illinois  in   1 8 1 8  By  Solon  Justus  Buck 

One  hundred  years  ago  Illinois,  then  upon  the  far  western  edge  of  the  wave  of  Ameri- 
can civilization  slowly  advancing  across  the  continent,  was  admitted  to  statehood  in  the 
Union.  This  volume,  the  first  of  the  Illinois  Centennial  Publications,  treats  of  the  social, 
economical  and  political  life  of  the  state  at  the  close  of  the  territorial  period.  As  history 
it  is  scientifically  accurate,  and  having  been  written  to  prove  of  interest  to  the  intelli- 
gent general  reader,  it  is  more  than  a  mere  historical  record,  being  warm  with  human  inter- 
est and  rich  in  literary  charm.  Fully  illustrated.  Price,  $2.00 

HOW  tO  Speak  Convincingly          By  Edwin  G.  Lawrence 

The  ability  to  express  one's  thoughts  in  an  effective  manner  by  word  of  mouth  is  one 
of  the  most  valuable  of  all  personal  acquirements.  In  business  its  importance  can  hardly 
be  overestimated,  and  in  social  life  its  possessor  finds  a  ready  welcome  everywhere. 

This  book  shows  how  any  one  may  improve  himself  in  the  art  of  speaking,  and, 
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principles  and  rules  laid  down  apply  to  human  speech  generally.  Price,  $1.00 


Women  and  the  Franchise  By  Josephine  Schain 

Women  ask  no  favor  when  they  demand  equal  suffrage.  It  is  as  a  right  they  claim  it, 
based  on  a  logical  presentation  of  the  facts  in  the  case.  Miss  Schain,  who  is  one  of  the 
younger  leaders  in  the  suffrage  movement,  gives  herein  the  reasons  why  the  franchise 
should  be  extended  to  women.  Her  style  is  vigorous  and  pleasing,  and  her  arguments 
remarkably  well  put.  Price,  60  cents 

Statistics  By  W.  B.  Bailey,  Ph.D.,  and  John  Cummings 

Statistics  are  the  languages  in  which  social  conditions  are  accurately  described,  and 
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the  needs  of  the  constantly  increasing  number  of  persons  in  this  country  who  require  an 
acquaintance  with  the  elements  of  statistics  that  this  volume  has  been  prepared. 

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[March  28 


'OVER  THERE9 

WITH  THE  AUSTRALIANS 

By  Captain  Hugh  Knyvett 

Anzac  Scout 


Moffat,  Chicago 

CAPT.  KNYVETT 


Captain  Hugh  Knyvett,  whose  extraordinary  successes  as  a  lecturer  upon 
the  war  have  resulted  in  many  glittering  offers  to  publish  an  account  of  his 
personal  experiences,  has  at  last  yielded.  His  story  of  how,  by  twos  and 
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Ball"  of  Australia  gathered  for  the  defense  of  the  mother  country,  is  one  of  the 
most  picturesque  of  the  war. 

The   news  of   a  world   at  war   found    Hugh   Knyvett,   in   the   late   summer 

of  1914,  pearl-fishing  in  the  Pacific.     He  went  into  the  ranks  of  the  Australians,  and  fought  through 
the  tragedy  of  Gallipoli. 

The  rest  of  the  story  is  of  warfare  in  France,  presented  from  an  angle  altogether  novel.  The 
author  was  delegated  to  the  thrilling  business  of  intelligence  gathering — the  most  dangerous  and 
useful  branch  of  the  service  which  in  this  war  has  developed  on  entirely  new  lines. 

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THE  ONLY  POSSIBLE  PEACE 

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Dr.  Howe  sees  the  European  war  from  an 
entirely  new  angle  as  a  struggle  for  imperialism 
of  world  states  and  primarily  economic.  Dr. 
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many, and  traces  the  war  to  the  industrial  rather 
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NEW  POPULAR  EDITION 

THE  FRANCE  OF  TO-DAY 

By  Barrett  Wendell 

Professor  of  English  at  Harvard  University 

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NEW  POPULAR  EDITION 

THE  NAVY  AS  A  FIGHTING 
MACHINE 

By  Rear-Admiral  Bradley  A.  Fiske 

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AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY  AND 
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By  Sidney  L.  Gulick 

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CREDIT  OF  THE  NATIONS 

A  STUDY  OF  THE  EUROPEAN  WAR 

By  J.  Laurence  Laughlin 

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This  impressive  and  deeply  interesting  study  of 
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The   Conversion  of  Europe 

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Psychological     Insight;     THE     METHODS     OF     DEPICTING 
CHARACTER  IN  FICTION  AND  BIOGRAPHY  —  The  Nature  and 
Limits    of   a    Character   Study  —  The   Character   Study   in 
Biography  —  The   Character   Study   in    Autobiography  and 
in    Fiction  ;    LAST   ESSAYS  —  Candour   in    Biography  —  The 
War    Spirit    and     Christianity  —  Oxford    Liberalism     and 
Dogma  —  Mr.    Balfour's    Gifford    Lectures. 

The  Mount  of  Vision: 

The  Story  of  the   Psychological   Experiment  Which 
Resulted  in  the  Discovery  of  the  Edgar  Chapel  at 
Glastonbury. 

By  FREDERICK  BLIGH   BOND,   F.R.I.B.A.,   Director 
of   Excavations   at   Glastonbury   Abbey  ;   With   Illustra- 
tions and  Plans.     8vo.     $2.00  net. 
This  book,  by  the  Director  of  Excavations  at  Glaston- 
bury Abbey   (who  is  a  member  of  the  Psychical  Research 
Society),  gives  for  the  first  time  a  full  and  exact  record 
of  the  strange  automatic  script,  in  medieval  English  or 
Latin,   utilized   in   connection   with  the  discovery   of  the 
Edgar  Chapel  at  the  east  end  of  the  Abbey  and  bearing 
also   on   another   lost   site,    that   of   the   Loretto   Chapel. 
The  script  was  produced  from  the  end  of  1907  onward. 

Being  a  Study  of  Life  in  Terms  of  the  Whole. 

By  the  Right  Rev.  CHARLES  H.  BRENT,  D.D.,  Bishop- 
Elect    of   Western    New   York.      With   an    Introduction 
by  the  Bishop  of  London,  and  a  Frontispiece.     Crown 
8vo.     $1.00  net. 
"It  will  widen   its   readers'   minds   in   their  conception 
of    God's    Love    and    Purpose    for   the    World,    and    give 
them  fresh  faith  and  hope  in  the  present  darkness  and 
clash    of    arms.      It    will    quicken    by   such    chapters    as 
"The   Wholeness   of   Holiness'   their   ideal   as    to   what   is 
possible    in    heroic    self-giving   from    man."     .     .     .  —  The 
Guardian. 

By   H.   E.      The   Cardinal  Archbishop  of  New    York. 

The  Life  of  John  Cardinal  McCloskey 

First  Prince  of  the  Church  in  America.  1  81  0-  1885. 
By   His   Eminence   JOHN    CARDINAL   FARLEY.     With   6  illustrations.     8vo.     $3.50  net. 
This   book   has   a   special  interest  not   only   as   the    biography   of   America's    first   Cardinal   by   his    former   sec- 
retary,   but    also    as   a    contribution    to   the   history    of    the    religious    life   of    New    York   during   the    19th    century. 

LONGMANS,  GREEN   &   CO.,  Publishers 

Fourth  Avenue  and  Thirtieth  Street,  New  York 

When  writing  to  advertisers  please  mention  THE  DIAL. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


271 


Forward  Movements  In  Education 

NEW    EXPERIMENTS    AND    METHODS    IN    VARIOUS    FIELDS 
WORK    SUCCESSFULLY   IN   THEIR   PRACTICAL   APPLICATION 


"WAR  FRENCH 

When  war  was  declared  by  the  United  States, 
certain  professors  of  French  realized  that  in  the 
months  to  come  thousands  of  American  men  and 
women  would  go  to  France  to  serve  on  or  behind 
the  battle  line.  Very  few  of  these  could  under- 
stand or  speak  French.  The  teachers  of  French 
realized  that  ignorance  or  knowledge  of  the  French 
language  might  in  many  instances  make  the  dif- 
ference between  delay  and  speed,  between  blunder- 
ing and  efficiency,  between  suffering  and  relief,  be- 
tween death  and  life. 

The  faculty  of  the  Romance  Department  of  the 
University  of  Chicago  saw  that  an  opportunity  was 
presented  for  rendering  signal  service  to  their 
country.  Under  the  leadership  of  Ernest  H.  Wil- 
kins  and  Algernon  Coleman,  instruction  in  French 
was  given  to  classes  at  Fort  Sheridan,  to  various 
groups  and  organizations  in  the  city  of  Chicago, 
and  to  students  at  the  University.  These  lessons 
were  developed  to  meet  the  special  needs  of  soldiers, 
doctors,  and  nurses.  After  the  lessons  had  been 
used  in  mimeograph  form  in  these  and  subsequent 
classes,  they  were  published  in  convenient  text- 
book form  for  future  use. 

After  almost  a  year's  experience  a  new  text- 
book for  soldiers,  "Army  French,"  has  been  pre- 
pared and  recently  published,  which  instructors  in 
various  camps  report  as  being  better  adapted  to 
their  needs  than  any  other  book  they  have  seen. 
This  text,  the  text  for  doctors  and  nurses,  and  the 
supplementary  reader  or  conversation  book  are  all 
widely  and  successfully  used. 

MATHEMATICS 

Criticism  has  been  made  for  years  regarding  the 
inefficiency  of  the  work  in  the  field  of  secondary- 
school  mathematics.  It  has  been  pointed  out  that 
only  a  small  percentage  of  the  students  who  begin 
the  subject  complete  the  course;  it  has  been  felt 
that  the  work  is  not  vitalized;  that  interest  is  lack- 
ing on  the  part  of  the  students.  Experiments  con- 
ducted in  the  University  High  School  of  the 
University  of  Chicago  demonstrated  that  the 
obstacles  could  largely  be  overcome  by  teaching 
arithmetic,  algebra,  geometry,  and  trigonometry 
as  one  subject  in  the  form  of  general  mathematics. 
Thus  the  abstractions  have  been  made  concrete, 
and  the  material  of  each  topic  has  aided  in  the 
understanding  of  the  others.  The  result  is  a 
successful  series  of  textbooks  by  Ernst  R.  Breslich, 
Head  of  the  Department  of  Mathematics  in  the 
University  of  Chicago  High  School,  which  is  being 
successfully  used  in  public  and  private  schools 
throughout  the  country. 

ECONOMICS 

There  was  a  time  when  classes  finished  the 
prescribed  textbook  and  stopped.  The  opinions  of 
one  man  on  the  many  important  questions  were  a 
law  and  gospel  to  the  student.  Today  in  most 
colleges,  classes  use  books  of  readings  selected 
from  all  sources  and  written  by  experts  in  each 
particular  field.  The  series  is  known  as  Materials 
for  the  Study  of  Economics.  This  series  of  source 
books  and  outlines,  at  present  seven  in  number 
and  rapidly  growing,  has  been  developed  in  the 
Department  of  Political  Economy  of  the  Univer- 
sity of  Chicago.  The  student  is  afforded  an  un- 
biased view  because  the  books  present  both  sides 
of  a  question. 

A  new  series,  Material  for  the  Study  of  Business, 
under  the  editorship  of  Leon  C.  Marshall,  Dean  of 
the  School  of  Commerce  and  Administration  of  the 
University  of  Chicago,  has  recently  been  initiated 
with  the  publication  of  a  textbook  on  "Quarter- 
master and  Ordnance  Supply"  prepared  by  instruct- 
ors in  the  Ordnance  Course  at  the  University  of 
Chicago.  The  second  volume,  "Readings  in  Indus- 
trial Society,"  compiled  by  the  editor  of  the  series, 
is  scheduled  for  spring  publication.  Other  volumes 
are  in  preparation. 


LITERATURE 

We   learn    to   appreciate   literature   not   so   much 
by    reading    about    literature    as    by    reading    the 
literature  itself.    Walter  C.  Bronson,  of  Brown  Uni-       Name 
versity,    was    one    to    appreciate    this    fact    and    he 

set  to  work  to  assemble  the  best  of  English  poetry.       Position    

American    poetry,    and    American    prose    in    handy  » 

volumes.      Illustrative   and   explanatory   notes   fur-       Address    

nish     a     variety     of     interesting     side-lights     and 

information  about  the   authors  and   the   selections.  

When   writing  to  advertisers  please   mention   TJIK  DIAL. 


Further  aids  to  the  study  and  interpretation  of 
literature  are  available,  and  include  a  work  by 
Percy  H.  Boynton  on  London  in  the  various  liter- 
ary periods,  an  introduction  to  literary  theory  and 
interpretation  by  Richard  G.  Moulton,  and  a  special 
method  of  conducting  classes  in  Shakespeare  by 
Albert  H.  Tolman. 

RELIGIOUS  EDUCATION 

The  present  awakening  in  religious  education 
dates  back  more  than  twenty  years,  and  counts  as 
one  of  its  sources  the  energy  of  William  Rainey 
Harper,  first  President  of  the  University  of  Chi- 
cago. To  him  and  to  his  colleague,  Ernest  D. 
Burton  of  the  New  Testament  Department  of  the 
University,  we  owe  the  plans  for  the  production 
of  a  series  of  textbooks,  The  Constructive  Studies. 
which  gives  to  religious  education  in  the  Sunday 
School  and  elsewhere  the  same  serious  and  digni- 
fied character  that  has  so  long  been  a  recognized 
standard  of  the  day  school. 

This  series  now  numbers  thirty  volumes  ranging 
from  the  kindergarten  to  adult  classes.  They  are 
well  bound,  clearly  printed,  and  handsomely  illus- 
trated, and  are  used  in  Sunday  Schools  representing 
many  Protestant  denominations,  as  the  basis  of  a 
complete  curriculum  or  as  individual  texts  in  cer- 
tain classes. 

Principles  and  Methods  of  Religious  Education 
is  a  series  of  handbooks  recording  practical  and 
successful  experiments  by  men  familiar  with  the 
scientific  principles  of  religious  education. 

Outline  Bible-Study  Courses  constitute  a  con- 
tinually increasing  series  of  extension  courses  in 
religious  subjects  for  personal  study  or  for  classes. 
All  these  courses  are  prepared  on  the  basis  of 
modern  scholarship,  using  only  the  Bible  as  a  text- 
book, yet  they  are  free  from  disputations  or 
theological  questions. 

Handbooks  of  Ethics  and  Religion  is  a  series  of 
text  and  reference  books  for  the  use  of  college 
classes  and  for  general  reading.  The  subjects 
have  been  selected  and  arranged  in  logical  and 
progressive  order,  providing  work  for  the  four 
college  years,  and  the  best  college  teachers  have 
been  secured  to  prepare  the  volumes,  of  which 
there  are  now  five. 

In  view  of  the  increasing  responsibilities  of 
editorship  in  connection  with  these  different  series 
three  men  in  the  University  of  Chicago  now  share 
the  work:  Ernest  D.  Burton,  Head  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  New  Testament  and  Early  Christian 
Literature,  Shailer  Mathews,  Dean  of  the  Divinity 
School,  and  Theodore  G.  Scares,  Professor  of 
Homiletics  and  Religious  Education  and  Head  of 
the  Department  of  Practical  Theology. 


The  University   of  Chicago  Press, 
5803  Ellis  Avenue,  Chicago,  111. 
Gentlemen: 

I  am  interested  in  the  subjects  checked  and  ask 
that  you   send  me,  by  return  mail,   titles,   descrip- 
tions, and  prices  of  your  books  in  these  fields. 
D  War  French. 

D  Secondary-School  Mathematics. 
D  The    series    "Materials    for    the    Study    of 
Business." 

D  The    series    "Materials    for    the    Study    of 
Economics." 

D  Literature. 

D  Graded  Lessons  for  Sunday  Schools. 

D  Principles  and  Methods  of  Religious  Edu- 
cation. 

D  Outline  Bible  Study  Courses. 

D  Handbooks  of  Ethics  and  Religion. 
D  A    Copy   of   your    Descriptive   Catalogue    of   Re- 
ligious Publications. 

D  A    Copy   of   your   Descriptive   Educational   Cata- 
logue. 


THE     DIAL  [March  28 


THREE   NOVELS    OF    IMPORTANCE 


"So,  if  this  story  of  Drowsy  seems  a  fairy  tale,   let  us  remember  that    the  Atlantic  Cable   would   be 

a   fairy    tale   to    Columbus." 

This,  from  the  author's  preface,  indicates  that  the  new  novel  by  the  editor  of  Life  is  more 
on  the  lines  of  "Amos  Judd,"  "The  Pines  of  Lory,"  and  "The  Last  American"  than  like 
his  more  recent  novel,  "Pandora's  Box."  It  is  the  somewhat  romantic  narrative  of  a 
woman  and  a  reckless  lover,  whose  control  of  waves  of  thought  brings  about  exciting 
and  significant  happenings. 


DROWSY 


is  the  title    (that  was  the  nickname  given  the  hero  because  of  his  unusual  eyes).     The 
author  is 

JOHN  AMES  MITCHELL 


With    over    300    pages,    20    remarkable    illustra- 
tions, and  22  amusing  decorations  by  the  author. 

Net  $1.50. 


Tur   IA/HITF    MftBMIMf*  By  GERTRupE  ATHERTON 

I   HE      WW  ••  I    I    El       I  Yl  W  fi\  W  I  HI  \3  Author  of  "The  Living  Present,"  etc. 

The  one  war  novel  the  whole  nation  is  talking  about.  "White-hot  with  matter  of  interest  to 
all  human  beings  from  the  'hausfraus  cowed  to  the  doormat'  to  the  American  soldiers  now 
fighting  to  free  them  in  common  with  all  humanity"  says  the  Chicago  Herald  of  this  thrilling 
story  of  the  German  Revolution  that  may  come. 

"The  work  of  a  just  and  keen  mind  guided  by  first-hand  knowledge,  a  book  that  will  be  read 
far  and  wide  over  the  world.  .  .  It  holds  a  fierce,  pitiless  love  story;  it  is  crowded  with 
living  characters,  and  moves  before  a  vivid  background.  .  .  Alive  with  the  beat  of  the 
pulse  of  this  time,"  is  the  opinion  of  the  New  York  Times. 

Sixth  Printing  Just  Off  Press  ! 
Cloth,  I2mo,  net  $1.00 


THE  HOUSE  OF  CONRAD 

The  story  of  the  great  forces  of  nationalism  about  to  break  in  America.  "Its  pages  are  crowded 
with  a  great  variety  of  characters.  .  .  Sometimes  they  are  sketched  in  bold  strokes,  some- 
times worked  out  in  fine,  realistic  detail,  sometimes  made  vital  in  a  few  words.  But  they  all 
bear  the  stamp  of  truth,  and  they  are  all  made  to  live. 

"  'The  House  of  Conrad'  deserves  a  warm  welcome  from  American  readers  because  of  its 
intrinsic  interest  and  artistry,  the  sincerity  of  its  spirit,  and  its  very  great  value  as  a  picture 
of  the  unconscious  processes  of  Americanization  at  work  upon  the  minds  and  souls  of  immi- 
grants."— Nenu  York  Times. 

Cloth,  I2mo,  net  $1.50 

Publishers  FREDERICK  A.  STOKES  COMPANY  New  York 

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THE    DIAL 


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the  time  of  its  arrival  in  France  until  it  entered  the  trenches. 

THE  A.  E.  F. 

By  HEYWOOD  BROUN 

The  landing  of  America's  first  contingent  of  soldiers,  their  triumphant 
march  through  Paris,  their  amusing  difficulties  with  a  strange  lan- 
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army,  the  Americans  in  training,  their  first  days  in  the  trenches — 
Mr.  Broun  tells  you  about  all  these  in  an  unusual  book,  humorous  and 
pathetic,  gripping  and  inspiring,  always  wholly  American.  $1.50  net. 


TO  BAGDAD 
WITH  THE   BRITISH 

By  ARTHUR  T.    CLARK 

The  thrilling  story  of  the  strongest 
drama  of  the  war  fought  amid  the 
drifting  sands  and  burning  suns  of 
Mesopotamia.  A  full  account  of  the 
drives  against  Jerusalem  and  Bag- 
dad, and  their  effect  upon  the  great 
war  as  a  whole.  Illustrated. 

$1.50  net. 

By  CHARLES  W.  WHITEHAIR 

If  you  want  to  know  of  the  men  who  have  gone  over  the  top  in  France 
and  Belgium,  at  Gallipoli  and  in  the  Holy  Land,  how  they  really  acted, 
and  lived  and  died,  read  this  great  human  document  of  tragedy  and  humor, 
by  one  of  the  best  known  Y.  M.  C.  A.  men  in  the  service.  Illustrated. 

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UNDER  FOUR  FLAGS 
FOR  FRANCE 

By    CAPTAIN 

GEORGE  CLARKE  MUSGRAVE 
The  only  complete  account  of  forty 
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written  from  the  view  point  of  the 
men  who  have  planned  and  directed 
all  the  great  battles.  It  makes  the 
events  of  the  war  up-to-date,  per- 
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and  it  is  a  big  human  interest  story 
besides.  With  many  illustrations 
and  maps.  $2.00  net. 


FROM  THE  FRONT 

An  anthology  of  Trench  Poetry 

Compiled   by 

LIEUT.  C.  E.  ANDREWS,  U.S.A. 
Poems  and  verses  written  by  the 
men  in  actual  service,  —  spirited, 
tender,  humorous,  —  revealing  the 
very  souls  of  brave  men.  There  are 
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volume,  including  Alan  Seeger, 
Rupert  Brooke,  Patrick  MacGill,  and 
Robert  Service.  $1.00  net. 

WHEATLESS  AND 
MEATLESS  DAYS 

By    PAULINE   D.    PARTRIDGE 

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AMERICAN   WOMEN 

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WORLD  WAR 

By  IDA  CLYDE  CLARKE 

A  splendid  story,  brimming  with 
interest,  showing  all  that  American 
women  have  done,  are  doing  and 
can  do  to  help  win  the  war.  The 
first  complete  account  of  a  great 
work  well  done.  $2.00  net. 

PRACTICAL 
GARDENING 

By  HUGH  FINDLAY 

How  to  make  the  garden  anywhere 
yield  abundantly  in  common  or  un- 
common vegetables,  berries  and 
small  fruits.  A  practical  guide-book 
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trated. $2.00  net. 


THE  AMERICAN  YEAR  BOOK 

Edited  by  FRANCIS  G.  WICKWARE 

Every  important  event  of  the  past  year  is  recorded  completely  and  interest- 
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you  all  you  want  to  know  about  the  big  things  of  the  biggest  year  of 
the  world's  history.  900  pages  fully  indexed.  $3.00  net. 

For  Sale  at  Att  Booksellers 

THESE  ARE  APPLETON  BOOKS 
D.  Appleton  &  Company,  Publishers,  New  York 


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274  THE     DIAL  [March  28 

BRENTANO'S  NEW  PUBLICATIONS 

SPRING     1918 

THE  LYRICAL  POEMS  AND  TRANSLATIONS  OF  PERCY  BYSSHE 
SHELLEY.  Arranged  in  Chronological  Order,  with  a  Preface  by  C.  H.  Her- 
ford.  Sm.  4to.  Cloth,  gold  back  and  side.  Uniform  with  "Keats's  Poems" 
issued  by  the  same  publishers.  Price  $3.25  net. 

f  Printed  by  the  Florence  Press,  London,  England. 

"The  finest  piece  of  printing  issued  of  late.  Having  before  us  the 
Kelmscott  and  the  Vale  editions  of  Shelley,  we  feel  free  to  say  that  this 
edition  ranks  with  them,  and  we  heartily  commend  it  to  lovers  of  Shelley, 
and  alternatively  to  lovers  of  good  printing." 

— Saturday  Review  (London). 

AMERICAN  CARICATURES  PERTAINING  TO  THE  CIVIL  WAR.  Repro- 
duced from  the  Originals  published  in  sheet  form  from  1856  to  1872.  New 
Edition,  with  Introduction,  limited  to  400  copies.  Oblong.  Small  4to.  Cloth. 
Price  $2.00  net. 

THE  SOCIAL  LETTER:  a  Guide  to  the  Etiquette  of  Social  Correspondence, 
illustrated  with  numerous  Examples.  By  Elizabeth  Myers.  12mo.  Cloth. 
Price  $1.00  net. 

HARVARD  PLAYS.  Edited  by  Professor  George  P.  Baker.  12mo.  Boards. 
Price  $1.00  net  per  volume. 

Vol.  I.   PLAYS  OF  THE  47  WORKSHOP. 

Vol.  II.  PLAYS  OF  THE  HARVARD  DRAMATIC  CLUB. 

THE  AVIATOR'S  POCKET  DICTIONARY.  French-English  and  English- 
French.  A  Handbook  for  the  Use  of  Aviators  and  Engineers  in  the  United 
States  Army,  based  on  the  Official  "Vocabulaire"  issued  by  the  French 
War  Department.  With  Tables  of  Measurements  in  American  and  English 
Measures,  and  their  Metrical  Equivalents.  Edited  under  the  supervision  of 
A.  De  Gramont  De  Guiche,  D.Sc.,  of  the  French  Aviation  Corps.  12mo.  Limp 
Cloth.  Price  $1.00  net. 

THE  AVIATOR'S  ELEMENTARY  HANDBOOK.  A  Primer  of  Aviation  and 
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tion Corps.  Translated  by  Dwight  M.  Miner,  A.B.,  formerly  Teacher  of 
Science  at  the  Taunton  High  School,  Mass.  12mo.  Cloth.  Price  $1.00  net. 


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LOVE  AND  LIBERTY,  OR  NELSON  AT  NAPLES.  By  Alexandre  Dumas. 
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THE  HUNT  BALL  MYSTERY.  By  Sir  William  Magnay.  12mo.  Cloth. 
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RAMUNTCHO.     By  Pierre  Loti.     12mo.    Cloth.    $1.35  net. 

A  ROYAL  PRISONER.  Being  the  Fifth  Volume  of  the  Fantomas  Series  of  De- 
tective Tales.  By  Pierre  Souvestre  and  Marcel  Allain.  12mo.  Cloth. 
$1.35  net.  (Ready  in  April) 

THE  SHIP  OF  DEATH.  By  Edward  Stilgebauer,  author  of  "Love's  Inferno." 
12mo.  Cloth.  $1.50  net.  (Ready  in  May) 

THERE  WAS  A  KING  IN  EGYPT.  By  Norma  Lorimer,  Author  of  "A  Wife 
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(Ready  in  May) 

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THEkDIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  763 


MARCH  28,  1918 


CONTENTS 


TRAPS  FOR  THE  UNWARY  ....     Randolph  Bourne    ... 

RiMSKY-KoRSAKOV Paul  Rosenfeld    .     : 

A  STUDY  OF  AMERICAN  INTOLERANCE  Alfred  Booth  Kuttner 


OUR  LONDON  LETTER   .     .     .*.     * 
To  DOROTHY    .     .     .     Verse     .     . 
A  HINT  TO  ESSAY-LOVERS     .     .     .:; 
SUPERSTITION  BECOME  RESPECTABLE 
THE  POETRY  OF  CONRAD  AIKEN     . 
A  YEAR  OF  MISTAKES  .     .     .    , .     . 
NEW  PLAYS  AND  A  NEW  THEORY     . 

"A  QUEER  FELLOW" 

REBECCA  WEST — NOVELIST 


277 
279 
282 
286 
288 


Edward  Shanks  .  .  . 
Maxwell  Bodenheim 
B.  I.  Kinne  .  .  .  .  .  288 
Joseph  Jastrow  ....  289 
John  Gould  Fletcher  .  .291 
Harold  Stearns  ...  .  .  293 
Padraic  Colum  .  .  .  .295 
William  Aspenwall  Bradley  297 
Henry  B.  Fuller  ....  299 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS .  300 

Colorado,  the  Queen  Jewel  of  the  Rockies. — Florida,  the  Land  of  Enchantment. 
— A  Diary  of  the  Russian  Revolution. — Creators  of  Decorative  Styles. — Organic 
Evolution. — The  Note  Book  of  an  Intelligence  Officer. — Hearts  of  Controversy. 
— A  Literary  Pilgrim  in  England. — Medical  Research  and  Human  Welfare. — The 
Spell  of  China. — The  History  of  Medieval  Europe. — An  Introduction  to  Political 
Parties  and  Practical  Politics. 

CASUAL  COMMENT   .     .     .     .    ,; V.  .  .  304 

NOTES  AND  NEWS •  .    ,. •    .  •  i,  .  .  306 

SELECTIVE  LIST  OF  SPRING  BOOKS .  .  307 

LIST  OF  BOOKS  RECEIVED  .  ,320 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 

CONRAD  AIKEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY 


Contributing  Editors 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 

PADRAIC  COLUM 
HENRY  B.  FULLER 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

H.  M.  KALLEN 
KENNETH  MACGOWAN 
JOHN  E.  ROBINSON 


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jFortniff&tlP  Journal  of  Criticism  and  ^Discussion  of  literature  and 


for  the  Unwary 


What  place  is  there  to  be  for  the 
younger  American  writers  who  have 
broken  the  "genteel"  tradition  with  a 
sudden  violence  that  elicits  angry  cries 
of  pain  from  the  critics,  so  long  regarded 
by  the  significant  classes  as  guardians  of 
our  cultural  faith?  Read  Mr.  Brownell 
on  standards  and  see  with  what  a  be- 
wildered contempt  one  of  the  most  vigor- 
ous and  gentlemanly  survivals  from  the 
genteel  tradition  regards  the  efforts  of  the 
would-be  literary  artists  of  today.  Read 
Stuart  P.  Sherman  on  contemporary  litera- 
ture, and  see  with  what  a  hurt  panic  a 
young  gentleman,  perhaps  the  very  last 
brave  offshoot  of  the  genteel  tradition,  re- 
gards those  bold  modern  writers  from 
whom  his  contemporaries  derive.  One 
can  admire  the  intellectual  acuteness  and 
sound  moral  sense  of  both  these  critics, 
and  yet  feel  how  quaintly  irrelevant  for 
our  purposes  is  an  idea  of  the  good,  the 
true,  and  the  beautiful,  which  culminates 
in  a  rapture  for  Thackeray  (vide  Mr. 
Brownell),  or  is  a  literary  aesthetic  (vide 
Mr.  Sherman)  which  gives  Mr.  Arnold 
Bennett  first  place  as  an  artist  because  of 
his  wholesome  theories  of  human  conduct. 
Mr.  Sherman  has  done  us  the  service  of 
showing  us  how  very  dead  is  the  genteel 
tradition  in  our  hearts,  how  thoroughly  the 
sense  of  what  is  desirable  and  absorbing 
has  shifted  in  our  younger  American  life. 

But  he  has  also  shown  us  how  gentil- 
ity in  literary  attitude  lingers  on.  Pro- 
fessors of  literature  still  like  it,  and  those 
pioneer  rebels  who  hate  it  have  tended  to 
hate  it  not  wisely  but  too  well.  Crusaders 
like  Mr.  Dreiser  and  Mr.  Mencken  have 
dealt  loud  enough  blows,  but  they  beat  at  a 
straw  man  of  puritanism  which,  for  the 
younger  generation,  has  not  even  the  vital- 
ity to  be  interesting.  Art  always  has  to 
struggle  with  the  mob,  and  Mr.  Mencken's 
discovery  that  it  has  to  struggle  in  America 
is  a  little  naive.  The  philistine  and  the 
puritan  are  troublesome,  though  never 


decisive,  and  in  America  today  they  seem 
less  decisive  than  ever.  Mr.  Sherman,  an 
arrant  philistine,  in  that  he  defends  the 
life  lived  through  the  conventions,  is  dan- 
gerous because  he  makes  philistinism 
sound  like  belles-lettres.  Mr.  Mencken, 
on  the  other  hand,  deserves  everything 
Mr.  Sherman  says  about  him,  because  in 
his  rather  self-conscious  bluster  he  makes 
literary  art  sound  like  vulgarity.  The  best 
thing  that  can  be  done  to  these  contending 
critics  is  to  persuade  them  to  kill  each  other 
off.  Both  are  moralists  before  they  are 
critics  of  literary  art.  Both  have  an 
exaggerated  respect  for  Demos,  which  one 
expresses  by  means  of  a  phobia,  the  other 
by  a  remarkable  process  of  idealization. 
Mr.  Mencken  is  as  much  a  product  of  the 
genteel  tradition  as  is  Mr.  Sherman,  for 
he  represents  a  moralism  imperfectly  trans- 
cended. 

Let  us  look  for  the  enemy  of  the  literary 
artist  in  America  today  not  among  the 
philistines  or  the  puritans,  among  the  ani- 
mal-obsessed novelists  or  the  dainty  pro- 
fessors who  make  Mr.  Mencken  profane. 
The  real  enemy  is  still  the  genteel  tradi- 
tion which  tends  to  smother  the  timid 
experiments  of  a  younger  generation  that 
is  not  satisfied  with  husks.  For  the  deadly 
virus  of  gentility  is  carried  along  by  an 
up-to-date  cultivated  public — small  per- 
haps, but  growing — who  are  all  the  more 
dangerous  because  they  are  so  hospitable. 
The  would-be  literary  artist  needs  to  be 
protected  not  so  much  from  his  enemies 
as  from  his  friends.  Puritan  and  profes- 
sor may  agree  in  their  disgust  at  the 
creative  imagination  at  work  in  America, 
but  it  is  not  their  hostility  which  keeps 
it  from  being  freer  and  more  expressive. 
The  confusing  force  is  rather  an  undis- 
criminating  approval  on  the  part  of  a 
public  who  want  the  new  without  the  un- 
settling. The  current  popularity  of  verse, 
the  vogue  of  the  little  theatres  and  the 
little  magazines  reveal  a  public  that  is 


278 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


almost  pathetically  receptive  to  anything 
which  has  the  flavor  or  the  pretension  of 
literary  art.  The  striving  literary  artist 
is  faced  by  no  stony  and  uncomprehending 
world.  Almost  anyone  can  win  recogni- 
tion and  admiration.  But  where  is  the 
criticism  that  will  discriminate  between 
what  is  fresh,  sincere,  and  creative  and 
what  is  merely  stagy  and  blatantly  rebel- 
lious? The  Brownells  profess  to  find  no 
nuances  in  this  mob  of  young  literary 
anarchists.  The  Shermans  cannot  degrade 
themselves  to  the  level  of  treating  seriously 
a  crowd  of  naughty  children.  A  new 
criticism  has  to  be  created  to  meet  not  only 
the  work  of  the  new  artists  but  also  the 
uncritical  hospitality  of  current  taste.  If 
anything  more  than  ephemeral  is  to  come 
out  of  this  younger  school,  outlawed  by 
the  older  criticism,  the  new  critic  must 
intervene  between  public  and  writer  with 
an  insistence  on  clearer  and  sharper  out- 
lines of  appreciation  by  the  one,  and  the 
attainment  of  a  richer  artistry  by  the  other. 
That  is  why  a  study  such  as  Miss  Amy 
Lowell's  on  recent  tendencies  in  American 
verse  is  so  significant.  The  intelligent  re- 
viewers who  saw  in  the  book  only  a  puff 
for  Imagism  disclosed  how  very  novel  is 
an  intelligent  attempt  to  place  our  current 
literary  art  not  merely  against  the  spirit- 
ual background  of  tradition,  but  in  the 
terms  and  in  the  spirit  of  the  contemporary 
imagination  itself.  Her  very  tone  is  revo- 
lutionary. She  is  neither  sentimental  nor 
apologetic.  Poetry  appears  for  the  first 
time  on  our  critical  horizon  as  neither  a 
refined  dessert  to  be  consumed  when  the 
day's  work  is  done,  nor  as  a  private  hobby 
which  the  business  man  will  deride  if  he 
hears  about  it,  but  as  a  sound  and  im- 
portant activity  of  contemporary  Ameri- 
can life.  Some  people  who  habitually 
patronize  Miss  Lowell  complain  that  in 
her  book  she  patronizes  Carl  Sandburg. 
Actually  she  makes  him  a  powerful  figure, 
with  his  brave  novelty  of  the  America  that 
is  in  the  making.  Her  sound  intuition  gets 
the  better  of  her  class-feeling  even  in  her 
attitude  towards  the  war.  For,  having 
orthodoxly  registered  her  sense  of  the 
complete  bouleversement  which  it  is  mak- 
ing in  the  spiritual  life  of  the  world,  she 
calmly  proceeds  as  if  it  were  not.  Neither 
in  her  criticism  nor  in  her  verse  is  the 


slightest  evidence  that  into  the  domain  of 
literary  art  has  the  war  penetrated,  or  will 
it  penetrate.  Nothing  shows  better  than 
her  attitude  how  very  far  the  younger 
generation  is  beyond  those  older  counsel- 
ors who  hope  that  the  war  will  "get  under 
our  skins" — perhaps  to  make  a  few  bad 
poets  write  worse  poems,  and  to  give  many 
mediocre  writers  a  momentary  patriotic 
and  social  glamor,  but  not  to  touch  a 
"young  world"  which  has  its  treasures  for 
other  heavens! 

The  problem  of  the  literary  artist  is 
how  to  obtain  more  of  this  intel- 
ligent, pertinent,  absolutely  contempora- 
neous criticism,  which  shall  be  both  severe 
and  encouraging.  It  will  be  obtained  when 
the  artist  himself  has  turned  critic  and  set 
to  work  to  discover  and  interpret  in  others 
the  motives  and  values  and  efforts  he  feels 
in  himself.  The  "high  seriousness"  of 
Miss  Lowell's  own  critical  attitude  towards 
the  artistic  problems  of  the  six  poets  sug- 
gests, I  think,  that  there  is  a  promise  of  a 
rich  and  vibrant  literary  era  before  us. 
No  one  pretends  to  be  satisfied  with  the 
novels  and  plays  and  interpretations  now 
being  turned  out  by  the  younger  intel- 
lectuals. Least  of  all  must  they  them- 
selves be  satisfied.  After  all,  very  little  of 
their  work  really  gives  voice  to  the  ambi- 
tions, desires,  discontents,  and  spiritual 
adventures  of  the  all  too  self-conscious 
young  American  world.  Moreover,  there  is 
for  this  healthy  dissatisfaction  an  insidious 
trap — the  terrible  glamor  of  social  patron- 
age which  so  easily  blunts  idealism  in  the 
young  prophet.  The  other  day,  reading 
"My  Literary  Friends  and  Acquaintances," 
I  shuddered  at  Howells's  glee  over  the 
impeccable  social  tone  of  Boston  and  Cam- 
bridge literary  life.  He  was  playful  enough 
about  it,  but  not  too  playful  to  conceal  the 
enormity  of  his  innocence.  He  does  not  see 
how  dreadful  it  is  to  contrast  Cambridge 
with  ragged  vagabonds  and  unpresentable 
authors  of  other  ages.  To  a  younger 
generation  which  feels  that  the  writer 
ought  to  be  at  least  a  spiritual  vagabond, 
a  de-classed  mind,  this  gentility  of  Mr. 
Howells  and  his  friends  has  come  to  seem 
more  alien  than  Sologub.  We  are  acquiring 
an  almost  Stendhalian  horror  for  those 
correctnesses  and  tacts  which  wield  such 
hypnotic  influence  over  our  middle-class 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


279 


life.  "Society,"  we  say,  whether  it  be  in 
the  form  of  the  mob  or  the  cultivated 
dinner-circle,  is  the  deadly  enemy  of  the 
literary  artist.  Literary  promises  can  be 
seen  visibly  fading  out  in  the  warm  beams 
of  association  with  the  refined  and  the 
important.  And  social  glamor  was  never 
so  dangerous  as  it  is  today  when  it  is 
anxious  to  be  enlightened  and  liberal. 
Timidity  is  still  the  reigning  vice  of  the 
American  intellect,  and  the  terrorism  of 
"good  taste"  is  yet  more  deadly  to  the 
creation  of  literary  art  than  is  sheer  bar- 
barism. The  literary  artist  needs  protec- 
tion from  the  liberal  audience  that  will 
accept  him  though  he  shock  them,  but  that 
subtly  tame  him  even  while  they  appreciate. 
If  this  literary  promise  does  not  fulfill 
itself,  it  will  be  because  our  younger 
writers  have  pleased  a  public  too  easy  to 
please.  As  we  look  around  at  those  who 
have  ideas,  our  proper  mood  is  not 
pleasure  that  their  work  is  so  good,  but 
discontent  that  it  is  not  better.  It  will 
not  be  better  unless  certain  values  are  felt 
more  intensely.  Those  Americans  who 


are  fortunate  enough  to  see  Copeau's 
theatre  seem  to  remark  there  a  fusion  of 
fervor  and  simplicity  with  finished  work- 
manship, a  sort  of  sensuous  austerity  of 
tone — an  effort  of  creative  novelty  work- 
ing with  all  that  is  vital  in  a  tradition. 
Do  we  not  want  these  values  in  our  Ameri- 
can effort?  Should  we  not  like  to  see  from 
this  younger  generation  a  literary  art 
which  will  combine  a  classical  and  puritan 
tradition  with  the  most  modern  ideas?  Do 
we  not  want  minds  with  a  touch  of  the 
apostolic  about  them  and  a  certain  edge — 
a  little  surly,  but  not  embittered — with  an 
intellectual  as  well  as  an  artistic  conscience, 
with  a  certain  tentative  superciliousness 
towards  Demos  and  an  appalling  hatred 
for  everything  which  savors  of  the  bour- 
geois or  the  sentimental?  Now  while 
everything  that  is  respectable  in  America 
seems  to  be  putting  its  effort,  with  a  sort  of 
joyful  perversity,  into  the  technique  of 
destruction,  are  there  no  desperate  spirit- 
ual outlaws  with  a  lust  to  create? 


RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


Rimsky-Korsakov 


The  music  of  Rimsky-Korsakov  is  like 
one  of  the  books,  full  of  gay  pictures, 
which  are  given  to  children.  It  is  perhaps 
the  most  brilliant  of  them  all,  a  picture- 
book  illuminated  in  crude  and  joyous 
colors — bright  reds,  apple  greens,  golden 
oranges  and  yellows — and  executed  with 
genuine  verve  and  fantasy.  The  Slavonic 
and  Oriental  legends  and  fairy  tales  are 
illustrated  astonishingly,  with  a  certain 
humor  in  the  matter-of-fact  notation  of 
grotesque  and  miraculous  events.  The  per- 
sonages in  the  pictures  are  arrayed  in 
bizarre  and  shimmering  costumes,  de- 
lightfully inaccurate,  and  if  they  represent 
kings  and  queens,  are  set  in  the  midst  of  a 
fabulous  pomp  and  glitter,  and  wear 
crowns  incrustated  with  large  and  impos- 
sible stones.  Framing  the  illustrations  are 
border-fancies  of  sunflowers  and  golden 
cocks  and  wondrous  springtime  birds, 
fashioned  boisterously  and  humorously  in 
the  manner  of  Russian  peasant  art.  In- 
deed, the  book  is  executed  so  charmingly 


that  the  parents  find  it  as  amusing  as  the 
children. 

But  though  the  music  is  the  loveliest  of 
picture-books,  it  is  nothing  more.  It  is  as 
if  Rimsky-Korsakov  had  ignored  the  other 
and  larger  functions  of  his  art,  and  been 
content  to  have  his  music  only  picturesque 
and  colorful;  as  if  the  childish  Czar  in 
"Le  Coq  d'Or,"  who  desires  only  to  lie 
abed  all  day,  eat  delicate  food,  and  listen 
to  the  fairy  tales  of  his  nurse,  had  been 
something  of  a  portrait  of  the  composer. 
There  is  a  curious  coldness  and  objectivity 
in  the  music,  for  all  its  gay  and  opulent 
exterior,  as  if  the  need  that  brought  it 
forth  had  been  very  small,  very  easily 
satisfied.  There  is  no  page  of  Rimsky's 
many  scores  that  reveal  him  heavy  with  a 
great  experience,  straining  to  formulate 
it.  The  music  is  never  more  than  a  grace- 
ful arrangement  of  surfaces,  the  competent 
presentation  of  matter  chosen  for  its 
exotic  rhythms  and  shape,  its  Oriental  and 
peasant  tang.  The  form  is  ever  a  thing 
of  two  dimensions.  The  musical  ideas 


280 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


are  passed  through  the  colors  of  various 
timbres  and  tonalities,  made  to  undergo  a 
series  of  dexterous  deformations,  and  are 
contrasted,  superficially,  with  other  ideas 
when  the  possibilities  of  technical  varia- 
tion have  been  exhausted.  There  is  no 
actual  development  in  the  sense  of 
volumnear  increase.  The  form  extends 
only  in  time;  in  "Scheherazade,"  for  in- 
stance, the  climaxes  are  purely  voluntary 
and  physical.  And  it  is  only  the  virtue  of 
the  component  elements,  the  spiciness  of 
the  thematic  material,  the  nimbleness  and 
suavity  of  the  compositional  arrangements, 
and  chiefly,  the  sensuous  quality  of  the 
orchestral  speech  that  save  the  music 
of  Rimsky-Korsakov  from  banality  and 
give  it  a  certain  limited  value. 

It  is  just  this  superficiality  which  makes 
the  place  of  the  music  in  the  history  of 
Russian  art  so  ambiguous.  Intentionally, 
to  a  certain  extent,  Rimsky's  work  is 
autochthonous.  He  was  one  of  those  com- 
posers who,  in  the  middle  of  the  last  cen- 
tury, felt  descend  upon  them  the  need  of 
speaking  their  own  tongue  and  gave  them- 
selves entirely  to  the  labor  of  discovering 
a  music  essentially  Russian.  His  material, 
at  its  best,  approximates  the  idiom  of  the 
Russian  folk  song,  or  communicates  cer- 
tain qualities — an  Oriental  sweetness,  a 
barbaric  lassitude  and  abandon — admit- 
tedly racial.  His  music  is  full  of  elements 
— wild  and  headlong  rhythms,  exotic 
modes — abstracted  from  the  popular  and 
liturgical  chants  or  deftly  moulded  upon 
them.  For  there  was  always  within  him 
the  idea  of  creating  an  art,  particularly 
an  operatic  art,  that  would  be  as  Russian 
as  Wagner's,  for  instance,  is  German;  the 
texts  of  his  operas  are  adopted  from  Rus- 
sian history  and  folklore,  and  he  con- 
tinually attempted  to  find  a  musical  idiom 
with  the  accent  of  the  old  Slavic  chroni- 
cles and  fairy  tales.  Certain  of  his  works, 
particularly  "Le  Coq  d'Or,"  are  deliberately 
an  imitation  of  the  childish  and  fabulous 
inventions  of  the  peasant  artists.  And 
certainly  none  of  the  other  members  of 
the  nationalist  group  associated  with 
Rimsky-Korsakov — not  Moussorgsky,  for 
all  his  emotional  profundity;  nor  Borodin, 
for  all  his  sumptuous  imagination — had  so 
firm  an  intellectual  grasp  of  the  common 
problem,  nor  was  technically  so  well 


equipped  to  solve  it.  None  of  them,  for 
instance,  had  so  wide  an  acquaintance  with 
the  folk  song,  the  touchstone  of  their 
labors.  For  Rimsky-Korsakov  was  some- 
thing of  a  philosophical  authority  on  the 
music  of  the  many  peoples  of  the  Empire, 
made  collections  of  chants,  and  could  draw 
on  this  fund  for  his  work.  Nor  did  any 
of  them  possess  his  technical  facility. 
Moussorgsky,  for  instance,  had  to  dis- 
cover the  art  of  music  painfully  with  each 
step  of  composition,  and  orchestrated 
faultily  all  his  life,  while  Rimsky-Korsakov 
had  a  natural  sense  of  the  orchestra,  wrote 
treatises  on  the  science  of  instrumentation 
and  on  the  science  of  harmony,  and  de- 
veloped into  something  of  a  doctor  of 
music.  Indeed,  when  finally  there  de- 
volved upon  him,  as  general  legatee  of  the 
nationalist  school,  the  task  of  correct- 
ing and  editing  the  works  of  Borodin 
and  Dargomijsky  and  Moussorgsky,  he 
brought  to  his  labor  an  eruditeness  that 
bordered  dangerously  on  pedantry.  Nor 
was  his  learning  only  musical.  He  had  a 
great  knowledge  of  the  art  and  customs 
that  had  existed  in  Russia  before  the  in- 
fluences of  western  Europe  repressed  them, 
of  the  dances  and  rites  and  sun  worship 
that  survived,  despite  Christianity,  as 
popular  and  rustic  games,  and  he  could 
press  them  into  service  in  his  search  for  a 
national  expression.  Like  the  Sultana  in 
his  symphonic  poem,  he  "drew  on  the 
poets  for  their  verses,  on  the  folk  songs 
for  their  words,  and  intermingled  tales 
and  adventures  one  with  another." 

Yet  there  is  no  score  of  Rimsky-Kor- 
sakov's,  no  one  of  his  fifteen  operas  and 
dozen  symphonic  works,  which  has,  in  all 
its  mass,  the  living  virtue  that  informs  a 
single  page  of  "Boris  Goudonow,"  the 
virtue  of  a  thing  that  satisfies  the  very 
needs  of  life  and  brings  to  a  race  release 
and  formulation  of  its  speech.  There  is 
no  score  of  his,  for  all  the  tang  and 
luxuriousness  of  his  orchestration,  for  all 
the  incrustation  of  bright  strange  stones 
on  the  matter  of  his  operas,  that  has  the 
deep  glowing  color  of  certain  passages  of 
Borodin's  work,  with  their  magical  evoca- 
tions of  terrestrial  Asia  and  feudal  Mus- 
covy, their 

Timbres  d'or  des  mongoles  orfevreries 
Et  vieil  or  des  vieilles  nations! 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


281 


For  he  was  in  no  sense  as  nobly  human  of 
stature,  as  deeply  aware  of  the  life  about 
him,  as  Moussorgsky,  nor  did  he  feel  with- 
in himself  Borodin's  rich  and  vivid  sense 
of  the  past.  "The  people  are  the  creat- 
ors," Glinka  had  told  the  young  national- 
ist composers,  "you  are  but  the  arrangers." 
It  was  precisely  the  vital  and  direct  con- 
tact with  the  source  of  all  creative  work 
that  Rimsky-Korsakov  lacked.  There  is  a 
fault  of  instinct  in  men  like  him,  who 
can  feel  their  race  and  their  environment 
only  through  the  conscious  mind.  Just 
what  in  Rimsky's  education  produced  his 
intellectualism,  we  do  not  know.  Cer- 
tainly it  was  nothing  extraordinary,  for 
society  produces  innumerable  artists  like 
him,  who  are  fundamentally  incapable 
of  becoming  the  instrument  every  cre- 
ative being  is,  and  of  discovering  through 
themselves  the  consciousness  of  their  fel- 
lows. Whatever  its  cause,  there  is  in 
such  men  a  fear  of  the  unsealing  of  the 
unconscious  mind,  the  depository  of  all 
actual  and  vital  sensations,  which  no  effort 
of  their  own  can  overcome.  It  is  for  that 
reason  that  they  have  so  gigantic  and  un- 
shakable a  confidence  in  all  purely  con- 
scious processes  of  creation,  particularly 
in  the  incorporation  of  a  •priori  theories. 
So  it  was  with  Rimsky.  There  is  patent  in 
all  his  work  a  vast  love  of  erudition  and 
a  vast  faith  in  its  efficacy.  He  is  always 
attempting  to  incarnate  in  the  flesh  of  his 
music,  laws  abstracted  from  classical 
works.  Even  Tchaikowsky,  who  was  a 
good  deal  of  an  intellectualist  himself  and 
found  "perfect"  each  one  of  the  thirty 
practice-fugues  that  Rimsky  composed  in 
the  course  of  a  single  month,  complained 
that  the  latter  "worshipped  technique" 
and  that  his  work  was  "full  of  contrapun- 
tal tricks  and  all  the  signs  of  a  sterile 
pedantry."  It  was  not  that  Rimsky  was 
pedantic  from  choice,  out  of  a  wilful  per- 
versity. As  in  all  inhibited  artists,  his  em- 
ployment of  intellectual  formulas  is 
only  his  fear  of  opening  the  dark  sluices 
through  which  the  rhythms  of  life  surge. 
If  Rimsky-Korsakov  was  not  absolutely 
sterile,  it  was  because  his  intellectual  qual- 
ity itself  was  vivacious  and  brilliant. 
Though  he  remained  ever  a  stranger  to 
Russia  and  to  his  fellows,  as  he  did  to 
himself,  he  became  the  most  observant  of 


travelers.  Though  as  the  foreigner  he 
perceived  only  the  superficial  and  pictur- 
esque elements  of  the  life  of  the  land — its 
Orientalism,  its  barbaric  coloring — and 
found  his  happiest  expression  in  a  fantasy 
after  the  "Thousand  Nights  and  a  Night," 
he  noted  his  impressions  skilfully  and 
vividly,  with  an  almost  virtuosic  sense  of 
his  ^ material.  If  he  could  not  paint  the 
spring  in  music,  he  could  at  least  embroider 
the  score  of  "Sniegourochka"  delightfully 
with  birdcalls  and  all  manner  of  vernal 
fancies.  If  he  could  not  recreate  the  spirit 
of  peasant  art,  he  could  at  least,  as  in  "Le 
Coq  d'Or,"  imitate  it  so  tastefully  that, 
listening  to  the  music,  we  seem  to  have 
before  us  one  of  the  pictures  beloved  by 
the  Russian  folk — a  picture  with  bright 
and  joyous  dabs  of  color,  with  clumsy  but 
gleeful  depictions  of  battles  and  caval- 
cades and  festivities  and  banqueting  tables 
loaded  with  fruits,  meats,  and  flagons.  It 
is  indeed  curious,  and  not  a  little  pathetic, 
to  observe  how  keen  Rimsky-Korsakov's 
intelligence  ever  was.  It  is  within  the 
limits  marked  by  his  work  that  Russian 
music  developed.  There  is  no  work  of 
Strawinsky's,  for  instance,  that  is  not 
simply  the  successful  handling  of  a  material 
Rimsky  attempted  to  employ.  The  opera 
based  on  a  fairy  tale  and  composed  with 
the  naivete  of  a  child,  the  burlesque  scenes 
from  popular  life,  with  their  utilization  of 
vulgar  tunes  and  dance  rhythms,  and  the 
reconstruction  of  ethnological  dances  and 
rites  are  all  foreshadowed  in  Rimsky's 
work.  And  when  finally  "Les  Noces  Vil- 
lageoises,"  Strawinsky's  new  ballet,  is  pro- 
duced it  may  well  appear  the  complete 
realization  of  the  matter  the  older  man 
employed  only  picturesquely  in  "Le  Coq 
d'Or."  Even  in  his  science  of  orchestra- 
tion— the  sense  of  the  instruments  that 
makes  him  seem  to  defer  to  them,  to  let 
them  have  their  will  rather  than  to  impose 
a  music  from  without  upon  them — Straw- 
insky  has  simply  materialized  Rimsky's  in- 
tention. It  is  not  only  because  he  was  for 
a  while  Rimsky's  pupil.  It  is  because 
fortune  has  given  him  the  power  to  take 
possession  of  a  chamber  outside  of  which 
the  other  stood  all  his  life,  and  could  not 
enter,  and  saw  only  by  peering  furtively 
through  the  chinks  of  the  door. 

PAUL  ROSENFELD. 


282 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


A  Study  of  American  Intolerance 

HOW    THE    WAR    HAS    SHARPENED    OUR    DIFFERENCES    AND    PUT    OUR    DEMOCRACY 

UPON   ITS  METTLE 


PART    TWO: 


The  study  of  our  domestic  intolerance 
is  so  fascinating  that  I  am  tempted  to  pur- 
sue it  a  little  further  in  one  or  two  direc- 
tions before  examining  the  contributive 
intolerance  which  the  atmosphere  of  war 
has  inevitably  created  in  this  as  well  as  in 
all  other  warring  countries.  This  will  at 
the  same  time  put  us  in  a  better  position 
to  understand  the  combined  effect  of  these 
two  currents  of  intolerance  now  so  widely 
manifest  in  our  public  life. 

In  times  of  peace  we  should  answer  the 
charge  of  intolerance  by  referring  to  our 
constitution,  to  our  state  charters  and  su- 
preme court  decisions,  to  all  the  splendid 
declarations  of  our  political  literature 
where  our  sense  of  liberty  and  the  rights 
of  free  speech  have  been  so  frequently  ex- 
pressed. We  should  make  naught  of  the 
accusation  by  reviewing  the  guarantees 
which,  as  we  conceive  it,  put  our  tolerance 
beyond  debate.  But  it  might  well  impress 
an  acute  observer  that  we  were  citing  all 
our  formulations  on  the  subject  and  very 
few  of  our  practices.  And  yet  that  is  the 
vital  point  of  the  discussion.  For  toler- 
ance is  at  bottom  a  spiritual  and  intellect- 
ual matter  which  can  never  be  wholly 
expressed  in  fixed  forms.  Its  presence  or 
absence  is  always  most  clearly  registered 
in  the  intellectual  atmosphere  and  social 
sanctions  of  the  community. 

If  we  apply  this  more  searching,  internal 
standard  instead  of  making  a  purely 
formal  defence,  we  may  bring  ourselves  to 
realize  that  we  have  been  curiously  intol- 
erant of  many  of  the  things  which  toler- 
ance ought  to  breed.  The  tolerance  of 
criticism,  for  instance,  is  not  as  native  to 
us  as  we  like  to  imagine.  We  resent  crit- 
icism with  a  passion  that  makes  any  real 
criticism  impossible  because  it  breaks  off 
all  communication  between  the  critic  and 
the  person  criticized.  Nobody  is  so  cor- 
dially hated  among  us  as  the  "knocker,"  a 
term  which  of  itself  shows  that  the  func- 
tion of  criticism  is  not  understood.  It  was 
this  almost  instinctive  resentment  which 
was  so  skilfully  played  upon  by  powerful 


interests  against  the  "muckraker,"  just 
when  muckraking  had  outgrown  its  sensa- 
tionalism and  was  about  to  begin  con- 
structive criticism.  Our  magazines  soon 
resumed  the  more  congenial  task  of  chant- 
ing our  achievements  and  ignoring  our  de- 
fects. The  almost  complete  absence  of 
sarcasm  and  irony  in  our  more  permanent 
literature  is  certainly  significant  in  this  con- 
nection; most  of  our  writers  dispense  with 
these  forms  of  criticism  altogether,  and 
those  who  cling  to  them  soon  find  them- 
selves exiled  from  the  general  reading 
public.  Intellectual  exchange  among  us 
is  constantly  impeded  by  this  amazing  hos- 
tility to  criticism.  We  act  like  people  who 
are  afraid  to  sit  down  and  discuss  things 
lest  the  discussion  bring  out  deep  and  ir- 
reconcilable differences. 

This  same  feeling  about  criticism  is  re- 
flected in  many  of  our  most  current  say- 
ings. Our  greatest  national  slogan,  "mind 
your  own  business,"  undoubtedly  echoed 
an  earlier  defiance  of  the  inquisition  of 
state  and  church  authorities  which  the 
American  pioneer  had  discarded.  But  the 
hostile  note  in  it  also  helped  to  solidify  the 
antisocial  isolation  which  became  typical 
of  American  life  until  it  grew  to  be  an 
anachronism  and  an  impediment  at  a  time 
when  vast  economic  changes  called  for  a 
degree  of  social  interaction  hitherto  un- 
dreamed of.  For  it  is  well  to  remember 
that  we  have  been  isolationists  not  only  in 
external  policy  but  in  our  internal  life  as 
well.  A  less  classic  saying  from  the  Far 
West,  which  enjoins  to  be  able  to  "look 
the  other  fellow  in  the  eye  and  tell  him  to 
go  to  Hell,"  betrays  a  similar  attitude. 
One  cannot  help  imagining  that  anyone 
who  urged  his  fellowship  so  defiantly  must 
have  had  something  to  conceal. 

Here  again  we  must  consider  the  social 
background.  These  Western  communities 
were  composed  of  the  most  extraordinarily 
heterogeneous  groups  of  men,  with  some- 
times a  criminal  record  to  live  down  or  a 
failure  not  altogether  of  their  own  doing 
to  make  up  for.  The  tolerance  they  craved 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


283 


was  entirely  of  a  negative  sort;  they 
wished  to  be  left  alone.  They  could  not 
help  emphasizing  their  own  positive  in- 
tolerance, because  they  had  to  guard  not 
only  against  inquiry  from  without  but  also 
against  any  inner  impulses  from  their  past 
which  might  threaten  assertion.  The 
scarcity  of  women  among  them  was  an- 
other fertile  source  of  intolerant  codifi- 
cations. For  the  hard  and  fast  division 
of  women  into  the  infinitely  good  and  the 
eternally  bad,  with  its  peculiar  combina- 
tion of  sentimental  reverence  and  cruel 
sexual  exploitation,  is  one  of  the  uncon- 
scious sources  from  which  intolerance 
spreads  to  the  social  and  intellectual  life. 
So  primitive  a  society  is  never  tolerant; 
it  is  built  up  on  rigorous  taboos  and  can- 
not admit  any  sophistications.  An  interest- 
ing parallel  to  colonial  conditions  here 
suggests  itself.  These  Western  mushroom 
communities  were  by  no  means  so  unlike 
our  earliest  European  settlements  on  the 
Atlantic  coast  as  tradition  would  prefer  us 
to  believe.  After  all,  did  not  these  first 
immigrants  number  among  them,  aside 
from  the  religious  and  political  exiles, 
many  "undesirable  citizens"  ?  and  did  not 
this  state  of  affairs  cause  much  uneasiness 
among  the  righteous  majority?  If  we 
may  credit  the  scant  social  records  of  those 
early  days,  the  answer  is  surely  in  the 
affirmative.  Here  too  conditions  made  for 
a  negative  tolerance,  an  avoidance  of  any 
issues  that  might  reveal  deep-seated  differ- 
ences. Thus  our  immigrant  psychology 
was,  in  one  sense,  with  us  from  the  be- 
ginning. 

But  the  uneasy  sense  of  anarchic  dif- 
ferences to  which  I  have  referred  in  all 
these  connections  and  the  resulting  atmos- 
phere of  tension,  so  hostile  to  the  flexible 
requirements  of  any  true  tolerance,  are 
nowhere  so  subtly  reflected  as  in  our  atti- 
tude towards  the  law.  We  are  renowned 
for  the  number  of  laws  and  statutes  which 
our  legislatures  grind  out  every  year.  In 
fact  this  excessive  legalism  is  really  in  the 
nature  of  a  symptom.  In  the  sphere  of 
neurotic  afflictions,  we  often  encounter  a 
man  who  is  so  afraid  of  his  impulses  that 
he  finds  it  necessary  to  protect  himself  by 
means  of  all  sorts  of  self-imposed  restric- 
tions. Such  a  sufferer,  the  compulsion 
neurotic  par  excellence,  is  not  free  or 


capable  of  being  tolerant  towards  himself; 
he  cannot  trust  his  spontaneity  and  must 
therefore  fortify  an  inner  psychic  fear  by 
external  formulations,  which  may  take  the 
shape  of  wall  mottoes,  or  of  a  series  of 
commandments  which  he  constantly  repeats 
to  himself,  or  of  any  other  artificial  con- 
trivance; and,  conversely,  he  cannot  per- 
form any  positive  action  without  reference 
to  a  series  of  precedents  and  justifications. 
A  free  man  gets  along  with  a  minimum  of 
regulations.  A  free  nation  does  the  same. 
A  nation  which  is  inwardly  constrained,  on 
the  other'  hand,  takes  refuge  in  legalism, 
and  displays  a  naive  and  superstitious 
faith  in  legal  devices. 

Both  in  the  individual  and  in  the  nation 
this  excess  breeds  its  own  reaction.  With 
all  our  great  reverence  for  law  we  also 
show  a  dangerous  contempt  for  it.  The 
magic  of  law  has  become  parlor  magic. 
We  are  all  for  doing  things  legally  rather 
than  justly.  Where  a  law  forbids  we 
quickly  pass  another  one  which  will  permit, 
and  thus  destroy  the  sanctity  of  the  law  by 
using  it  to  cloak  a  social  violation.  From 
being  an  instrument,  law  has  become  for 
us  merely  instrumental,  something  trivially 
conceived  and  without  the  deeper  social 
sanctions  which  alone  give  weight  and  per- 
manence to  law.  But  these  are  again  con- 
ditions which  allow  a  dominant  class  to 
indulge  its  intolerance  towards  inferior 
classes  of  lesser  prestige.  That  this  form 
of  intolerance  ending  in  sheer  injustice  is 
in  danger  of  spreading  can  hardly  be 
doubted.  We  may  put  ourselves  above 
the  startling  accusations  of  Russian  immi- 
grants, recently  returned  to  Russia,  about 
legal  and  other  oppressions  suffered  here, 
but  we  cannot  ignore  that  astonishing  docu- 
ment of  Governor  McCall's  to  the  Gov- 
ernor of  South  Carolina  in  which  it  is 
stated  as  a  notorious  fact  that  at  least 
three  immigrant  races  beside  the  negro 
do  not  receive  justice  in  some  of  our  states. 

If  I  have  been  somewhat  over  elaborate 
in  painting  the  background  of  a  native  in- 
tolerance in  this  country  from  indications 
that  are  perhaps  novel  to  the  reader,  I 
may  now  count  upon  a  swifter  under- 
standing of  what  the  psychology  of  war 
adds  to  these  conditions.  Little  as  we 
know  in  this  comparatively  unexplored 
field,  we  may  at  least  record  a  tendency 


284 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


which  for  want  of  a  better  name  I  have 
called  the  principle  of  degradation.  Be- 
fore man  can  become  a  killer  he  must  first 
degrade  his  opponent  to  the  point  of  utter 
worthlessness.  Where  the  issue  is  of  life 
or  death  we  reduce  the  value  of  our 
enemy's  life  to  zero  and  raise  our  own 
value  to  infinity.  In  the  most  naked  form 
of  strife,  when  we  slay  for  the  sake  of 
food  or  for  sexual  rivalry,  the  process  is 
transparent.  We  destroy  our  rival,  reduce 
him  to  nothingness,  in  order  that  we  may 
live  on,  either  in  ourselves  or  in  our  prog- 
eny, live  forever,  in  that  infinite  expansion 
of  ourselves  for  which  we  all  instinctively 
strive.  In  such  a  case  the  comparison  is 
direct:  we  compare  our  enemy  to  our- 
selves and  condemn  him  to  death  in  prefer- 
ence to  ourselves.  Where  the  cause  of 
strife  is  more  abstract,  the  comparison 
becomes  indirect:  we  then  measure  our 
enemy  against  an  idea  compared  to  which 
his  value  ceases  to  exist,  as  when  we  slew 
the  Saracen  for  the  greater  glory  of  the 
Lord.  The  well  known  tendency  to  re- 
duce our  enemy  to  an  automaton — to 
think  of  him  in  mechanical  terms  as  an 
object  whose  plans,  movements,  and  ulti- 
mate defeat  can  be  predicted — is  merely 
a  different  aspect  of  this  same  process. 
For  there  is,  of  course,  nothing  more 
degrading  to  a  personality  than  to  reduce 
it  to  the  status  of  a  thing.  We  need  only 
to  visualize  the  collapse  of  the  body  when 
a  person  has  been  shot. 

This  process  of  degradation,  with  its 
allied  automaton  theory,  is  an  essential 
psychological  step  in  every  form  of  killing, 
however  sordid  or  exalted.  We  should 
find  it  inconceivable  to  kill  anybody  whom 
we  valued  as  we  do  our  own  person,  for 
this  would  be  equivalent  to  killing  our- 
selves. The  sense  of  human  identity  must 
first  be  destroyed.  The  process  then 
develops  somewhat  as  follows.  When  a 
wave  of  national  hostility  arises  over  some 
specific  issue,  and  the  possibility  of  aggres- 
sion moves  into  the  foreground,  the  ten- 
dency to  degrade  the  opponent  immediately 
sets  in.  The  aim  is  to  divorce  him  from 
human  fellowship,  to  render  him  utterly 
alien,  so  that  we  can  slay  him  with  a  good 
conscience.  It  is  essential  that  the  danger- 
ous sense  of  having  killed  somebody  like 
ourselves,  which  it  is  the  very  object  of 


internal  state  morality  to  revive  in  the 
murderer  when  it  condemns  him  to  death, 
should  by  no  chance  be  aroused.  Every 
possible  form  of  difference,  beginning  with 
differences  of  race,  color,  religion,  or 
morality,  is  exaggerated  to  the  greatest 
possible  extreme.  The  process  extends  by 
imperceptible  degrees  to  such  subtle  mat- 
ters as  philosophy  or  manners  or  even  diet, 
as  when  cockney  mobs  threatened  the  "frog 
eaters"  across  the  Channel  over  the  Fash- 
oda  affair.  In  the  end  these  differences 
may  become  sheer  fictions  unless  it  be 
assumed  that  they  express  instincts  so 
elusive  that  they  cannot  be  put  into  words, 
as  in  the  proverbial  case  of  the  two  Irish- 
men who  began  to  fight  as  soon  as  they  had 
been  introduced  to  each  other.  The  neu- 
tral spectator,  himself  removed  from  the 
workings  of  this  tendency,  here  helplessly 
witnesses  that  most  abominable  camou- 
flage of  war  which  obscures  man's  common 
humanity. 

In  a  comparatively  homogeneous  na- 
tion such  as  England  or  France  or 
Germany  this  process  runs  off  smoothly. 
The  "enemy"  is  entirely  without,  so  that 
the  whole  psychological  mechanism  of 
alienation  works  outward  beyond  the 
boundaries  of  the  country.  Lack  of  actual 
contact  with  one's  enemy  is  an  advantage 
under  these  circumstances:  the  chasm 
which  must  open  between  two  nations  be- 
fore they  can  bring  themselves  to  fly  at 
each  other's  throats  can  be  created  in  the 
shortest  possible  time.  This  projection  of 
aggressive  emotions  upon  the  enemy  be- 
yond the  boundary  line  tends  to  reduce  the 
aggressive  tendencies  within  the  country 
to  a  minimum.  All  the  clashes  between 
castes  and  classes,  the  normal  domestic 
group  hostility,  are  temporarily  suspended. 
A  fictitious  sense  of  alienation  from  the 
enemy  without  is  echoed  by  a  fictitious 
sense  of  likeness  and  identity  within  the 
nation.  The  "solid  front"  towards  the 
enemy  accompanies  an  internal  solidarity. 

It  is  the  failure  of  that  process  in  this 
country  which  we  are  now  witnessing.  The 
most  primitive  incentive  to  a  solid  front, 
an  attack  at  close  quarters,  was  absent. 
We  did  not  go  into  the  war  for  the  prosaic 
motive  of  self-preservation  as  the  term 
would  be  understood  by  the  average  sen- 
sual man,  but  for  the  sake  of  an  inter- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


285 


national  idea  complicated  in  its  nature  and 
slow  to  penetrate  through  large  masses  of 
the  people.  There  was  therefore  a  natural 
retardation  of  the  movement  towards  in- 
ternal solidarity,  quite  aside  from  the 
obstacles  which  I  have  outlined.  But  in  the 
absence  of  incentives  to  a  solid  front  the 
result  was  not  internal  apathy,  such  as 
would  be  certain  to  settle  upon  a  compara- 
tively homogeneous  country,  but  a  violent 
increase  in  every  form  of  internal  hostility 
and  intolerance.  Our  certified  Americans, 
educated  in  the  theory  that  the  world  war 
was  a  struggle  for  Anglo-Saxon  prestige 
and  bitterly  concerned  to  preserve  their 
own  domestic  prestige,  were  quick  to  see 
the  issue.  Their  sure  instinct  discovered 
the  "enemy  within,"  a  phrase  which  in 
itself  shows  an  intuitional  genius  of  no 
mean  order.  Balked  in  their  desire  to  get 
at  the  foreign  enemy,  they  turned  upon 
those  whom  they  had  long  sensed  as  hos- 
tile forces  in  their  very  midst.  To  take 
one  example  from  hundreds:  at  a  recent 
meeting  of  the  teachers  of  New  York 
City  to  consider  the  question  of  loyalty, 
a  speaker  declared  it  to  be  an  easy  matter 
to  discover  disloyalists  by  inspecting  the 
names  of  the  teaching  staff.  After  point- 
ing out  some  of  the  names  he  remarked, 
"Do  these  sound  as  if  they  came  of  New 
England  stock?"  This  is  the  issue  of 
Anglo-Saxon  prestige  in  its  most  naked 
form.  To  raise  it  is  to  inaugurate  a  system 
of  private  warfare  within  the  state.  It  is 
the  culmination  of  an  intolerance  long 
latent  and  now  privileged  to  break  forth 
with  the  excuse  that  war  inevitably  breeds 
such  a  condition. 

Yet  it  has  not  bred  it  to  a  similar  degree 
in  other  countries.  An  English  mob  may 
sometimes,  as  recently  in  the  case  of  Mr. 
Russell,  attempt  to  burn  a  church  over  a 
philosopher's  head  as  if  to  show  its  con- 
tempt for  the  two  things  which  it  has 
never  understood;  but  it  is  still  to  be 
recorded  that  any  considerable  part  of  the 
British  Empire  applauded  the  act.  In  al- 
most all  the  warring  countries  on  the 
Entente  side  large  bodies  of  reputable 
people  have  stood  out  against  the  govern- 
ment— on  platforms  varying  all  the  way 
from  out  and  out  pacifism  to  definite 
schemes  for  immediate  negotiations — 
without  utterly  losing  caste  or  drawing 


upon  themselves  anything  more  than  a 
resentment  which,  though  fierce  and  scath- 
ing, still  retains  a  predominantly  political 
character.  With  us  that  has  not  been  the 
case.  Our  "best  people"  have  approved 
some  of  our  worst  excesses,  or  else  excused 
them  as  being  inevitable.  These  countries, 
if  I  may  again  be  permitted  to  use  a 
medical  figure,  had  a  sounder  psychological 
constitution  to  stand  such  differences  of 
opinion.  People  could  differ  without 
utterly  forfeiting  their  sense  of  identity  or 
being  classed  as  "alien"  or  "enemies  with- 
in" on  the  easy  analogy  drawn  from  the 
presence  of  large  groups  of  psychologi- 
cally "alien"  groups.  Differences  could 
thus  be  discussed  at  a  more  intellectual 
level  with  a  much  greater  degree  of  toler- 
ance, for  tolerance  consists  in  the  recog- 
nition that  people  like  ourselves  may  after 
all  have  different  points  of  view.  To 
excommunicate  for  difference  of  opinion  is 
the  easiest,  and  in  a  way  the  most  natural, 
thing  to  do.  But  it  reveals  a  primitiveness 
of  intellectual  processes  which  is  directly 
inimical  to  any  civilized  order. 

One  of  the  most  mischievous  results  of 
such  a  condition  is  that  it  effectually  pre- 
vents the  expressions  of  any  moderate 
point  of  view.  The  real  alien  enemy 
among  us  is  rightly  prevented  from  voic- 
ing his  opposition  to  the  war  by  the  penalty 
of  his  liberty  and  his  life.  But  all  over 
the  country  there  are  large  blocks  of  public 
opinion  which  for  the  present  are  con- 
strained to  remain  inarticulate  for  fear  of 
being  automatically  classified  with  groups 
which  they  themselves  most  patriotically 
detest.  Our  bitter-enders  have  temporarily 
acquired  a  tremendous  leverage. 

Yet  this  is,  after  all,  a  condition  which 
cannot  last.  As  soon  as  our  moderates 
can  again  contribute  to  a  sane  public 
opinion  about  our  war  aims,  it  will  become 
apparent  that  the  war  has  opened  many 
large  questions.  It  will  then  be  seen  that 
the  "enemy  within"  is  really  a  class  opposi- 
tion to  a  true  cosmopolitan  democracy. 
Our  internal  racial  differences  are  really  a 
part  of  the  human  situation.  The  "enemy 
within"  is  our  enemy  only  because  we  make 
him  so.  He  is  part  of  the  problem  of  liv- 
ing together,  of  democracy  put  upon  its 


mettle. 


ALFRED  BOOTH  KUTTNER. 


286 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


Our  London  Letter 


The  English  literary  public  has  learned  by  ex- 
perience to  feel  some  distrust  of  new  great  foreign 
authors  and,  in  particular,  of  new  great  foreign 
dramatists.  These  articles  of  export  have  come 
to  us,  in  the  past,  mainly  by  way  of  Germany; 
and  the  German  critics,  who  are  to  be  commended 
for  their  omnivorousness,  are  hardly  to  be  com- 
mended for  their  judgment.  If  I  may  use  a  vig- 
orous phrase,  they  have,  at  one  time  and  another, 
sold  us  a  great  many  pups.  Nevertheless  the 
English  literary  public  is  just  preparing  to  take 
an  interest  in  a  great  foreign  dramatist,  whose 
reputation  up  till  now  has  been  principally  gained 
in  Germany.  Mr.  Josip  Kosor,  whose  four  plays 
have  just  been  translated  into  English  under  the 
title  "People  of  the  Universe,"  is  a  Serbo-Croat 
who  fled  from  the  Austrian  province  of  Dalma- 
tia,  in  which  he  was  born.  This,  no  doubt,  will 
help  to  efface  the  Teutonic  associations  of  his 
fame.  What  we  shall  make  of  him  in  the  end 
I  cannot  tell ;  nor  can  I  very  clearly  express  what 
I  think  of  him  at  the  moment.  One  thing 
at  least  is  obvious:  he  is  a  writer  of  extraor- 
dinary power  in  the  rendering  of  unrestrained 
passion.  His  characters  are  both  terrible  and 
painful  to  behold,  for  they  fling  themselves  about 
in  their  world  as  a  bird  does  when  it  has  got  itself 
unawares  into  a  room.  Whether  mere  demo- 
niac energy  of  this  sort  is  enough,  or  whether 
in  Mr.  Kosor  it  is  supported  by  deeper  intuitions 
of  life — these  are  questions  which  as  yet  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  answer.  Only  very  timid  criticism 
refrains  from  approaching  new  work  until  it  is 
ready  with  a  settled  judgment;  yet  only  very 
shallow  criticism  judges  before  it  is  ready.  The 
plays  do  at  least  demand  notice  and  examination. 

A  few  days  ago  I  met  Mr.  Kosor,  who  is  now 
in  London;  but  I  must  confess  that  I  got  little 
enlightenment  from  him.  It  may  have  been  the 
feebleness  of  my  apprehension,  although  I  pre- 
ferred to  believe  that  it  was  the  uncertainty  of 
his  English.  I  had  hoped  to  find  some  bridge 
over  the  gulf  which  still  divided  me  from  a 
thorough  understanding  of  his  work.  I  found 
none  however;  nor  could  I  foist  upon  him  any 
literary  affiliations  such  as  one  naturally  clutches 
at  when  one  is  thoroughly  puzzled.  He  rejected 
the  suggestion  of  any  influence  from  Strindberg, 
saying  that  he  had  never  read  Strindberg; 
and  he  affirmed  that  the  sole  influence  of  which 
he  was  conscious  came  from  the  Gospels.  He 
also  maintained  that  the  real  essence  and  worth 


of  his  work  lay  in  its  symbolism.  Yet  for  me 
the  second  of  his  plays,  "Passion's  Furnace,"  and 
the  first  act  of  the  third,  "Reconciliation,"  are 
the  clearest  and  most  enjoyable,  because  they  can 
be  taken  simply  as  immensely  vigorous  pictures 
of  peasant  life,  extraordinarily  alive  with  the 
peasant's  love  of  land.  The  end  of  "Reconcili- 
ation" is  highly  mystical  in  character,  and  the 
first  play,  "The  Woman,"  and  the  last,  "The 
Invincible  Ship,"  are  almost  wholly  symbolical. 
"The  Invincible  Ship"  seems  to  be  Mr.  Kosor's 
favorite.  It  is,  he  says,  more  lyrical  than  the  rest ; 
and  it  does  at  least  give  me  some  sort  of  total 
impression,  which  I  cannot  analyze  or  describe. 

The  real  trouble,  I  suppose,  springs  from  the 
gulf  which  divides  Slav  from  European.  After 
all,  the  Slav  is  the  link  between  Europe  and 
Asia;  and  our  difficulty  in  apprehending  Slav 
poetry,  though  not  so  great  as  our  difficulty  in 
apprehending  Asiatic  literature,  is  at  least  analo- 
gous to  it.  At  the  same  time  that  I  met  Mr. 
Kosor  I  met  also  a  compatriot  of  his  with 
whom  I  discussed  certain  Russian  authors  who 
have  recently  made  a  stir  in  London.  In  par- 
ticular I  asked  him  what  he  thought  of  Sologub ; 
and  he  told  me  that  Sologub  had  poetry,  could 
create  beauty,  and  was  in  fact  an  aesthete,  but 
had  no  depth  of  thought.  Now  to  me  those  of 
Sologub's  books  which  I  have  read  are  simply 
inexplicable  nightmares,  to  which  this  criticism 
gave  me  no  key  at  all.  It  seemed  like  judgment 
moving  on  another  plane  of  thought  than  mine. 
On  the  other  hand,  both  Mr.  Kosor  and  his  com- 
patriot found  it  amusing  and  characteristically 
English  when  I  confessed  that  to  me  Turgenev 
and  Chekhov  were  ultimately  the  most  satisfying 
of  Russian  writers. 

I  find  that  I  must  embark  on  yet  another  con- 
fession of  inability  to  deliver  judgment.  Not 
long  since  in  these  pages  I  had  to  apologize  for 
confusing  Mr.  Yeats's  new  volume  of  verses 
with  another  book  by  him  which  was  announced 
at  the  same  time  under  the  title  "Per  Arnica 
Silentia  Lunae."  This  second  book,  rather  long 
delayed  after  its  announcement,  is  now  pub- 
lished; and  it  has  raised  again  my  question  as  to 
what  Mr.  Yeats  really  is.  I  am  certain  that 
he  is  a  fine,  perhaps  a  great  poet — surely  a  very 
clever  one.  He  himself  claims  to  be  a  mystic, 
and  I  wish  I  could  make  up  my  mind  as  to 
whether  he  is  not  also  something  of  a  charlatan. 
The  study  of  charlatanry  is  a  fascinating  busi- 
ness, though  the  meaning  of  the  word  is  not 
very  clearly  understood.  A  charlatan  is  not  a 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


287 


plain  humbug;  if  he  were,  I  should  not  have 
thought  of  the  word  in  connection  with  Mr. 
Yeats.  A  charlatan  is  a  man  whose  success  in 
deceiving  others  flows  from  the  fact  that  he  has 
first  deceived  himself.  And  I  sometimes  won- 
der whether  Mr.  Yeats  is  not  mistaken  in  sup- 
posing that  he  is  mystical  by  nature,  and  whether 
the  mystical  element  in  his  writings  is  not  merely 
a  magnificent  pretense  to  which  he  has  fallen 
the  first  and  most  complete  victim. 

Mr.  E.  A.  Boyd  in  his  book  on  "Ireland's 
Literary  Renaissance"  leaves  no  doubt  as  to  his 
own  judgment  in  the  matter: 

Vision  conies  only  as  the  reward  of  severe  mental 
discipline,  after  study  as  vigorous  as  that  demanded 
by  any  of  the  so-called  exact  sciences.  But  there  is 
no  trace  of  this  in  Yeats,  who  cannot  properly  be 
described  as  an  intellectual  poet.  His  appeal  is 
primarily  sensuous.  .  .  Mysticism  to  Yeats  is  not 
an  intellectual  belief,  but  an  emotional  or  artistic 
refuge.  His  visions  do  not  convince  us,  because  they 
are  obviously  literary  rather  than  spiritual.  The 
concepts  which  are  realities  to  Blake,  or  to  Yeats's 
contemporary,  "JE,"  are  to  him  symbols,  nor  do  they 
strike  the  reader  as  being  anything  more. 

And  after  some  misgivings  and  hesitations,  I 
come  to  the  same  conclusion.  Mysticism  and 
magic,  with  all  the  apparatus  of  dreams,  and 
divination,  trances,  automatic  writing,  materiali- 
zation, and  what  not  are  to  Mr.  Yeats,  in  the 
end,  just  so  many  poetical  "properties."  His 
real  greatness  lies,  as  Mr.  Boyd  says,  in  his  sensu- 
ous appeal,  in  the  images  he  creates,  and  in  the 
extraordinary  beauty  and  exactness  of  his  phrases 
and  rhythms.  I  am  fortified  in  this  opinion  by  a 
careful  perusal  of  his  new  book.  I  do  not  believe 
he  would  give  his  life  for  any  of  these  ideas, 
although  he  might  well  give  his  life  to  persuade 
himself  and  others  that  he  really  held  them. 

The  book  consists  of  two  essays.  One  is  enti- 
tled "Anima  Hominis,"  the  other  "Anima 
Mundi."  The  first  expounds  the  theory  that 
the  poet,  and  the  man  of  genius  generally, 
expresses  in  his  work  not  his  own  self  but  his  anti- 
self,  the  antithesis  of  his  real  personality.  Thus 
Dante,  says  Mr.  Yeats,  "celebrated  the  most  pure 
lady  poet  ever  sung  and  the  Divine  Justice,  not 
merely  because  death  took  that  lady  and  Florence 
banished  her  singer,  but  because  he  had  to  strug- 
gle in  his  own  heart  with  his  unjust  anger  and 
his  lust."  This  is  at  least  an  attractive  theory; 
and  it  is  newer  than  that  of  the  second  essay, 
which  deals  with  the  "great  memory  passing  on 
from  generation  to  generation"  and  Henry 
More's  "soul  of  the  world,"  which  receives  the 
spirits  of  the  dead  and  from  which  knowledge 
comes  inexplicably  to  living  men.  Although  the 


subjects  of  these  essays  are  interesting  in  them- 
selves, I  am  nearly  sure  that  they  are  to  Mr. 
Yeats  only  "subjects"  on  which  he  can  string 
phrases  and  images.  It  seems  probable,  in  my 
judgment,  that  they  have  to  him  no  more  intel- 
lectual significance  than  the  ballad-themes  had  to 
the  balladists  or  the  story  of  "The  Eve  of  St. 
Agnes"  to  Keats.  Yet  he  has  made  out  of  them 
two  beautiful  pieces  of  prose  and  a  mysterious 
but  moving  poem  which  acts  as  a  sort  of  preface 
to  the  volume. 

In  Mr.  Yeats's  prose  I  always  find  sentences 
and  incidents  related  by  way  of  illustration  over 
which  I  linger  with  peculiar  pleasure.  He  han- 
dles words  as  a  dancer  manages  and  varies  his 
steps  in  an  intricate  figure;  and  one  is  fascinated 
by  the  unconcerned  precision  with  which  he 
expresses  his  meaning,  as  when  he  says  that  he 
closes  a  book  because  his  thought  has  over- 
brimmed the  page,  or  that  "even  the  most  wise 
dead  can  but  arrange  their  memories  as  we 
arrange  pieces  upon  a  chessboard,  and  obey 
remembered  words  alone,"  or  that: 

The  dead  living  in  their  memories  are,  I  am  per- 
suaded, the  source  of  all  that  we  call  instinct,  and  it 
is  their  love  and  their  desire,  all  unknowing,  that 
make  us  drive  beyond  our  reason,  or  in  defiance  of 
our  interest  it  may  be;  and  it  is  the  dream  martens 
that,  all  unknowing,  are  master-masons  to  the  living 
martens  building  about  church  windows  their  elab- 
orate nests;  and  in  their  turn  the  phantoms  are  stung 
to  a  keener  delight  from  a  concord  between  their 
luminous  pure  vehicle  and  our  strong  senses. 

But  the  pleasure  one  finds  in  such  passages  is 
purely  literary  and  Mr.  Yeats  is  here  a  fine 
poet,  not  a  mystic.  However,  so  long  as  the 
belief  produces  such  passages  from  him  there  is 
no  reason  for  us  to  quarrel  with  him  for  think- 
ing himself  a  mystic. 

These  two  books  are  on  the  whole  the  most 
interesting  of  recent  publications.  One  or  two 
more,  however,  may  be  briefly  mentioned.  Mr. 
Hugh  Walpole  has  just  brought  himself  to  allow 
a  pre-war  novel  to  be  printed,  with  an  apology 
to  the  effect  that  all  this  will  seem  very  old-fash- 
ioned and  long  out  of  date.  Mr.  Gerald  Gould, 
the  most  indefatigable,  wrong-headed,  and  read- 
able critic  of  novelists  ever  known,  has  protested 
that  whatever  was  fit  subject  for  artistic  treat- 
ment before  the  war  must  necessarily  remain  fit 
even  now.  Here  he  is,  of  course,  right  for  once ; 
and  I  should  find  it  hard  to  believe,  what  I  was 
assured  the  other  day,  that  our  promised  post- 
bellum  revival  of  literature  will  take  the  form 
of  our  poets',  novelists',  and  dramatists'  writing 
exclusively  for  that  abominable  and  formless 


288 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


myth  or  phantasm,  the  Business  Man.  But  I 
must  protest  that  the  theme  of  "The  Green  Mir- 
ror," which  is  the  conflict  between  a  long- 
founded  family  and  new  disruptive  ideas,  has 
been  treated  too  often  lately  for  any  except  a 
man  of  great  genius  to  avoid  the  cliches  of 
thought,  phrase,  and  situation  which  the  subject 
has  gathered  round  it.  I  am  sick  of  the  conflict 
between  the  old  and  the  new  generations;  and 
here,  at  any  rate,  I  am  all  for  peace  by  nego- 
tiation. 

Verse  has  been  very  quiet,  as  they  say  in  the 
financial  columns.  Mr.  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson 
has  published  a  collection  called  "Whin,"  in 
which  the  use  of  proper  names  for  poetical  pur- 
poses has  been  pushed,  I  suppose,  further  than 
ever  before  in  the  history  of  literature.  There 
is  little  else  that  is  remarkable  about  it.  Two 
more  interesting  volumes  are  promised  to  us: 
Mr.  J.  C.  Squire's  "Poems:  First  Series"  are  in 
the  press  and  will  appear  sometime  during  the 
summer;  Mr.  Walter  de  la  Mare's  new  book, 
"Motley;  and  other  Poems,"  may  come  at  any 
moment.  It  is  eagerly  awaited  (this  is  neither  a 
cliche  nor  an  over-statement)  by  many  who  have 
waited,  with  varying  degrees  of  impatience,  on 
Mr.  de  la  Mare's  pleasure  for  some  two  years, 
during  which  the  book  has  been  promised.  Hav- 
ing read  his  latest  pieces  scattered  in  periodicals, 
I  believe  that  from  being  a  fine  poet  he  has 
become  a  great  poet;  but  we  shall  know  within 
a  month  or  so.  No  certain  report  exists  as  to 
how  Mr.  de  la  Mare  was  induced  to  allow  the 
book  to  go  to  the  printer.  Some  of  his  follow- 
ers had  given  up  all  hope;  but  it  is  credibly 
stated  that  a  committee  of  admirers  burglariously 
entered  his  house  and  removed  the  manuscript 
from  his  custody. 

EDWARD  SHANKS. 
London,  March  7,  igi8. 


To  Dorothy 

An  old  moon  hunts  for  the  edge  of  sky, 

And  finds  it  is  but  the  rim  of  a  dream 

He  carried  within  himself. 

Yet,  he  spreads  his  dream-line  to  a  horizon, 

And  searches  once  more. 

Then,  when  at  last  he  seats  himself 

With  falling  head,  he  feels  his  dream-edge 

Driven  against  his  breast     . 

These  things  I  have  done,  seeking  you. 

MAXWELL  BODENHEIM. 


A  Hint  to  Essay-Lovers 

THERE'S  PIPPINS  AND  CHEESE  TO  COME.  By 
Charles  S.  Brooks.  Yale  University  Press;  $2. 
The  essay-reader  does  not  have  to  explain  to 
another  of  his  kind  why  he  enjoys  essays.  There 
is  an  understanding  between  them,  and  while 
they  do  not  constitute  a  secret  brotherhood,  a 
closed  corporation,  there  is  that  aspect  about 
their  communion.  Lamb  has  an  exquisite  philo- 
sophical outlook,  he  has  a  quizzical  sense  of 
humor,  he  is  lovable  and  he  is  kindly.  But  the 
essay-phile  enjoys  and  likes  Hazlitt!  He  is  cer- 
tainly not  lovable  in  the  way  Lamb  is;  in  fact 
it  might  be  said  that  if  Lamb  is  lovable  Hazlitt 
is  not.  One  loves  Lamb  in  a  personal  manner, 
as  though  one  had  known  him  through  the  many 
years  of  devotion  to  "Bridget";  one  would  have 
found  Hazlitt  difficult,  intensely  interesting  but 
demanding  a  great  bit  of  intellectual  and  spir- 
itual endurance.  One  might  have  loved  him, 
but  not  for  his  faults.  And  so  it  goes.  There 
is  Stevenson,  and  there  is  Macaulay;  Carlyle, 
Montaigne,  and  Bacon  all  have  their  person- 
alities, as  different  in  their  essays  as  they  were 
in  the  flesh.  It  is  their  essays  that  endear  them 
all  to  the  devotee ;  under  that  banner  they  march 
side  by  side,  congenial  and  attractive.  We  will 
have  no  invidious  distinctions.  Either  you  are 
an  essay-phile  or  you  are  not. 

While  it  might  be  possible  and  conventional, 
therefore,  to  say  that  "There's  Pippins  and 
Cheese  to  Come"  names  a  book  of  essays  by  the 
man  who  wrote  "Journeys  to  Bagdad,"  Charles 
S.  Brooks,  and  to  rest  assured  that  the  sales  of 
the  one  will  at  least  equal  those  of  the  other, 
there  remains  the  desire  of  the  discoverer  to  pass 
along  the  good  news:  "There  is  another  essay- 
ist!" It  cannot  satisfy  the  heart  of  the  real  essay- 
lover  to  hope  that  a  man's  first  book  will  guar- 
antee the  success  of  the  second.  One  must  do 
something  to  help. 

There  is  Lamb  in  these  essays,  not  imitation, 
not  even  subconscious  aping  of  style.  But  in 
charm  of  spirit,  quiet  humor,  whimsical  phrase- 
ology— in  these  characteristics  one  feels  Lamb. 
In  "A  Plague  of  All  Cowards"  one  comes  on 
this: 

And  yet — really  I  hesitate.  I  blush.  My  attack  will 
be  too  intimate ;  for  I  have  confessed  that  I  am 
not  the  very  button  on  the  cap  of  bravery.  I  have 
indeed  stiffened  myself  to  ride  a  horse,  a  mightier 
feat  than  driving  him,  because  of  the  tallness  of  the 
monster  and  his  uneasy  movement,  as  though  his  legs 
were  not  well-socketed  and  might  fall  out  on  a 
change  of  gaits. 


THE    DIAL 


289 


Even  the  seasoned  rider  will  not  have  forgotten 
this  feeling.  And  though  you  must  wade  back 
through  memory  to  childhood  you  will  respond 
when  you  read  this: 

But  if  your  companion  is  one  of  valor's  minions 
.  .  .  a  dizzy  plank  is  a  pleasant  belvedere  from 
which  to  view  the  world.  The  bravery  of  this  kind 
of  person  is  not  confined  to  these  few  matters.  If 
you  happen  to  go  driving  with  him,  he  will — if  the 
horse  is  of  the  kind  that  distends  his  nostrils — on  a 
sudden  toss  you  the  reins  and  leave  you  to  guard 
him  while  he  dispatches  an  errand.  If  it  were  a 
motor  car  there  would  be  a  brake  to  hold  it.  If  it 
were  a  boat  you  might  throw  out  an  anchor.  A 
butcher's  cart  would  have  a  metal  drag.  But  here  you 
sit  defenceless — tied  to  the  whim  of  a  horse — greased 
for  a  runaway.  The  beast  Dobbin  turns  his  head 
and  holds  you  with  his  hard  eye.  There  is  a  con- 
vulsive movement  along  his  back,  a  preface,  it  may 
be,  to  a  sudden  seizure.  A  real  friend  would  have 
loosened  the  straps  that  run  along  the  horse's  flanks. 
Then  if  any  deviltry  take  him,  he  might  go  off  alone 
and  have  it  out. 

One  of  the  charms,  if  not  the  charm,  of  the 
essay  is  that  the  essayist  may  talk  about  anything 
he  please,  and  the  reader  may  expect  anything, 
no  matter  what  the  ostensible  subject  was  at 
starting.  Therefore  in  Mr.  Brooks's  essay  "The 
Man  of  Grub  Street  Comes  from  His  Garret" 
a  splendid,  yea  a  brilliant,  resume  of  Fifth  Ave- 
nue is  quite  in  place. 

Is  there  a  scene  like  it  in  the  world?  The  boule- 
vards of  Paris  in  times  of  peace  are  hardly  so  gay. 
Fifth  Avenue  is  blocked  with  motor  cars.  Fashion  has 
gone  forth  to  select  a  feather.  A  ringlet  has  gone 
awry  and  must  be  mended.  The  Pomeranian's  health 
is  served  by  sunlight.  The  Spitz  must  have  an  air- 
ing. Fashion  has  wagged  its  head  upon  a  Chinese 
vase — has  indeed  squinted  at  it  through  a  lorgnette 
against  a  fleck — and  now  lolls  home  to  dinner.  Or 
style  has  veared  an  inch  and  it  has  been  a  day  of 
fitting.  At  restaurant  windows  one  may  see  the  feed- 
ing of  the  overfed.  Men  sit  in  club  windows  and 
still  wear  their  silk  hats  as  though  there  was  no 
glass  between  them  and  the  windy  world.  Footmen 
in  boots  and  breeches  sit  as  stiffly  as  though  they 
were  toys  grown  large  and  had  metal  spikes  below 
to  hold  them  to  their  boxes.  They  look  like  the 
iron  firemen  that  ride  on  nursery  fire-engines. 

Moreover,  to  honeycomb  this  review  with 
quotations  is  only  to  follow  the  best  essay  tra- 
dition. Thus  is  the  victim  often  treated  in  the 
kindest  manner.  Montaigne,  certainly,  set  a 
record  that,  though  it  may  not  be  desirable  to 
attempt  beating  it,  gives  dignified  justification. 
Therefore  another: 

Had  I  been  the  artist  I  would  have  run  from  either 
F's  praise  or  disapproval.  As  an  instance,  I  saw  a 
friend  on  a  late  occasion  coming  from  a  bookstore 
with  a  volume  of  suspicious  color  beneath  his  arm. 
I  had  been  avoiding  that  particular  bookstore  for  a 
week  because  my  work  lay  for  sale  on  a  forward 
table.  And  now  when  my  friend  appeared,  a  sud- 
den panic  seized  me,  and  I  plunged  into  the  first 
doorway  to  escape.  I  found  myself  facing  a  soda 
fountain.  For  a  moment,  in  my  blur,  I  could  not  ac- 


count for  the  soda  fountain,  or  know  quite  how  it  had 
come  into  my  life.  Presently  an  interne  .  .  .  asked 
me  what  I'd  have.  Still  somewhat  dazed  in  my  dis- 
composure, having  no  answer  ready,  my  startled  fancy 
ran  among  the  signs  and  labels  of  the  counter  until  I 
recalled  that  a  bearded  man  once,  unblushing  in  my 
presence,  had  ordered  a  banana  flip.  I  got  the  fel- 
low's ear  and  named  it  softly.  Whereupon  he  placed 
a  dead-looking  banana  across  a  mound  of  ice  cream, 
poured  on  colored  juices  as  though  to  mark  the  fatal 
wound,  and  offered  it  to  me.  I  ate  a  few  bites  of  the 
sickish  mixture  until  the  streets  were  safe. 

There  you  are.  If,  after  that,  you  have  no 
desire  to  own  the  book,  my  aim  has  been  frus- 
trated and  you  are  the  loser.  For — I  shall  be 
quite  frank  about  it — it  has  been  my  conscious 
intent  to  write  that  sort  of  review  which  would 
make  the  reader  want  the  book.  It  is  the  kind 
of  volume  you  keep  handy  to  read  to  your 
friends;  somebody  says  something  which  reminds 
you  of  Brooks,  and  away  you  rush  to  get  the 
book  to  read  "just  this  paragraph." 

B.   I.   KlNNE. 


Superstition  Become  Respectable 

THE  QUESTION:   "!F  A  MAN  DIE  SHALL  HE  LIVE 
AGAIN?"    By  Edward  Clodd.     Clode;  $2. 

Mr.  Edward  Clodd  presents — in  the  impresa- 
rio sense — a  review  of  the  follies  of  1917  in  the 
revival  of  the  ancient  miracle-play  of  spiritual- 
ism. The  year  is  pertinent  only  in  that  it  marks 
the  appearance  of  "Raymond,"  the  tragic  vol- 
ume in  which  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  records  the 
inconsequential  evidence  of  the  communications 
of  his  son  killed  in  battle,  received  through  medi- 
umistic  harlequins  and  their  vaudeville  "con- 
trols" ;  also  the  evidence  of  his  own  pitiable  cre- 
dulity. In  spite  of  a  high  regard  for  Sir  Oliver's 
well  merited  reputation,  for  his  sincerity  and 
noble  qualities,  and  in  spite  of  a  keen  sympathy 
with  his  loss,  Mr.  Clodd  does  not  permit  himself 
to  mitigate  his  duty  to  speak  plainly  as  a  defender 
of  science  and  reason: 

You,  Sir  Oliver,  knowing,  as  you  must  have  known, 
the  taint  which  permeates  the  early  history  of  spiritual- 
ism, its  inception  in  fraud  and  the  detection  of  a  suc- 
cession of  tricksters  from  the  Fox  girls  onwards,  and 
thereby  cautioned  to  be  on  your  guard,  have  proved 
yourself,  on  your  own  admission,  incompetent  to  detect 
the  frauds  of  Eusapia  Palladino.  .  .  Your  faith  in 
the  integrity  of  Mrs.  Piper,  despite  her  failure, 
crowned  by  her  confession,  withdrawn,  it  is  true,  but 
none  the  less  a  fact,  remains  unshaken.  You  lose  a 
dear  son  in  the  holiest  of  causes  for  which  a  man 
can  die ;  you  forthwith  repair  to  a  modern  Witch 
of  Endor  to  seek,  at  second  hand,  consolations  which 
assuredly  he  whom  you  mourn  would,  in  preference, 
pour  direct  into  your  attuned  and  sympathetic  ear ; 
you — one  of  the  most  prominent  and  best  known  of 
men — are  simple  enough  to  believe  that  your  anonym- 


290 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


ity  and  that  of  your  wife  and  family  was  secure 
at  the  early  seances  which  Mrs.  Leonard  and  Mr. 
Vout  Peters  gave  you.  And  with  what  dire  result — 
the  publication  of  a  series  of  spurious  communica- 
tions, a  large  portion  of  which  is  mischievous  drivel, 
dragging  with  it  into  the  mire  whatever  lofty  con- 
ceptions of  a  spiritual  world  have  been  framed  by 
mortals. 

What  is  more  serious,  your  maleficent  influence 
gives  impetus  to  the  recrudescence  of  superstition 
which  is  so  deplorable  a  feature  of  these  days.  The 
difference  between  the  mediums  whom  you  consult 
and  the  lower  grade  of  fortune-tellers  who  are  had 
up  and  fined  or  imprisoned  as  rogues  and  vagabonds 
is  one  of  degree,  not  of  kind.  The  sellers  of  the 
thousands  of  mascots— credulity  in  which  as  life- 
preservers  and  luck-bringers  is  genuine — the  palmists, 
and  all  other  professors  of  the  occult,  have  in  you 
their  acknowledged  patron. 

Thus  you,  who  have  achieved  high  rank  as  a  phy- 
sicist, descend  to  the  plane  of  the  savage  animist, 
surrendering  the  substance  for  the  shadow. 

Introductory  to  this  climax  of  application,  Mr. 
Clodd  brings  within  the  covers  of  a  readable  sur- 
vey a  brief  account  of  the  several  factors  and 
personalities  that  have  contributed  directly  to 
modern  spiritualism,  and  of  the  kindred  influ- 
ences hovering  congenially  in  the  hazy  penumbra 
of  occult  notions  and  befuddled  verbiage.  The 
historical  prelude  is  spoken  in  these  words:  "Pic- 
ture to  yourself  a  little  chamber  in  which  no  very 
brilliant  light  was  admitted,  with  a  crowd  of 
people  from  all  quarters,  excited,  carefully 
worked-up,  all  a  flutter  with  expectation."  The 
reader  will  assume  that  this  account  of  the  psy- 
chological atmosphere  of  the  seance  refers  to 
some  "evidential"  sittings  with  the  entranced 
Mrs.  Piper  revealing  private  affairs  of  her  sit- 
ters among  the  elite  of  Boston;  or  to  the  crude 
but  much  headlined  and  conspicuously  sponsored 
Eusapia  in  London,  Paris,  or  New  York;  or  if 
not  so  recent,  to  the  slate-writing  performances 
of  Slade  or  the  "cabinet"  pranks  of  the  Daven- 
ports; or  at  the  earliest  to  the  raps  and  table- 
tippings  of  the  original  (?)  Fox  sisters.  Not  at 
all;  they  were  written  eighteen  hundred  years 
ago  by  that  rare  modern,  Lucian,  whose  accounts 
of  such  impostures  are  as  good  reading  and  as 
good  sense  today  as  when  they  were  written  for 
the  benefit  of  any  Greco-Roman  Society  for 
Psychical  Research  that  may  have  flourished  in 
his  day.  The  strange  unoriginality  of  the  tricks 
of  the  spiritualist  trade  prove  that  the  longings 
of  men  have  always  led  to  the  same  modes  of 
seeking  and  finding  satisfaction:  mysterious  raps 
and  voices  and  forms,  rocking  of  tables,  miracles 
in  transporting  objects,  handling  live  coals,  float- 
ing through  space,  seeing  at  a  distance,  reading 
sealed  messages,  foreseeing  the  future,  holding 
converse  with  the  dead. 


But  even  Lucian  and  his  intellectual  ancestry 
are  recent  compared  with  the  racial  antiquity 
of  all  this  longing  inquiry,  and  of  the  beliefs  and 
legends  that  surround  it.  It  goes  back  to  the 
early  history  of  mankind  and  is  found  in  its 
spontaneous  expression  wherever  the  primitive 
mind  survives:  in  the  angekok  of  Labrador,  the 
shaman  of  Siberia,  the  mediums  of  unenlightened 
lands  from  China  to  Peru,  the  mahatmas  of 
Adyar  or  the  voodoos  of  the  Congo.  Here  is  its 
authentic  root  and  its  true  service;  it  is  anthro- 
pology and  not  psychical  research.  The  interest  is 
not  in  the  evidence  but  in  the  beliefs  and  the  ways 
of  satisfying  them — precisely  the  same  interest 
that  attaches  to  primitive  medicine-magic  and  the 
crude  ritual  of  the  medicine  man.  That  such 
ways  of  thinking  survive,  and  must  in  the  nature 
of  things  survive,  brings  them  within  the  equally 
legitimate  study  of  folklore.  And  if  our  inter- 
est lies  in  the  manner  of  their  appeal,  and  in 
the  understanding  of  the  processes  by  which  such 
evidence  continues  to  impose  on  modern  and 
schooled  minds,  psychology  is  ready  to  furnish 
an  answer  to  the  logical  minded.  The  difficulty 
is  that  cold  logic  is  less  satisfying  than  hot  (or 
warmed  over)  dramatic  superstition;  that  the 
otherwise  open-minded  are  also  open  to  the  lure 
of  the  obscure  and  the  soothing  siren  tones  of 
prepossession.  Logic  does  well  enough  for  the 
workaday  world,  where  reason  is  at  a  premium, 
or  at  least  at  par,  but  is  not  welcome  at  the  pri- 
vate hearth  of  desire  and  the  reserved  sanctum  of 
the  will  to  believe.  Even  a  mild  indulgence  in 
this  toxic  atmosphere  closes  the  door  of  reason. 
"When  men  have  once  acquiesced  in  untrue  opin- 
ions and  registered  them  as  authentic  records  in 
their  minds,  it  is  no  less  impossible  to  speak  intel- 
ligently to  such  men  as  to  write  legibly  on  a 
paper  already  scribbled  over."  That  remains  as 
true  today  as  when  Hobbes  wrote  it. 

Mr.  Clodd's  antidote  consists  of  select  doses 
of  anthropology,  reenforced  by  plain  tales  of 
exposures  of  mediums,  who  at  the  worst  are  ras- 
cals and  scoundrels  and  at  the  best  "are  an 
unwholesome  lot" — "a  mad  world,  my  masters." 
The  anthropology  is  not  all  of  the  primitive 
type;  much  of  it  is  in  the  nature  of  survival, 
and  naturally  takes  on  the  color  of  a  sophisticated 
mysticism,  and  an  intellectual  speculation.  But 
wherever  spiritualism  seeks  the  evidence  of  phys- 
ical manifestations  and  deserts  the  spiritual  field 
for  "materializations,"  it  is  bound  to  come  in 
contact  with  fraud  and  hysteria,  to  which  it 
usually  succumbs.  The  byways  of  the  pursuit 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


291 


are  many  and  devious,  some  of  them  rescued 
from  the  mire  of  pseudo-science  and  made  intel- 
ligible and  respectable  as  authentic  psychological 
facts  with  a  proper  and  scientific  explanation.  At 
that  point  the  psychical  researcher  loses  interest 
in  them.  Such  are  "crystal-gazing"  and  "telep- 
athy" and  hypnosis  and  hallucinations.  But  the 
difficulty  remains  that  while  all  this  is  fairly 
convincing  to  the  normal  stable  mind,  the  aver- 
age degree  of  stability  is  still  compatible  with  a 
belief  in  the  existence  of  black  swans  that  are 
not  biological  variants  of  white  ones,  but  intrin- 
sically of  a  different  color,  taking  their  appear- 
ance and  behavior  from  a  different  set  of  laws 
than  those  that  rule  in  a  commonplace  universe. 
To  these  may  be  repeated  the  dictum  of  Wil- 
liam James — whose  psychological  hospitality  was 
wide — that  the  interpretation  of  events  for  their 
personal  significance  is  an  abomination.  Once 
the  personal  element  in  such  beliefs  is  reduced 
to  proper  proportions,  their  restriction  to  the 
middle  ground  of  sanity  is  assured. 

Such  is  the  question  that  Mr.  Clodd  pro- 
pounds, and  such  his  firm  matter-of-fact  answer. 
(Mr.  Clodd,  an  anthropologist  and  writer  by 
avocation,  is  a  banker  by  profession.)  Out  of 
the  same  rank  growth  he  garners  a  very  differ- 
ent harvest.  The  task  is  likely  to  prove  an 
ungrateful  one,  but  must  constantly  be  repeated 
if  the  world  is  to  be  made  safe  and  held  safe 
for  rationality.  It  must  be  done  in  modern 
terms  and  by  way  of  modern  instances.  The 
follies  of  1817  or  1857  seem  indeed  old-fash- 
ioned follies;  but  not  so  those  of  1917,  with 
their  reputable  sponsors  whom  we  know  and 
respect.  Prestige  remains  a  dangerous  influence, 
and  yet  an  indispensable  one.  The  right  dispo- 
sition of  our  confidence  is  one  of  the  pragmatic 
tests — not  of  learning  but  of  wisdom  in  the 
higher  reaches  of  thought,  and  of  common  sense 
in  the  lowlier  ones.  It  is  not  pleasant  to  con- 
template the  lapses  of  noble  minds,  nor  is  the 
self-approval  of  our  superior  shrewdness  an  envi- 
able trait.  The  true  lesson  of  the  review  is 
a  subjective  modesty,  and  an  objective  firmness; 
it  is  of  the  same  order  as  that  moral  stability 
that  holds  to  the  might  of  right,  though  the 
wrong  celebrate  its  triumphs.  Anthropology  is 
the  proper  study  of  mankind,  its  legitimate 
drama;  though  the  annals  of  psychical  research 
make  an  interesting  motion-picture  of  the  va- 
garies of  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men. 

JOSEPH  JASTROW. 


The  Poetry  of  Conrad  Aiken 

NOCTURNE   OF   REMEMBERED    SPRING,   and    Other 
Poems.     By   Conrad    Aiken.     Four   Seas;   $1.25. 

It  is  a  difficult  business  to  be  a  poet.  It  is  not 
only  difficult;  it  is  highly  dangerous.  For  the 
poet  must  constantly  employ  not  only  his  mind, 
but  his  feelings.  He  must  see  the  world  not  only 
as  objective  phenomena  for  meditation,  but  as  sub- 
jective influence  for  emotion.  Now  it  is  perfectly 
true  that  the  majority  of  mankind,  the  "average 
sensual"  man  and  woman,  only  maintain  their 
mental  equilibrium  through  the  rigorous  suppres- 
sion or  the  progressive  atrophy  of  their  feelings. 
From  this  state  of  emotional  prohibition  the  poet 
alone,  the  man  of  imagination,  is  free;  and  his 
is  a  dangerous  freedom,  for  himself  and  for  oth- 
ers, since  in  it  the  rules  of  social  conduct,  the 
regulations  of  the  average,  do  not  exist. 

Therefore  it  is  difficult  to  be  a  poet.  I  do  not 
mean  by  this  that  it  is  at  all  difficult  to  be  the 
prevailing  fashion  of  the  day  in  poetry,  or  even 
the  fashion  of  the  year  before  last.  For  that,  one 
needs  only  a  certain  crude  vigor  of  the  pen,  and 
a  voice  loud  enough  to  dominate  the  market 
place.  But  the  true  poets  do  not  dominate  the 
market  place.  They  may  think  themselves  lucky 
if  they  find  a  hundred  serious  readers,  and  among 
them,  two  or  three  friends.  They  may  consider 
themselves  fortunate  to  find  a  publisher.  They 
may  hold  themselves  highly  favored  if  they  retain 
some  measure  of  health  and  can  wrest  a  suffi- 
ciency of  food  from  the  world. 

Conrad  Aiken  is  a  poet  in  the  sense  that  his 
work  displays  a  certain  harmonious  development 
upon  a  given  groundwork.  His  first  volume, 
"Earth  Triumphant,"  proved  that  he  was  the 
possessor  of  an  instrument.  It  is  true  that  he 
played  on  this  instrument  with  a  dangerous  facil- 
ity. For  in  him  the  sense  of  metrical  rhythm 
and  the  answering  recall  of  rhyme  was  given 
from  the  very  first.  Other  poets  have  to  en- 
ter the  great  vague  world  of  thought  that 
beckons  them,  by  hacking  and  hewing  their  way 
through  a  forest  of  experimental  forms — a  proc- 
ess which  is  calculated  to  kill  off  all  but  the 
stoutest.  There  was  nothing  of  this  in  Aiken. 
He  was  master  of  a  smooth  limpid  flow  of  verse 
narrative  from  the  beginning.  He  did  not  have 
to  learn  and  unlearn  his  technique.  It  was  an 
authentic  gift.  Such  a  poet  is  rare  enough  even 
in  England,  still  rarer  in  America. 

But  it  was  not  until   the  appearance  of  his 


292 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


second  volume,  "Turns  and  Movies,"  that  Aiken 
began  to  use  his  powers  for  the  deliberate  expres- 
sion of  any  new  idea.  Since  that  volume  he  has 
published  two  others,  "The  Jig  of  Forslin"  and 
now  the  "Nocturne  of  Remembered  Spring," 
which  this  morning's  post  has  brought  to  my  desk 
in  London.  Throughout  these  three  works  there 
runs  a  sole  essential  idea.  Aiken  is  the  poet  of 
sexual  illusion  and  disillusion. 

It  will  be  remembered  that  Aiken  admits  being 
a  Freudian.  Indeed,  his  most  remarkable  work, 
"The  Jig  of  Forslin,"  was  constructed  as  a  delib- 
erate Freudian  synthesis  of  civilized  man's  mind 
— to  quote  its  author,  "Forslin  is  not  a  man,  but 
man."  Now  the  substance  of  the  Freudian  psy- 
chology is  this;  that  the  major  part  of  the  higher 
psychical  reactions  of  mankind  may  be  traced  to 
sexual  impulse,  suppressed,  transformed,  and  sub- 
limated. It  is  true  that  Freud  himself  has  never 
pushed  this  theory  to  the  point  which  it  occupies 
in  the  minds  of  many  of  his  more  fanatical  fol- 
lowers, such  as  Jung.  For  Freud,  what  part  of 
any  human  imaginative  effort  could  be  traced 
to  sublimated  libido  would  probably  vary  with 
every  given  case.  But  the  theory  that  man  does 
normally  discharge  along  lines  of  imaginative 
art  and  phantasy  the  superfluity  of  his  sexual 
reactions,  remains  to  Freud,  as  to  Aiken,  un- 
questionable. 

Now  the  difficulty  with  any  psychological  the- 
ory of  this  sort  is  that  it  tends  to  stereotype 
minds,  to  make  all  the  activities  of  the  human 
brain  seem  alike.  If  it  be  true,  as  I  believe  it  is, 
that  the  transformation  of  species  has  been 
brought  about  by  adaptation  to  changed  sur- 
roundings, rather  than  by  natural  selection  of 
any  particular  species,  then  it  follows  that  of  all 
species  man  is  the  most  a'daptable  to  all  given 
circumstances  and,  further,  that  the  mental  and 
psychical  reactions  of  man  vary  according  to  the 
circumstances  in  which  he  is  placed.  The  theory 
of  Freud  and  Jung  would  fasten  upon  mankind 
a  certain  fixed  type  of  thought — that  all  imag- 
inative activity  is  reducible  to  a  transformation 
of  primitive  sex-impulse.  This  theory  fails  com- 
pletely to  take  into  account  the  claims  of  evolu- 
tion. If  the  sex-impulse  can  thus  transform 
itself,  what  is  to  hinder  it  from  becoming  another 
kind  of  impulse  altogether?  And  having  become 
that,  what  is  to  hinder  it  from  again  reacting 
upon  the  untransformed  remainder,  and  again 
transforming  it?  We  must  keep  our  minds  away 


from  these  hard  and  fast  compartments.  Freud's 
theory,  even  if  true,  is  merely  a  limitation  of  our 
activities ;  it  clears  up  old  ground,  but  it  does  not 
point  the  way  to  any  new  sphere  of  thought- 
activity. 

I  have  been  led  to  this  digression  by  the  neces- 
sity of  examining  critically  the  basis  of  Aiken's 
thought  before  proceeding  to  the  study  of  his 
poetry  as  illustrative  of  that  basis.  Now  it  seems 
to  me  that,  apart  from  his  incontestable  gifts  as 
a  prosodist  and  word -controller,  Conrad  Aiken's 
mind  has  up  to  the  present  worked  on  somewhat 
too  narrow  a  basis.  His  poems,  in  short,  are 
variations  of  but  one  idea — the  idea  of  sexual 
disillusionment.  It  is  true  that  this  method  as 
employed  in  the  case  of  "The  Jig  of  Forslin," 
produced  a  poem  of  very  remarkable  range  and 
beauty.  But  "Forslin"  in  a  sense  exhausted  the 
range  of  variations  possible  to  its  theme.  And 
in  his  more  recent  work  Aiken  contents  himself 
with  repeating  a  little  more  wearily  and  subtly 
his  familiar  cry.  There  is  an  atmosphere  of  bore- 
dom about  it  all,  a  hint  of  yawns,  a  trail  of  dust. 

This  should  not  be.  Any  poet  with  one  half 
the  powers  Aiken  has  should  mentally  rouse  him- 
self to  tackle  other  themes.  There  is  nothing 
which  wearies  the  mind  more  quickly  than  to  be 
chained  down  to  one  particular  type  of  work. 
Shakespeare,  and  not  only  Shakespeare,  found 
that  the  way  of  the  utmost  range  was  the  way 
of  the  fullest  development.  The  best  poem  in 
Aiken's  present  volume  is  the  one  called  "1915: 
The  Trenches."  It  is  a  very  fine  picture  of  the 
weariness  of  waiting,  with  the  poignant  cry  at 
the  end  "Will  the  word  come  today?"  It  proves 
that  the  war  is  legitimate  matter  for  poetry  in 
so  far  as  it  enlarges  one's  mental  horizon — as  a 
great  spectacle  to  be  looked  upon  impersonally, 
without  partisan  spirit,  in  the  way  in  which  the 
veteran  soldier  now  looks  upon  it.  Next  to  this 
poem  I  like  best  the  one  called  "Episode  in 
Grey."  This  too  is  a  study  in  disillusionment, 
but  it  has  a  harsher,  more  poignant,  more  mascu- 
line accent  than  the  others.  It  carries  disillusion- 
ment far  beyond  mere  boredom,  to  the  point 
where  disillusionment  begins  to  live  a  new  pas- 
sionate life  of  its  own.  Conrad  Aiken  is  devel- 
oping, after  all,  and  when  he  arrives  in  the  new 
country  whither  he  is  tending,  I  caution  the  dry- 
rotting  celebrities  of  yesteryear  in  America  to 
look  out !  They  will  find  a  poet. 

JOHN  GOULD  FLETCHER. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


293 


A  Year  of  Mistakes 

APPROACHES  TO  THE  GREAT  SETTLEMENT.  By 
Emily  Greene  Balch.  Introduction  by  Norman 
Angell.  Huebsch;  $1.50. 

IN  OUR  FIRST  YEAR  OF  WAR:  Messages  and 
Addresses  to  the  Congress  and  the  People,  March 
5,  1917  to  January  8,  1918,  by  Woodrow  Wil- 
son. Harpers;  $1. 

We  have  recently  been  told  that  until  a  cen- 
tury or  two  has  elapsed  we  cannot  expect  to  dis- 
cover the  deeper  significance  of  the  Russian 
Revolution.  Perhaps — but  unfortunately  it  will 
then  be  too  late  to  draw  lessons  from  the  mis- 
takes of  the  conventional  diplomacy  of  1917. 
That  is,  it  will  be  too  late  for  the  present  war. 
Doubtless  there  would  be  a  certain  intellectual 
pleasure  in  assessing  the  year  with  so  secure  a 
detachment  and  assurance,  yet  like  a  great  many 
intellectual  pleasures  it  would  be  bought  only 
at  the  price  of  practical  impotence.  We  shall 
have  to  risk  our  interpretations  in  a  world  of 
perversity  and  change,  just  as  we  have  to  risk 
our  actions.  The  intelligence  which  explicates 
only  accomplished  facts  somehow  cuts  a  pitiable 
figure  in  our  immediate  world,  where  thousands 
of  men  are  every  day  blown  to  bits  because  we 
seem  unable  to  control  events  beyond  expressing 
a  mild  surprise  when  the  "inevitable"  (always 
called  that  afterwards)  takes  place.  Indeed,  it 
is  a  kind  of  duty  to  attempt  our  interpretation, 
even  perhaps  a  false  interpretation,  when  the 
great  body  of  American  public  opinion  still  seems 
blissfully  unaware  that  any  blunders  were  made. 
Mistakes  are  forgivable;  but  the  ostrich  habit 
of  refusing  to  recognize  them  after  they  have 
occurred,  a  habit  so  beloved  by  our  newspaper 
editors  and  too  many  of  our  public  spokesmen, 
is  a  sure  way  to  lose  the  war.  As  far  as  the 
casual  observer  can  discern,  President  Wilson  is 
about  the  only  person  of  influence  who  has 
shown  any  clear  perception  of  what  the  big  dip- 
plomatic  blunders  of  1917  were.  Of  course  he 
hasn't  advertised  these  blunders  from  the  house- 
tops— to  do  so  was  hardly  necessary,  nor  would 
it  be  exactly  tactful  towards  certain  of  our  co- 
belligerents.  But  in  his  speech  to  Russia  of  Jan- 
uary 8,  1918,  and  in  his  answer  to  Von  Hert- 
ling,  President  Wilson  revealed  a  democratic 
vision  and  an  understanding  which  not  only  put 
our  case  admirably  before  the  world  and  before 
history,  but  by  implication  exposed  the  more 
glaring  errors  of  Allied  diplomatic  policy  in  the 
previous  year.  In  these  two  books — the  first  doc- 
umentary, the  second  merely  a  collection  of 


speeches — the  record  stands  out  with  terrifying 
clearness. 

Yet  curiously  enough  it  has  been  the  last  two 
speeches  to  Russia  and  Von  Hertling  which  have 
given  most  concern  to  our  unofficial  but  strident 
moulders  of  public  opinion,  who  somehow  have 
got  the  idea  into  their  heads  that  the  United 
States  is  composed  entirely  of  fools  and  cowards 
who  cannot  hear  the  word  "peace"  uttered  with- 
out going  into  a  collapse.  These  swivel-chair 
diplomats  have  been  fearfully  whispering  the 
word  "morale"  ever  since  we  entered  the  war, 
and  have  successfully  persuaded  themselves  that 
the  larger  part  of  our  population  must  be  treated 
tenderly,  like  babies.  Any  discussion  of  war 
aims — except,  naturally,  those  that  they  engage 
in — will  certainly  break  our  spirit,  and  put  us 
under  the  heel  of  Potsdam.  That  is  why  the 
first  two  speeches  of  President  Wilson  in  1918 
embarrassed  them  so.  Here  was  the  acknowl- 
edged leader  of  the  nation  saying  just  the  sort 
of  thing  which,  if  the  private  citizen  had  uttered 
it,  would  certainly  merit  the  reproach  of  faint- 
heartedness, pacifism.  Why  not  be  honest? 
Many  editors  and  speakers  secretly  thought  that 
our  President  was  guilty  of  this  weakness  in 
"morale"  (oh,  magic  word!),  although  they 
hadn't  the  courage  to  more  than  hint  as  much. 
It  is  a  hard  thing  to  say,  yet  it  is  perfectly  true 
that  many  regarded  the  pitiable  plight  of  Russia 
less  with  democratic  sympathy  than  with  some- 
thing of  gratification  that  here  was  proof  posi- 
tive that  President  Wilson's  "peace  offensive" 
was  untimely.  "Now,"  they  are  all  bleating 
again  in  joyous  unison,  "is  no  time  for  peace 
talk."  In  other  words,  as  long  as  President 
Wilson's  diplomacy  did  not  appear  to  work,  had 
no  striking  effect  in  Germany,  they  were  all  for 
it.  The  moment  it  began  to  stride,  to  become 
a  genuine  force,  they  grew  uneasy  and  anxious. 
Beating  Germany  by  the  sword  they  understood ; 
beating  Germany  by  the  power  of  ideas  was, 
of  course,  a  chimera.  But  to  combine,  to  beat 
Germany  both  by  the  sword  and  the  power  of 
ideas,  which  is  President  Wilson's  method,  they 
completely  failed  to  comprehend.  However, 
Germany  did  not  disappoint  them;  it  did  not 
become  liberalized.  After  that  dubious  January, 
they  are  again  living  in  a  world  they  understand, 
a  world  of  victory  and  defeat  by  arms  alone,  a 
world  of  international  crime  and  punishment,  a 
world  in  which  President  Wilson's  diplomacy 
has  no  legitimate  place.  At  a  time  when  most 
of  all  we  need  to  voice  and  perform  a  great 


294 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


act  of  faith  towards  Russia,  they  are  only  half- 
heartedly supporting  the  President  in  his  obvi- 
ous desire  to  check  the  hand  of  Japan.  Once 
more  they  are  urging  him  to  abandon  all  his 
originality,  his  force,  his  moral  distinction  and 
to  become  the  shouter  for  a  stale  and  flaccid 
shibboleth.  Seemingly  America  is  to  contribute 
nothing  more  than  men,  money,  and  munitions. 

But  these  alone  will  not  win  the  war.  A 
superiority  of  material  forces  will  not  break  the 
spell  of  the  German  autocracy  over  the  suffer- 
ing German  people,  any  more  than  those  pos- 
sessing an  inferiority  of  material  forces  will  be 
compelled  to  bow  to  that  autocracy.  The  whole 
history  of  1917  shows  that.  The  obvious  les- 
son from  1917  is  not  that  we  need  Wilson 
diplomacy  less,  but  more.  After  all,  President 
Wilson's  chief  error  in  1917  was  not  an  error 
of  intention  but  of  emphasis,  a  mistake  arising 
from  lack  of  self-assertion  of  his  diplomacy  and 
delay  in  winning  our  co-belligerents  to  an  accep- 
tance of  that  diplomacy.  He  has  made  notable 
efforts  to  retrieve  the  harm  of  this  error  in  the 
first  two  speeches  of  1918  and  in  the  message 
to  the  Russian  Soviets  at  Moscow.  Likewise, 
his  seemingly  steadfast  disapproval  of  Japan's 
assertion  of  her  right  to  preserve  "law  and  order" 
in  Siberia  will  some  day  be  one  of  the  events 
of  this  war  that  we  shall  look  back  upon  with 
the  most  pride.  Our  political  aims  and  objects 
in  this  war  to  a  great  extent  stand  or  fall  as 
the  Russian  Revolution  stands  or  falls.  Presi- 
dent Wilson  has  been  quick  to  see  and  empha- 
size this.  Others  may  abandon  Russia,  but  he 
will  not. 

What,  then,  were  the  chief  mistakes  in  Allied 
diplomacy  during  1917?  There  were  three 
major  mistakes:  first,  the  misunderstanding, 
partly  malicious  and  deliberate  and  partly 
through  innocent  lack  of  information  (as  in  our 
own  case),  of  the  Russian  Revolution  and  its 
purposes;  second,  the  failure  to  emphasize  the 
importance  of  the  Reichstag  resolution  of  July 
19  and  to  give  it  moral  encouragement;  third, 
the  refusal  by  the  Allied  governments  of  per- 
mission to  attend  the  Stockholm  conference  of 
Socialists.  All  three  mistakes  were  the  results 
of  a  suspicious  and  embittered  temper,  and 
sprang  from  a  lack  of  faith  in  that  democ- 
racy which  it  is  the  object  of  this  war  to  pro- 
mote. They  were  blunders  applauded,  if  not 
engineered,  by  the  reactionary  and  purblind  pow- 
erful minorities  that  still  exercise  too  great  a 
control  over  the  destinies  of  the  Allied  nations. 

Consider    what    the    first    mistake    achieved. 


Misunderstanding  of  the  Russian  Revolution 
resulted  in  a  failure  to  revise  war  aims  until  that 
revision  came  too  late  to  allay  Russia's  suspicion 
of  the  Allies'  disinterestedness  and  democratic 
intentions.  It  resulted  in  the  fall  of  the  Keren- 
sky  government  and  the  rise  of  the  Bolsheviki. 
It  resulted  in  foolish  and  untimely  attempts  to 
foster  counter  revolutionary  sentiment  and  in 
false  charges  of  a  desire  to  make  a  separate  peace 
(on  June  15,  for  example,  the  Council  of  Work- 
men and  Soldiers'  Deputies  expelled  Grimm  for 
suggesting  a  separate  peace).  It  resulted  in 
complete  failure  to  take  advantage  of  the  great 
strategic  opportunity  offered  by  the  Russian  invi- 
tation to  attend  the  Brest-Litovsk  conference. 
And  finally  it  has  resulted  in  the  practical  loss 
of  Russia  to  the  Allies.  If  anyone  can  study  the 
record  and  remain  satisfied,  he  must  be  singularly 
lacking  in  imagination.  Russia  is  not  even  yet 
irremediably  lost,  but  if  we  continue  the  fatuous 
policy  of  1917,  if  we  do  not  firmly  support  Presi- 
dent Wilson  in  his  obvious  attempt  to  render 
aid  and  comfort  to  a  stricken  nation,  we  shall 
lose  Russia  beyond  all  hope  of  recovery  in  this 
or  the  next  generation. 

The  second  blunder,  the  failure  to  give  encour- 
agement to  the  liberal  elements  in  Germany 
which  had  put  through  the  Reichstag  resolution  by 
a  vote  of  212  to  126,  was  less  obvious,  although 
almost  as  pernicious  in  its  effects.  In  moving 
the  resolution  Deputy  Fehrenbach,  of  the  Cen- 
ter, said :  "One  must  despair  of  humanity,  if  the 
people  in  enemy  countries  do  not  recognize 
the  note  of  honesty  in  this  Resolution.  If  the 
enemy  should  scorn  again  this  manifestation  for 
peace,  then,  of  course,  the  slaughter  must  con- 
tinue until  the  Entente  group  tire  of  sacrificing 
their  nations."  Yet  what  was  the  reception 
accorded  this  resolution?  On  July  26,  one  week 
after  its  passage,  even  so  fair  and  liberal  a  man 
as  Asquith  himself  made  the  blunder  of  refer- 
ring contemptuously  to  the  resolution  in  a  speech 
in  the  House  of  Commons.  And  his  attitude  was 
but  a  reflection  of  the  conventional  attitude  of 
the  Entente  countries.  The  Reichstag  itself  was 
jeered  at  as  a  "hall  of  echoes";  the  German 
Socialists  were  called  "Kaiser  Socialists."  In  a 
word,  Germany  was  mocked  for  her  absence  of 
democracy,  yet  when  the  more  decent  men  in 
the  government  made  their  first  rather  feeble 
and  timid  step  towards  democracy,  they  were 
reproached  for  not  having  gone  the  whole  way. 
It  was  precisely  like  condemning  a  man  for  giv- 
ing up  whiskey  because  all  his  life  he  had  been 
a  drunkard.  This  error,  too,  President  Wilson 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


295 


has  tried  to  rectify  in  his  explicit  appeal  to 
the  makers  of  that  resolution  in  his  first  two 
addresses  of  1918. 

The  third  mistake,  not  allowing  the  Stock- 
holm conference  to  meet,  is  already  costing  us 
almost  as  much  as  the  other  two.  "Ninety-nine 
per  cent  of  all  the  peoples  looked  with  longing 
and  hope  to  Stockholm.  If  France  and  Great 
Britain  renounce  annexation  and  Germany  insists 
thereon,  we  shall  have  a  revolution  in  the  coun- 
try." So  said  Scheideman  in  the  German  Reichs- 
tag on  May  15,  1917.  On  May  28,  the  organ- 
ized Socialists  of  France  accepted  the  invitation 
to  the  Stockholm  conference.  On  June  1,  1917 
the  Council  of  Workmen  and  Soldiers'  Deputies 
issued  a  new  appeal  to  the  Socialists  and  workers 
of  the  world  to  go  to  Stockholm.  On  June  6, 
1917  the  organized  Socialists  of  Italy  accepted 
the  invitation.  On  August  10,  1917  the  British 
Labor  Party,  on  the  advice  of  Arthur  Henderson, 
voted  to  attend  the  conference.  Yet  early  in 
August  Samuel  Gompers,  presuming  to  speak  for 
American  labor,  refused  to  send  delegates  to  the 
conference;  and  on  August  13,  1917  the  British 
government,  following  the  American  govern- 
ment's lead,  denied  passports  to  the  delegates, 
and  a  day  later  France  followed  suit.  Whether 
such  a  conference  would  today  be  similarly 
flouted  is  perhaps  doubtful.  It  is  clearer  now 
than  it  was  in  1917  that  if  the  labor  and  peoples 
of  the  world  want  to  acquaint  the  German  peo- 
ple with  the  opinion  held  of  them  outside  their 
own  country,  we  stand  a  better  chance  to  do  it 
by  talking  to  them  directly  than  by  addressing 
them  through  the  intermediary  of  their  lying  gov- 
ernment. 

Such  is  the  record  of  1917,  a  tragic  year 
indeed  for  democracy.  It  must  be  plain  by  now 
that  we  cannot  win  this  war  by  force  of  arms 
alone.  If  it  is  not  a  war  of  ideas,  it  is  a  war 
without  meaning  and  purpose.  But  if  it  is  a  war 
between  two  conflicting  attitudes  of  viewing  the 
world,  what  is  our  ultimate  goal?  Eventually 
we  shall  have  to  capture  the  hearts  and  minds 
of  the  German  people.  Even  though  we  hoist 
our  standards  in  Berlin  and  march  triumphantly 
through  Potsdam,  we  shall  have  lost  the  war 
unless  we  have  achieved  that  moral  capture. 
Even  though  millions  more  wade  through  blood 
and  suffering,  unless  at  the  end  Germany  has 
become  liberalized  and  has  acquired  a  govern- 
ment that  can  be  trusted  in  a  community  of 
nations,  those  that  have  laid  down  their  lives 
so  generously  and  fearlessly  will  have  laid  them 
down  in  vain.  The  very  ghosts  of  our  dead  will 


mock  us  for  our  failure  if  no  cleaner  and  more 
decent  system  of  international  relations  is  cre- 
ated as  a  result  of  this  war.  Already  they 
demand  of  us  a  nobler  record  than  that  of  1917. 
It  is  not  enough  to  punish  Germany  for  her  sins  ; 
we  must  win  her  people  in  spirit  and  purpose. 
We  cannot  begin  the  plans  for  that  campaign 
too  soon.  We  cannot  examine  our  own  democ- 
racies too  critically  or  too  severely.  We  cannot 
forget  that  it  will  be  impossible  to  confer  on  a 
people  by  the  sword  an  idealism  of  which  we 
ourselves  are  only  the  half-hearted  champions. 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


New  Tlays  and  a  New  Theory 

PROBLEMS    OF    THE    PLAYWRIGHT.      By    Clayton 
Hamilton.     Holt;  $1.60. 

SACRIFICE,   and    Other   Plays.     By   Rabindranath 
Tagore.     Macmillan;  $1.50. 
THREE   SHORT  PLAYS:    Rococo,   Vote   by  Ballot, 
Farewell  to  the  Theatre.     By  Granville  Barker. 
Little,  Brown;  $1.00. 

Two  BELGIAN  PLAYS:  Mother  Nature  and  Prog- 
ress. By  Gustave  Vanzype.  With  an  introduc- 
tion by  Barrett  H.  Clark.  Little,  Brown;  $1.50. 
The  fisher  for  dramatic  ideas  who  has  cast  his 
net  by  publishers'  coasts  finds  little  to  hearten 
him  this  season.  There  is  Clayton  Hamilton's 
"Problem  of  the  Playwright" — it  is  a  sizable, 
but  not  a  flavory  fish;  Rabindranath  Tagore's 
"Sacrifice"  has  the  flavor  of  remote  seas,  but  one 
finds  that  one's  appetite  for  it  does  not  persist; 
Granville  Barker's  "Three  Plays"  is  long  in  the 
head,  bony  in  the  middle,  but  has  a  nice  bit  near 
the  tail — also  there  is  some  sport  in  landing 
it;  then  Gustave  Vanzype's  "Two  Belgian 
Plays,"  while  not  a  very  important  catch,  has 
flesh  and  flavor  that  make  it  better  than  medi- 
ocre. On  the  whole  the  haul  is  not  at  all  ex- 
citing. 

And  now  to  particularize.  "Problems  of  the 
Playwright"  is  a  reporter's  note-book.  It  is  in- 
telligent and  conscientious,  but  of  the  kind  of 
criticism  that  one  finds  in  every  page  of  Bernard 
Shaw's  dramatic  essays — the  kind  of  criticism 
that  immediately  puts  you  into  possession  of 
dramatic  standards — there  is  not  a  gleam.  Clay- 
ton Hamilton  simply  gives  us  his  reports  on  the 
American  Theatre  for  the  past  two  years.  Ar- 
resting things  in  connection  with  dramatic  the- 
ory are  sometimes  given,  but  one  invariably  finds 
them  enclosed  between  quotation  marks.  "A 
play  is  a  more  or  less  rapidly-developing  crisis 
in  destiny  or  circumstance,  and  a  dramatic  scene 
is  a  crisis  within  a  crisis,  clearly  furthering  the 


296 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


ultimate  event.  The  drama  may  be  called  the 
art  of  crisis,  as  fiction  is  the  art  of  gradual  de- 
velopment." This  saying  is  interesting  and  really 
instructive.  But  it  is  William  Archer  being 
quoted  by  Clayton  Hamilton.  He  is  combat- 
ing Brunetiere's  generally  accepted  assertion  that 
the  essential  element  of  drama  is  a  struggle 
between  human  wills.  Not  rinding  this  theory 
always  applicable,  Mr.  Archer  puts  forward  the 
theory  of  "more  or  less  rapidly-developing 
crisis."  Clayton  Hamilton  does  not  find  Arch- 
er's theory  invariably  applicable  either.  This 
leads  him  to  put  forward  his  own  theory  of  con- 
trasts: "A  play,"  he  says,  "becomes  more  and 
more  dramatic  in  proportion  to  the  multiplicity 
of  contrasts  it  contains  within  itself." 

This  idea  too  is  interesting  and  instructive. 
But  it  is  not  really  a  defining  idea  as  William 
Archer's  is.  Clayton  Hamilton's  theory  of  con- 
trasts would  cover  any  interesting  piece  of  lit- 
erature. One  could  say  only  of  a  play,  "It  is  a 
more  or  less  rapidly-developing  crisis."  But 
one  could  say  of  an  epic  or  a  novel  or  an  ode, 
"The  one  indispensable  element  of  success  .  .  . 
is  the  element  of  contrast."  Then  one  could 
point  out  the  very  marked  contrast  between 
Achilles  and  Hector,  between  Dante  and  the 
blessed  souls,  between  Sancho  Panza  and  Don 
Quixote,  and  in  the  "Ode  to  the  Skylark"  or 
the  "Ode  to  the  Nightingale"  the  poets'  con- 
trast between  their  own  joyless  state  and  the 
happiness  of  the  bird  that  seems  destined  to  sing 
for  all  time. 

There  is  a  comment  of  Arthur  Pinero's  re- 
peated in  "Problems  of  the  Playwright"  that  is 
valuable  and  that  gives  us  a  standard.  Pinero 
makes  a  distinction  between  "strategy"  and  "tac- 
tics" in  playmaking.  Strategy  is  the  general 
laying-out  of  the  play,  and  tactics  is  the  craft 
of  getting  the  characters  on  and  off  the  stage, 
and  so  forth.  Such  a  distinction  opens  our  eyes 
to  what  is  a  real  plan  and  what  is  merely  a  de- 
vice. It  is  a  pity  that  Pinero  has  not  written 
a  book  of  dramatic  criticism.  One  feels  inclined 
to  say  that  one  would  give  several  of  his  plays 
for  such  a  book. 

One  very  intriguing  thing  about  "Problems  of 
the  Playwright"  comes  out  of  the  way  in  which 
Clayton  Hamilton  contrives  to  admire  the  most 
sharply  contrasted  types  of  playwright.  He  is 
devoted  to  Pinero — yes,  devoted:  he  takes  to 
him  as  one  takes  to  a  religious  belief.  But  he 
also  admires  Maeterlinck.  Now  how  can  a  man 
who  appreciates  the  internal  drama  of  "Agla- 


vaine  and  Selysette"  accept  the  mechanics  of 
"The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray"?  If  there  was 
ever  a  play  that  was  an  insult  to  the  imaginative 
and  spiritually  informed  mind  it  is  that  bad 
play  of  Pinero's.  And  yet  one  beholds  Clayton 
Hamilton  rising  off  his  knees  in  the  conventicle 
of  Pinero  to  give  a  benediction  in  Maeterlinck's 
grove.  One  is  left  to  wonder  how  it  can  be 
done. 

If  we  had  been  told  that  the  five  plays  in  the 
volume  called  "Sacrifice"  had  been  written  by 
the  pupils  in  Rabindranath  Tagore's  seminary 
we  could  easily  accept  the  statement.  Not  one 
of  the  plays  given  in  the  volume  is  at  all  on  a 
level  with  "The  Post  Office,"  or  "The  King  of 
the  Dark  Chamber,"  or  "Chitra."  The  persons 
in  these  five  plays  have  the  indistinctness  of 
character  that  is  in  romances  composed  by  chil- 
dren. And  the  dooms  meted  out  to  these  per- 
sons are  just  such  dooms  as  imaginative  children 
would  be  touched  by.  For  each  of  the  plays 
there  is  a  philosophic  setting,  but  then  the  chil- 
dren of  a  philosophic  people  might  lisp  in  such 
terms.  There  is  a  suggestion  that  the  play  called 
"Sacrifice"  is  a  pronouncement  upon  the  pres- 
ent disaster  to  civilization.  One  can  hardly 
accept  it  as  such.  Indeed  it  is  the  child's  detach- 
ment that  is  on  each  one  of  them  that  makes 
these  plays  cherishable. 

Many  plays  published  in  book  form  are 
dramatic  without  being  theatrical,  but  it  might 
be  said  of  the  three  plays  that  Granville  Barker 
presents  us  with  that  they  are  theatrical  without 
being  dramatic.  They  are  not,  of  course,  the- 
atrical in  the  sense  of  being  meretriciously  ap- 
pealing; they  are  theatrical  in  the  sense  that  they 
are  written  with  the  two  eyes  of  the  author 
fixed  on  the  stage  and  that  they  actually  demand 
a  looker-on.  Take,  for  instance,  the  scene  in 
"Rococo"  where  the  vicar  is  on  the  carpet  with 
Reginald's  knee  holding  him  down  while  the 
vicar's  sister  makes  interventions.  What  is 
dramatic  in  this  scene  does  not  come  into  the 
written  word.  The  breaking  of  the  rococo  vase, 
too,  is  only  half  dramatic  in  the  text ;  it  would 
be  a  sensation  on  the  stage,  but  it  is  a  sensation 
at  a  remove  in  the  book.  "Vote  by  Ballot"  like 
"Rococo"  is  mordant,  and  like  "Rococo"  the 
best  that  is  in  it  does  not  come  out  through  the 
dialogue.  The  truth  is  that  these  two  plays 
have  the  matter  of  the  unusual,  but  not  the  fine, 
short  story,  and  that  we  look  for  something  more 
filled  with  life  and  experience  in  plays  presented 
to  us  in  a  volume. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


297 


"Farewell  to  the  Theatre,"  however,  does  hold 
more  than  the  experience  that  is  in  the  unusual 
short  story.  But  one  is  left  wondering  if  all 
Granville  Barker's  adroitness  could  make  it 
effective  on  the  stage.  For  "Farewell  to  the  The- 
atre" is  a  dialogue  only — indeed  one  might  de- 
scribe it  as  an  Imaginary  Conversation  between 
a  Celebrated  Actress  and  her  Constant  Lover. 
A  poetry  that,  as  it  would  seem,  should  have  been 
very  hard  to  disengage,  comes  out  of  this  dia- 
logue : 

.  .  .  I  found  that  the  number  of  my  looking- 
glasses  grew.  Till  one  day  I  counted  them  .  .  . 
and  big  and  small  there  were  forty-nine.  That  day 
I'd  bought  the  forty-ninth — an  old  Venetian  mirror 
.  •  .  so  popular  I  was  in  those  days  and  felt  so 
rich.  Yes  .  .  .  and  then  I  used  to  work  out  my 
parts  in  front  of  every  mirror  in  turn.  One  would 
make  me  prettier  and  one  more  dignified.  One  could 
give  me  pathos  and  one  gave  me  power.  Now  there 
was  a  woman  used  to  come  and  sew  for  me.  You 
know!  I  charitably  gave  her  jobs  .  .  .  took  an 
interest  in  her  "case"  .  .  .  encouraged  her  to  talk 
her  troubles  out  for  comfort's  sake.  I  wasn't  inter- 
ested. .  .  I  didn.'t  care  a  bit.  .  .  It  didn't  com- 
fort her.  She  talked  to  me  because  she  thought  I 
liked  it.  But  oddly,  it  was  just  sewing  she  liked  and 
she  sewed  well  and  sewing  did  her  good  .  .  . 
sewing  for  me.  You  remember  my  Lily  Prince  in 
"The  Backwater"? 

Yes. 

My  first  real  failure. 

I  liked  it. 

My  first  dead  failure  .  .  .  dear  Public.  Do  you 
know  why?  I  hadn't  found  her  in  the  mirrors.  I'd 
found  her  in  that  woman  as  she  sewed. 

I  didn't  think  it  a  failure. 

Well  .  .  .  the  dear  Public  wouldn't  pay  to  see 
it  ...  and  we've  found  no  other  word.  But  I 
knew  if  that  was  failure  now  I  meant  to  fail  .  .  . 
and  I  never  looked  into  a  mirror  again.  Except,  of 
course,  to  do  my  hair  and  paint  my  poor  face  and 
comically  comfort  myself  sometimes  ...  to  say 
.  .  .  "Dorothy,  as  mugs  go  it's  not  such  an  ugly 
mug."  I  took  the  looking-glasses  down.  .  .  I 
turned  their  faces  to  the  wall.  For  1  had  won  free 
from  the  shadowed  emptiness  of  self.  But  nobody 
understood.  Do  you  ? 

There  is  no  struggle  of  human  wills  in  this 
conversation  between  Dorothy  Taverner  and  Ed- 
ward McLenegan;  there  is  a  crisis,  however, 
although  it  is  hardly  marked.  And  because  there 
is  a  crisis  there  "Farewell  to  the  Theatre"  exists 
as  a  piece  of  drama. 

Gustave  Vanzype,  the  Belgian  dramatist,  has 
obviously  been  influenced  by  the  French  play- 
wright Curel,  whose  "La  Nouvelle  Idole"  has 
been  produced  in  New  York  by  the  French  The- 
atre. But  the  Belgian  has  a  distinctive  accent. 
Indeed  in  the  two  plays  presented  in  this  volume, 
in  "Mother  Nature"  and  in  "Progress,"  he  sug- 
gests a  richer  human  life  than  does  Curel.  Both 
wrote  thesis  plays,  but  in  the  Belgian  plays  the 


thesis  is  imposed  upon  humanity.  In  the  case  of 
"La  Nouvelle  Idole"  humanity  is  straitened  into 
a  thesis.  In  "Mother  Nature"  an  intellectual 
(Olivier)  degrades  his  wife  Renee:  he  will  not 
share  his  life  with  her  and  he  will  not  permit  her 
to  have  children.  In  the  end  Renee  goes  to  a 
lover  (Meryac),  but  not  before  she  assures  her- 
self that  her  escape  is  willed  not  from  weakness 
but  from  strength.  She  obeys  Mother  Nature 
(La  Souveraine)  in  her  choice.  In  "Progress" 
there  is  a  conflict  between  the  two  generations 
represented  by  the  physicians  Dr.  Therat  and  his 
son-in-law  Dr.  Leglay.  The  younger  finds  out 
that  the  elder's  methods  are  not  advancing  and 
that  they  are  becoming  destructive  to  life.  He 
breaks  with  him  and  in  doing  so  breaks  with  his 
wife,  who  is  devoted  to  her  father's  reputation. 
The  generation  that  succeeds  Dr.  Leglay  recon- 
ciles the  methods  of  each. 

The  distinctive  element  that  Vanzype  brings 
into  the  thesis  play  is  a  strong  sense  of  home  and 
of  family  life.  The  action  of  both  plays  takes 
place  within  a  family  circle.  Vanzype  evidently 
belongs  to  that  race  of  artists  who  loved  to  paint 
ordinary  groups  and  homely  interiors.  His 
people  are  types  rather  than  characters,  but  the 
strong  sense  that  he  has  of  their  solid  surround- 
ings makes  it  possible  for  the  dramatist  to  give 
them  an  accent  and  a  complexion. 

PADRAIC  COLUM. 


"A  Queer  Fellow" 

BOOTH  TARKINGTON.    By  Robert  Cortes  Holliday. 
Doubleday,  Page;     $1.25. 

Remy  de  Gourmont  called  the  critic  a  "crea- 
teur  des  valeurs"  and  contended  that  Sainte- 
Beuve  had  no  small  share  in  "making"  the  poets 
of  the  French  romantic  movement  by  imposing 
them  upon  the  public  at  his  own  valuation  of 
their  talents  and  genius.  Usually,  however,  it  is 
the  public  that  creates  its  own  values.  Criticism, 
as  we  have  it  today  in  the  absence  of  a  Sainte- 
Beuve,  does  little  more  in  the  long  run  than 
echo  popular  approval,  confirming  or  substantiat- 
ing it.  Now  and  then  a  critic  essays  some  ra- 
tionale of  this  taste — seeks  to  explain  why,  in  his 
opinion,  such  and  such  a  novelist  has  achieved 
success.  Even  this  is  something,  and  one  wishes 
it  were  attempted  oftener  in  America  on  the  scale 
of  Mr.  Holliday's  clever  and  candid  study  of 
Booth  Tarkington. 

In   England    [he  writes   in   his   "Foreword"]    it  seems 
to  be  quite  the  fashion  to  get  up  all  the  while  very 


298 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


respectable  little  biographical  and  critical  affairs  about 
Mr.  Wells  and  Mr.  Chesterton,  Mr.  Shaw  and  Mr. 
Galsworthy.  And  we  do  have  knocking  about  over 
here  admirable  little  books  about  foreign  writers  such 
as  Conrad,  Anatole  France,  and  the  one-time  Ameri- 
can Mr.  James.  But  certainly  we  have  rather  neg- 
lected to  pry  into  living  home  talent. 

Now  that  Mr.  Holliday  has  made  the  start, 
perhaps  others  will  follow  and  we  shall  have 
similar  studies  of  Theodore  Dreiser,  Robert 
Chambers,  Edith  Wharton,  Mary  S.  Watts,  and 
Gertrude  Atherton.  After  all,  it  is  just  as  well 
to  make  the  most  of  what  we  possess;  and  even 
if  the  material  at  times  seems  somewhat  thin,  and 
the  writer  a  little  ill  at  ease  in  his  effort  to 
thicken  it,  something  will  no  doubt  be  gained  if 
only  in  the  useful  practice  of  the  critical  genre 
which,  as  M.  de  Gourmont  implied,  is  as  im- 
portant in  its  way  as  the  creative.  Indeed,  it  may 
itself  become  entirely  creative  in  the  hands  of  a 
critic  who,  like  Mr.  Holliday,  is  also  something 
of  a  literary  artist  in  his  own  right,  and  who 
can  combine  sound  analysis  with  the  ability  to 
construct  out  of  the  qualities  and  characteristics 
thus  disengaged  a  complete  and  well  proportioned 
portrait  of  the  man  and  his  work. 

In  the  present  instance  it  is  a  portrait  some- 
what fantastic  and  by  no  means  altogether  flat- 
tering. For  Mr.  Holliday  has  accepted  seri- 
ously, though  with  a  light  heart,  his  task  of 
interpretation;  and  if  he  has  made  the  most  of 
Mr.  Tarkington's  good  points — as  he  was  bound 
to  /do  if  he  was  to  justify  the  job  at  all — he  has 
by  no  means  failed  to  stress  the  weak  points  of 
this  popular  favorite  among  contemporary  Amer- 
ican novelists.  As  such,  Mr.  Tarkington  con- 
stitutes a  somewhat  peculiar  case.  We  may  take 
with  what  qualification  we  will  his  indignant 
denial  that  he  has  ever  deliberately  courted  pub- 
lic favor;  he  has,  nevertheless,  clearly  and  to  an 
unusual  degree  tried  to  please  himself  as  well  as 
his  readers.  Even  when  most  superficial  in  mat- 
ter and  most  artificial  in  manner,  perhaps  most 
of  all  at  such  times,  he  has  shown  an  uncommon 
concern  for  at  least  certain  aspects  of  his  art 
as  a  writer.  This  is  the  more  remarkable  in 
that  among  the  many  conventions  which  he  im- 
plicitly accepts  and  which,  as  Mr.  Holliday 
points  out,  make  him  so  markedly  a  man — an 
American  man — of  his  time,  none  is  more  pro- 
nounced than  his  ostentatious  aversion  to  any- 
thing in  the  least  savoring  of  the  "artistic." 

His  little  short  of  violent  reaction  to  the  whole 
idea  of  the  "literary"  atmosphere  is  a  subject  for 
.  .  .  the  literary  alienist.  His  friends  know  that 
at  public  dinners  he  always  "winches,"  as  he  puts  it, 
at  every  oratorical  reference  to  "literature." 


Yet  this  is  the  man  who  on  leaving  college  made 
his  debut  in  a  fin-de-siecle  little  magazine  called 
"John-a-Dreams"  and  who  still  in  his  conver- 
sation refers  more  frequently  to  the  "artist"  than 
.anyone,  "except  a  painter  or  two,"  whom  Mr. 
Holliday  has  ever  heard! 

The  modern  painter  himself  is  not  above  this 
particular  form  of  insincerity  and  affectation.  I 
know  one  who  makes  a  boast  that  he  would 
rather  be  taken  for  a  professional  baseball  player 
than  anything  else.  Of  course  his  is  a  more 
or  less  inevitable  recoil  from  the  velvet  jacket 
and  long  hair  pose  of  the  preceding  generation. 
But  may  we  not  express  the  hope  that  the  time 
will  come — and  soon! — when  both  painter  and 
writer  will  be  content  to  be  simply  themselves 
and  nobody  else?  Certainly  Mr.  Tarkington's 
personality,  as  Mr.  Holliday  presents  it  to  us, 
would  be  far  more  engaging  without  this  taint 
of  morbidity  and  self-consciousness,  which  seeks 
expression  also  in  a  pretentious  disclaimer  of 
"highbrow"  interests.  It  is  difficult  to  find  any- 
thing either  amusing  or  edifying  in  the  anec- 
dote of  his  encounter  with  a  friend  whom  he  had 
not  seen  for  some  time  and  who,  in  the  interim, 
had  become  a  professor  at  an  Eastern  college. 
After  their  first  greetings  Tarkington  remarked 
musingly,  "Let  me  see,  what  is  it  you  are  doing 
now?" — then  added  quickly,  "Oh  yes,  I  remem- 
ber now.  You  are  doing  the  serious." 

Something  of  the  undergraduate's  supercilious- 
ness towards  the  faculty  survives  in  this  jejune 
flippancy,  which  is  therefore  not  without  a  cer- 
tain significance.  For  all  his  days  Mr.  Tarking- 
ton, like  the  late  Richard  Harding  Davis,  has 
remained  an  undergraduate  in  his  outlook  on  life. 
The  world  as  he  views  it  is  an  essentially  unreal 
world,  and  his  realism  is  no  less  romantic  than 
his  romance  itself.  Mr.  Holliday  professes  to 
trace  a  development  in  his  work  as  a  novelist, 
a  growth  in  seriousness  and  human  interest,  but 
we  are  unable  to  follow.  The  mere  abandon- 
ment of  a  complicated  plot  at  one  point  in  his 
career  proves  nothing  except  that  he  is  as  ready 
to  accept  one  convention  as  another,  and  that 
without  being  imitative  in  any  strict  or  slavish 
sense,  he  is  yet  responsive  to  the  current  changes 
in  literary  fashions.  Mr.  Tarkington's  lack  of 
any  real  grip  upon  life  is  perhaps  even  more  ap- 
parent in  "The  Turmoil"  than  in  his  earlier 
works,  just  because  the  stark  simplicity  of  its 
plan  throws  into  still  higher  relief  his  complete 
inability  to  create  characters  of  a  sufficient  depth 
or  complexity  to  make  them  either  credible  or 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


299 


interesting.  It,  no  less  than  "The  Gentleman 
from  Indiana"  and  "Monsieur  Beaucaire," 
strikes  one  as  the  sort  of  book  that  might  per- 
fectly well  have  been  written  by  a  clever  college 
boy  who  knew  nothing  of  life  save  by  divination, 
and  for  whom  literary  art  consisted  exclusively 
in  the  cultivation  of  a  sometimes  heightened  and 
colored  style.  It  is  noticeable  that  the  melodrama 
which  forms  an  important  element  in  so  much 
of  Mr.  Tarkington's  earlier  work  is  by  no  means 
eliminated  from  "The  Turmoil."  It  has  merely 
been  transferred  from  the  plot  itself  to  the  de- 
scriptive passages,  and  to  the  idea  of  modern 
industrialism  which  supplies  the  emotional  at- 
mosphere. 

Compared  with  "The  Turmoil,"  "Seventeen," 
which  I  believe  appeared  the  same  year,  is  a 
masterpiece  and  certainly  marks  the  height  of 
Mr.  Tarkington's  accomplishment  to  the  present. 
The  one  type  of  character  into  which  he  has  thus 
far  shown  any  real  insight  is  that  of  the  small 
boy  and  adolescent  youth — and  there,  perhaps,  be- 
cause he  has  had  to  depend  less  upon  imagination 
than  memory.  The  one  being  of  whom  each  of 
us  is  certain  to  know  a  little  something  is  him- 
self, at  the  different  stages  of  his  development, 
while  at  the  same  time  there  are  no  experiences 
which  men  and  women  share  so  completely  and 
universally  as  those  of  youth  and  childhood,  be- 
fore lives  and  souls  alike  draw  apart  and  become 
"specialized."  Mr.  Tarkington,  of  course,  by 
no  means  invented  this  boy  genre,  which  has 
been  one  of  the  most  popular  in  recent  litera- 
ture. But  I  can  think  of  no  one  else  who  has 
exploited  it  at  once  so  seriously  and  so  systemat- 
ically. "Seventeen"  is  a  good  deal  more  than  a 
mere  funny  book,  which  is  the  aspect  under  which 
Mr.  Holliday  principally  views  it.  It  is  a  study 
of  adolescence  that  is  searching  almost  to  the 
point  of  cruelty — cruelty  such  as  Flaubert  and 
Maupassant  have  been  accused  of  in  their  wield- 
ing of  the  scalpel  upon  adult  subjects.  The  style, 
too,  in  this  particular  department  of  Mr.  Tark- 
ington's work  is  admirable.  Indeed,  one  is 
tempted  to  say  that  whereas  in  other  depart- 
ments he  has  displayed  styles,  here  he  has  achieved 
Style.  The  question  of  Mr.  Tarkington's  fu- 
ture career  as  a  novelist  is  largely  a  question  of 
his  ability  to  carry  over  this  singularly  simple, 
nervous,  and  forceful  manner  into  his  other  work, 
as  a  result  of  increasing  insight  into  other,  and 
more  mature,  types  of  character. 

WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY. 


Rebecca  IFest — Novelist 


THE  RETURN  OF  THE  SOLDIER.    By  Rebecca  West. 
Century;  $1. 

What  first  interests  me  in  this  story  is  its 
length,  or  rather  its  brevity:  all  is  done  within 
one  hundred  and  eighty-five  pages.  We  have 
here  an  acute  compressed  exemplar  of  the  form 
lately  advocated  by  the  Folletts — that  mode  of 
novel-writing  which  has  produced  James's  "The 
Spoils  of  Poynton"  and  Mrs.  Wharton's  "Ethan 
Frome."  Say  they:  "The  novel  as  it  is  best 
written  today  has  the  sharp  focus,  the  unity  in 
purpose  and  point  of  view,  of  the  short  story. 
The  change  came  about  through  the  invention 
of  an  intermediate  form,  the  kind  of  two-hun- 
dred-page narrative  which  results,  not  from  fore- 
shortening the  novel  into  the  novelette,  but  from 
expanding  the  short  story  into  the  'novella.'  " 
Miss  West's  "novella"  is  an  episode,  a  situation 
involving  but  a  few  days — or  would  be,  were  it 
not  for  a  chronological  backthrow  which  provides 
perspective,  complications,  and  the  road  to  a 
highly  effective  climax. 

We  think,  at  the  start,  that  we  have  to  deal 
with  Rebecca  West  as  still  the  brisk  and  brusque 
young  radical  of  "The  Freewoman"  and  "The 
New  Republic,"  walking  through  life  in  a  trim 
tailor-made,  with  her  feet  setting  themselves 
down  firmly  and  her  elbows  in  vigorous  action. 
Well,  she  is  all  of  that — in  certain  phases  of  her 
social  criticism ;  but  she  is  much  more. 

Later  on  we  incline  to  image  Miss  West  as 
a  spirited  young  filly,  speeding  it  over  her  race 
track.  For  two-thirds  of  her  course  she  trots, 
true  to  form,  on  the  old  well-known  course, 
though  she  covers  it  with  a  quickened  stride ;  then 
comes  a  moment  of  tangled  hoofs  and  a  threat 
to  bolt  the  regular  track  and  to  finish  up  before 
the  judges'  stand  anyhow.  It  is  this  that  makes 
the  fifth  of  her  six  chapters,  which  is  crowded 
with  unskilled  transitions,  both  the  worst  and 
the  best;  surely  it  is  the  most  novel  and  moving. 

"The  Return  of  the  Soldier"  is  of  course  a 
war-story — a  story  of  shell-shock,  amnesia,  and 
the  suppressed  wish.  The  author  is  of  the  new 
day,  and  the  new  nomenclature  shall  not  fail. 
But  she  throws  out  a  decisive  arm  and  tames 
science  to  art — all  with  a  tense  economy  of  means 
that  helps  open  a  fresh  era  for  the  novel.  Shall 
the  returned  soldier  be  left  in  his  happy  penum- 
bra of  uncertainty  by  the  one  woman  out  of  his 
past  who  understood  and  satisfied  him,  or  shall  he 
be  cured  and  restored  to  the  slight-natured  wife 
who  never  satisfied  him  at  all?  Shall  the  worthy 


300 


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[March  28 


woman  make  the  sacrifice  for  the  unworthy  one, 
condemning  the  rescued  hero  to  face  the  future 
with  a  "dreadful,  decent  smile"? 

One's  sense  at  the  beginning  is  that  the  book 
may  be  a  contraption  ad  hoc:  it  indeed  derives 
from  the  war,  and  it  rests  on  a  combination  of 
circumstances  impossible  before  our  own  day; 
but  one  presently  perceives  that  it  is  animated 
by  a  higher  and  better  spirit,  and  one  willingly 
meets  the  applied  psychology  which,  exercised 
near  the  end  on  the  basis  of  homely  domestic 
detail,  brings  the  clouded  mind  safely  through 
the  labyrinth  and  throws  a  last  grateful  light  on 
a  memorable  and  essentially  lovable  heroine. 

It  is  in  the  social  setting  of  her  scene  that  Miss 
West  seems  most  her  radical  self.  Though  she 
loves  the  changing  aspects  of  nature  and  is  lav- 
ish with  vignettes  portraying  them,  she  is  severe 
upon  the  landscape-gardening  of  the  country- 
house  and  upon  all  its  implications.  A  border 
of  snowdrops  and  crocuses  has  no  aesthetic  rea- 
son: "its  use  is  purely  philosophic;  it  proclaims 
that  here  we  esteem  only  controlled  beauty,  that 
the  wild  will  not  have  its  way  within  our  gates, 
that  it  must  be  made  delicate  and  decorated  into 
felicity."  Yes,  most  of  the  people  in  this  story 
live  in  "the  impregnable  fort  of  a  gracious  life," 
and  have  but  scorn  for  the  sordid  dowdiness  of 
the  low-born  heroine  when  she  must  be  intro- 
duced into  its  choice  precincts.  Opposed  to  her 
stands  the  mistress  of  the  place;  she  is  of  those 
who  are  "aware  that  it  is  their  civilizing  mission 
to  flash  the  jewel  of  their  beauty  before  all  men, 
so  that  they  shall  desire  it  and  work  to  get  the 
wealth  to  buy  it,  and  thus  be  seduced  by  a  pres- 
ent appetite  to  a  tilling  of  the  earth  that  serves 
the  future."  And  the  curse  of  life  under  such 
general  conditions  is  quietly  but  memorably 
expressed  by  the  lady  (under  process  of  reforma- 
tion) who  tells  the  tale:  "People  like  me,  who 
are  not  artists,  are  never  sure  about  people  they 
don't  know." 

Miss  West's  diction  (I  may  even  call  it  style) 
is  of  a  richness — a  tempestuous,  tangled  richness 
that  keeps  one  interested  and  excited.  She  lav- 
ishes it  alike  on  her  landscape  and  on  the  psy- 
chology of  her  people.  Truth  to  tell,  as  regards 
this  last,  she  is  her  own  brusque,  peremptory  self, 
and  sometimes  does  rather  cursorily  what,  with 
due  regard  to  the  mysterious  temple  of  the  human 
mind,  might  justly  enlist  a  little  more  leisure 
and  finesse.  But  she  has  set  her  own  limits  and 
done  her  best — a  pretty  good  best — within  them. 

HENRY  B.  FULLER. 


BRIEFS  ox  NEW  BOOKS 


COLORADO,  THE   QUEEN   JEWEL  OF  THE 
ROCKIES.      By    Mae   Lucy    Baggs.      Page; 

$3.50. 

FLORIDA,  THE  LAND  OF  ENCHANTMENT. 

By  Nevin  O.  Winter.     Page;  $3.50. 

Give  the  imagination  the  task  of  constructing 
an  unexperienced  whole  out  of  the  bits  of  evi- 
dence at  hand,  and  it  is  likely  to  play  strange 
tricks.  A  certain  writer  confesses  that  he  was 
bitterly  disappointed  at  his  first  sight  of  a  swan 
— it  was  so  different  from  the  bird  he  had  recon- 
structed on  the  basis  of  the  china  cygnet  that 
served  as  a  match  safe  in  the  farmhouse  where 
he  had  spent  his  boyhood.  There  are  probably 
not  a  few  people  to  whom,  similarly,  Colorado 
appears  in  the  mind's  eye  as  a  wilderness  of 
highly  colored  post-card  mountains,  with  cog- 
ways  running  to  the  summits;  or  to  whom  Flor- 
ida, if  not  the  paradise  depicted  on  land-agents' 
pamphlets,  is  a  vivified  woodcut  of  the  Ever- 
glades, with  a  lambrequin  of  Spanish  moss  and 
reptiles.  Perhaps  in  no  respect  is  the  average 
American  more  deficient  than  in  the  geography 
of  his  own  land.  As  an  aid  to  his  imagination, 
accordingly,  the  "See  America  First"  series,  of 
which  these  two  books  are  the  latest  volumes, 
must  prove  invaluable.  If  the  books  themselves 
hardly  justify  their  sub-titles  any  more  than  a 
chamber  of  commerce  bulletin  ever  paints  a  con- 
vincing "Wonder  City,"  they  yet  furnish  abun- 
dant material  from  which  the  active  imagination 
of  the  reader  can  reconstruct  the  true  wonder- 
lands in  which  to  go  aroaming. 

The  prospective  tourist  or  the  rocking-chair 
traveler  will  find  "Florida"  and  "Colorado" 
complete  guides.  Both  books  follow  practically 
the  same  plan,  showing  the  rich  historic  back- 
grounds against  which  the  modern  life  of  the 
states  is  lived,  and  depicting  that  modern  life  in 
its  most  interesting  phases.  The  chief  emphasis 
(not  unnaturally,  since  one  of  the  chief  indus- 
tries of  both  states  is  the  tourist)  is  placed  on 
playgrounds.  "Florida,"  while  not  neglecting 
Palm  Beach,  will  be  found  especially  interesting 
and  valuable  for  its  descriptions  of  wild  life;  and 
the  account  of  Colorado's  mountain  sports  is 
enough  to  awaken  a  long-stifled  wanderlust.  The 
fact  that  the  books  have  small  literary  merit  is 
not  greatly  in  their  disfavor.  One  could  wish  that 
the  writer  had  not  used  "glimpse"  as  a  verb, 
or  had  been  a  little  more  careful  with  their  rela- 
tive pronouns ;  but  one  can  recommend  the  books, 
in  spite  of  crudities  of  style,  as  bits  of  honest 
workmanship,  brimming  over  with  facts,  attrac- 
tively printed  and  bound,  well  illustrated,  and 
presenting  each  a  businesslike  bibliography  for 
the  reader  who  wishes  to  travel  further. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


301 


A  DIARY  OF  THE  RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION. 

By    James    L.    Houghteling,    Jr.      Dodd, 

Mead;  $1.25. 

From  January  20  to  Easter,  1917  Mr. 
Houghteling  was  either  in  Petrograd  or  Mos- 
cow— or  on  the  train  between  the  two  cities. 
Although  this  is  only  the  start  of  the  Revolution 
— indeed,  the  really  dangerous  revolution  to  pro- 
letarian control  did  not  come  until  last  fall — 
it  is  the  most  dramatic  period,  the  period  one 
would  give  most  to  have  seen.  But  it  is  not  an 
especially  dramatic  period  in  Mr.  Houghteling's 
narrative,  which  is  just  what  it  says  it  is,  a  diary. 
He  sees  some  of  the  street  fighting;  he  witnesses 
the  perverse  and  imperturbable  manner  in  which 
the  ordinary  activities  of  everyday  life  insisted 
on  continuing;  he  talks  with  people  on  the  train, 
in  the  hotel,  at  street  corners.  Perhaps  if  Mr. 
Houghteling  had  made  pretenses  to  a  subtle  lit- 
erary style  instead  of  writing  straightforward 
description  his  story  would  have  lost  most  of 
its  present  genuine  effectiveness  and  interest. 
For  that  effectiveness  comes  largely  from  the  nat- 
uralness and  matter-of-factness  of  Mr.  Hough- 
teling's tone,  its  very  lack,  as  it  were,  of  the 
theatrical  and  melodramatic.  A  revolution  loses 
most  of  its  terrors  under  such  a  treatment ;  it 
becomes  almost  temptingly  easy  and  conven- 
tional. On  March  13  the  author  writes:  "It 
was  growing  dark  and  we  could  not  make  out 
who  were  skirmishing,  but  the  thought  surged 
in  upon  us  that  we  might  be  taken  for  police- 
men. We  were  near  home  and  by  unanimous 
consent  adjourned  for  the  day.  The  streets  of 
the  city  are  no  place  for  an  innocent  bystander 
tonight."  Fortunately  Mr.  Houghteling  was 
content  to  be  an  innocent  bystander  with  respect 
to  interpretation  of  events.  He  wisely  remains 
a  reporter.  Yet  one  report  we  cannot  read  but 
with  pride — the  eagerness  of  the  Provisional 
Government '  to  be  recognized  by  the  United 
States,  and  the  historic  fact  that  we  were  the 
first  nation  to  accord  that  recognition. 

CREATORS    OF    DECORATIVE    STYLES.      By 
Walter  A.  Dyer.    Doubleday,  Page ;  $3. 

Mr.  Dyer's  book  reminds  one  of  Oscar  Wilde's 
accusation  that  we  love  art  but  do  not  sufficiently 
honor  our  craftsman.  In  fact  it  has  chiefly  been 
the  epigrams  in  Wilde's  "Decorative  Arts  in 
America"  which  have  been  remembered,  with  the 
result  that  the  book's  effectiveness  in  the  drawing- 
room  has  largely  robbed  it  of  its  value  as  inspira- 
tion in  the  workshop.  Mr.  Dyer,  however, 
wisely  does  not  attempt  to  draw  morals  from 
his  clear  and  concise  history  of  our  decorative 
styles  and  their  leaders.  Yet  he  has  avoided  the 
pitfall  of  describing  all  styles  or  all  decorators — 
an  attempt  which  has  cast  so  many  interpreta- 


tive efforts  on  the  statistical  junk-heap — and  he 
has  at  the  same  time  resolutely  refused  to  take 
a  short  cut  to  taste.  The  evolution  of  the  styles 
in  England  from  1603  to  1800,  which  have  given 
a  distinctive  stamp  to  English  and  American 
social  life,  is  developed  so  that  it  is  impossible 
to  read  his  twelve  chapters  without  drawing  an 
inference.  English  style  is  our  heritage,  and 
others  are  but  exoticisms.  When  Mr.  Dyer 
chooses  eleven  decorators  from  Inigo  Jones  to 
Sheraton,  we  can  question  only  his  choice  of 
Chambers,  and  this  is  effaced  in  the  joy  of  escap- 
ing Isaac  Ware  and  William  Kent.  It  is  not  a 
book  telling  the  component  parts  of  all  style,* 
how  to  recognize  them  in  polite  society,  and  how 
to  imitate  them  on  a  small  income:  hints  as  to 
the  adaptability  to  the  present  are  left,  as  they 
should  be,  to  the  personality  of  the  reader.  It  is 
a  book  not  only  for  those  Americans  whose  social 
position  forces  them  to  take  an  interest  in  style, 
but  also  for  those  who  honestly  wish  we  could 
boast  a  national  decorative  style  of  our  own. 

ORGANIC  EVOLUTION.     By  Richard  Swan 
Lull.     Macmillan;  $3. 

By  far  the  larger  number  of  books  dealing  with 
the  subject  of  organic  evolution  have  been  written 
from  the  standpoint  of  interpretation  of  the  exist- 
ing organic  world.  Inductions  from  observations 
on  structure,  development,  distribution,  and 
activities  of  animals  and  plants  as  we  find  them 
to-day  have  been  made  the  basis  for  the  analysis 
of  the  factors  of  evolution.  In  the  last  decade 
experimentalists  have  been  busy  putting  to  the 
test  the  inductions  of  the  Darwinian  and  post- 
Darwinian  period,  not  always  with  confirmatory 
results.  Professor  Lull's  book  is  written  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  actual  record  of  evolution 
as  read  by  the  paleontologist  in  the  fossils  from 
the  past.  Of  necessity,  this  record  deals  mainly 
with  the  diversifications  and  successions  of  types 
already  established,  for  all  the  great  groups  of 
animals  were  in  existence  in  Lower  Cambrian 
times  or  shortly  thereafter.  The  investigator  of 
fossils  is  constantly  called  upon  to  reconstruct 
the  whole  animal  in  his  imagination  from  a  single 
organ  system,  the  hard  parts  or  skeleton,  and  to 
conjure  up  its  environment  and  habits  of  life 
from  the  slightest  of  clues  and  by  analogies  from 
living  relatives.  His  attention  is  also  repeatedly 
called  to  changes  in  structure,  with  lapse  of  time, 
in  changing  environmental  conditions.  Function 
and  environment  thus  come  in  his  view  of  the 
evolutionary  process  to  be  the  fashioning  ham- 
mers which  incessantly  shape  the  evolving  life 
of  sea,  forest,  desert,  and  plain. 

It  is  this  historical  dynamics  of  life,  richly 
illustrated  from  the  records  of  the  ancient  faunas, 
which  is  presented  in  this  latest  effort  to 


302 


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[March  28 


trace  the  course  of  evolution  and  evaluate  its 
factors.  Here  the  author  is  on  familiar  ground 
and  his  contributions  are  illuminating  and 
authoritative.  When  he  enters  other  fields,  how- 
ever, he  relies  quite  freely  on  previous  summaries. 
Hence  his  uncritical  acceptance  of  the  mimicry 
hypothesis  and  his  unqualified  ascription  of  the 
biogenetic  law  to  Haeckel.  Even  the  germ  plasm 
dogma  of  Weismann,  which  he  incorporates  with- 
out qualms,  does  not  seem  to  disturb  his  later 
applications  of  Lamarckian  principles.  From  the 
standpoint  of  the  cytologist,  the  geneticist,  the 
mutationist,  and  the  experimentalist,  the  work 
leaves  much  to  be  said,  but  they  must  look  else- 
where for  a  critical,  up-to-date  presentation  of 
their  conflicting  contributions  to  this  ever- 
widening  field  of  investigation. 

THE  NOTE  BOOK  OF  AN  INTELLIGENCE 
OFFICER.  By  Eric  Fisher  Wood.  Cen- 
tury; $1.75. 

There  are  many  good  things  in  Major  Wood's 
book.  It  is  the  gossip  of  a  man  who  has  met  in 
the  impact  of  work  the  personalities  which  direct 
the  operations  of  the  British  Empire.  He  has 
had  an  eye  to  their  revealing  ways  as  well  as  to 
the  humorous  wayside  incidents  of  war.  He  has 
an  interesting  study  of  the  workings  of  the  stu- 
pendous British  censorship.  In  his  account  of  the 
Battle  of  Arras,  in  which  he  marched  forward 
into  machine-gun  fire  and  was  wounded,  there 
is  the  simplicity  of  strong  feeling.  There  is  the 
simplicity,  too,  of  good  form,  which  makes  the 
volume  the  talk  of  a  gentleman  rather  than  the 
revelation  of  an  artist.  For  although  what 
Major  Wood  writes  is  carefully  observed  and 
under  favorable  conditions,  he  betrays  the  anaes- 
thesia of  class.  He  is  a  fierce  admirer  of  Lord 
Northcliffe.  He  talks  of  the  "progressive  ele- 
ments in  British  public  life  under  the  leadership 
of  such  men  as  Lloyd  George,  Carson,  Milner, 
and  Derby."  He  cannot  even  resist  his  impulse 
of  enthusiasm,  quite  natural  to  the  man  who 
fights,  for  war  and  war's  galvanic  effect  on  the 
emotions  of  a  people.  "There  are  moments  of 
exaltation,"  he  writes,  "when  one  finds  oneself 
agreeing  with  the  detestable  Nietzsche  that  war 
is  a  great  moral  rejuvenator,  both  for  the  nation 
and  for  the  individual."  He  has  become  con- 
vinced that  "war  psychology  lies  very  near  to 
fundamental  truths."  Major  Wood  is  an  exam- 
ple of  the  upper  class  man  at  his  best — convinced 
of  the  rightness  of  his  cause,  ready  to  sacrifice 
himself  and  be  a  gentleman  in  the  act,  humor- 
ous, charming,  not  too  impressed  with  the  power 
of  his  own  emotions.  And  yet  if  Major  Wood 
were  not  an  American,  one  might  call  him  insu- 
lar. For  those  rumblings  that  may  some  time  out- 
sound  the  clamor  of  war  itself,  he  has  no  ear. 


HEARTS  OF  CONTROVERSY.    By  Alice  Mey- 
nell.     Scribners;  $1.75. 

While  other  critics  are  engaged  in  appraising 
and  placing  the  authors  of  "today"  and  of  "yes- 
terday" Mrs.  Meynell  in  this  little  volume 
concerns  herself  with  the  authors  of  day  before 
yesterday.  Time  has  moved  on;  yet  Tennyson, 
Dickens,  Swinburne,  and  Charlotte  Bronte,  after 
the  pendulum-swing  of  appreciation  and  depreci- 
ation, are  not  even  yet  in  the  places  where  they 
precisely  belong.  Mrs.  Meynell,  in  her  delicate, 
none  too  conclusive  fashion,  holds  up  her  little 
taper,  throwing  a  new  light  and  producing  some 
delayed  nuances.  She  occupies  herself  largely 
with  the  culling  of  verbal  felicities,  securing 
many  even  from  Dickens,  and  not  a  few — of  a 
stark,  direct  kind — from  Emily  Bronte's  "Wuth- 
ering  Heights."  She  also  follows  Charlotte  from 
her  early  days  of  "unscholarly  Latin-English" 
to  the  later  period  of  the  better,  more  vital  Eng- 
lish in  which  she  describes  her  sister  Emily's 
death.  Mrs.  Meynell  praises  Tennyson  for  his 
independence  of  French  influences,  and  taxes 
Swinburne  for  having  so  often  merely  applied  his 
own  verbal  dexterity  to  other  men's  passions. 
Mrs.  Meynell  is  always  and  everywhere  very 
obviously  concerned  with  diction;  and  diction, 
in  most  of  the  present  essays,  is  her  dominant 
preoccupation. 

A  LITERARY  PILGRIM  IN  ENGLAND.     By 
Edward  Thomas.     Dodd,  Mead;  $3. 

For  the  chimney  corner  and  slippered  ease 
this  series  of  twenty-nine  topographical  biogra- 
phies is  good  company.  The  author  is  not  in- 
terested, for  the  moment  at  least,  in  the  tragedy 
of  Keats's  life,  the  sternness  of  Arnold's,  or  the 
boisterousness  of  Burns's.  His  intent  is  merely 
to  show  how  certain  districts  of  England  re- 
acted on  certain  of  her  writers:  what  London 
meant  to  Lamb,  for  example ;  to  what  extent  the 
Downs  affected  the  prose  of  Jefferies,  the  Lake 
District  the  poetry  of  Wordsworth,  and  Wilt- 
shire the  delightful  gossip  of  John  Aubrey.  The 
principal  question  always  is:  What  is  Her- 
rick's  country?  Fitzgerald's?  Stevenson's?  And 
to  what  degree  and  in  what  manner  did  this 
country,  with  its  hills,  flowers,  birds,  streams, 
and  trees,  find  its  way  into  the  author's  mind 
and  thence  into  his  work?  Although  Mr. 
Thomas  tells  us  little  that  is  new,  it  is  a  pleas- 
ure to  have  half-forgotten  landscapes  brought 
thus  deftly  before  our  eyes  again.  Liberal, 
though  skilful,  quotation  from  letters  and  poems, 
and  the  reproduction  in  color  of  several  paint- 
ings after  Walter  Decker,  R.B.A.,  and  others, 
help  materially  to  make  the  volume  what  it  is 
— a  leisurely  and  unruffled  journey  through  the 
garden  that  is  all  England. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


303 


MEDICAL  RESEARCH  AND  HUMAN  WEL- 
FARE. By  W.  W.  Keen.  Houghton  Mif- 
flin;  $1.25. 

America  is  fortunate  in  the  medical  tradition 
that  has  set  in  high  regard  the  practitioner  with 
broad  human  interests.  The  tradition  begins 
early  in  the  career  of  Benjamin  Rush.  It 
received  a  popular  sanction  in  the  writings  of 
Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  and  again  in  those  of 
S.  Weir  Mitchell.  It  is  to  this  group  that  one 
may  add  the  services  of  Dr.  Keen — the  fact  that 
three  of  the  names  belong  to  Philadelphia  is 
worthy  of  mention.  Dr.  Keen's  volume  tells  the 
deeply  significant  story  of  the  conquest  of  dis- 
ease by  human  endeavor;  it  tells  it  convincingly, 
with  adequate  reenforcement  of  data,  with  tell- 
ing evidence,  with  a  human  charm  in  the  pride 
of  triumph  of  a  professional  devotion.  The  vol- 
ume contains  a  photograph  of  Dr.  Keen  as  he 
served  in  the  Civil  War,  and  another  that  shows 
him  in  the  dignity  and  vigor  of  his  present  age. 
The  contrast  serves  to  illustrate  the  tremendous 
advance  in  methods  of  surgery  and  medicine 
which  a  single  life,  consecrated  to  the  allevia- 
tion of  ills,  has  witnessed  and  aided.  We  accept 
all  too  thoughtlessly  the  gifts  of  the  physician, 
rising  no  higher  ordinarily  than  the  personal 
tribute  of  the  "G.  P.,"  the  grateful  patient.  It 
is  well  to  have  passed  in  review  the  achievements 
of  the  army  of  medical  science,  an  account  of  its 
many  campaigns,  its  sore  trials,  its  still  imper- 
fect control  of  many  of  the  ills  that  flesh  is  heir 
to — but  through  it  all  a  persistent  and  consistent 
advance  and  a  series  of  battles  won.  Dr.  Keen's 
story  belongs  in  every  library  in  the  country. 
With  the  country  at  war,  the  service  of  the 
medical  fraternity  is  again  conspicuously  recog- 
nized. The  laboratory  and  the  hospital  sustain 
the  men  at  the  front,  and  sustain  them  with  the 
international  humanity  of  a  common  service. 
One  discordant  note  has  appeared,  the  protest 
of  sentimental  extremists  against  the  use  of 
animal  life  to  save  the  precious  lives  of  the 
defenders  of  our  country.  The  lesson  of  the 
contribution  of  medical  research  to  human  wel- 
fare still  needs  to  be  vigorously  enforced. 

THE  SPELL  OF  CHINA.  By  Archie  Bell. 
Page;  $2.50. 

There  is  a  good  deal  of  agreeable  chit-chat 
about  some  of  the  better  known  parts  of  China 
in  this  book  of  tourist  travel,  and  a  flowing 
journalistic  style  makes  it  easy  and  occasionally 
diverting  reading.  The  so-called  "spell"  is 
exerted  by  little  more  than  the  regulation  sights 
— Hongkong,  Canton,  Macao,  Shanghai,  Hang- 
chow  reached  via  houseboat,  Hankow,  Peking, 
Tientsin — cities  which,  although  they  spread  over 
a  large  part  of  the  eastern  coast  of  China,  com- 


prise only  a  small  part  of  the  whole  country. 
But  if  Mr.  Bell  saw  only  what  may  be  seen  by 
other  tourists,  he  seasoned  what  he  has  written 
with  a  few  nearly  original  investigations  that 
go  far  toward  justifying  his  effort.  His  experi- 
ences in  a  native  theatre  in  Shanghai  give  rise 
to  some  interesting  comments  about  what  the  new 
art  in  our  theatrical  world  owes  to  the  very 
ancient  Chinese  drama,  especially  in  the  matter 
of  stage  technique.  A  short  excursion  into  Nip- 
ponized  Korea,  with  observations  on  Japan's 
methods  of  efficiency,  completes  a  volume  which, 
were  it  as  valuable  as  readable,  would  take  a 
dignified  position  in  the  literature  of  travel. 

THE  HISTORY  OF  MEDIEVAL  EUROPE.   By 
Lynn  Thorndike.  Houghton  Mifflin ;  $2.75. 

Thorndike's  history  belongs  to  the  new  school. 
The  dominant  interest  here  developed  is  in  great 
movements  cutting  across  nationalities  and  polit- 
ical geography.  Artificial  boundary  lines  tend 
to  disappear  in  the  writer's  mind  and  interna- 
tional tendencies  in  the  development  of  Europe 
are  seen  as  wholes.  The  book  is  primarily  a  his- 
tory of  culture.  It  develops  the  economic  and 
social,  the  literary  and  artistic,  the  religious  and 
moral  life  of  the  people  quite  as  much  as,  or 
even  more  than,  the  course  of  political  intrigue 
and  military  exploits.  However,  dynastic  and 
other  class  ambitions  are  not  without  their  role 
in  the  medieval  drama  as  here  described,  and  the 
observable  kinship  to  present  tendencies  in  this 
regard  is  sometimes  striking.  Through  all  the 
book  one  gains  a  sense  of  continuity,  of  orderly 
progression.  This  effect  is  especially  helped  by 
the  chart  at  the  end  of  the  volume  which  por- 
trays graphically  by  use  of  maps  the  major  move- 
ments in  medieval  times. 

AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  POLITICAL  PARTIES 
AND  PRACTICAL  POLITICS.     By  P.  Orman' 
Ray.    Scribners;  $1.60. 

Politics  has  been  somewhat  obscured,  if  not 
placed  in  abeyance,  by  the  war,  but  the  present 
revision  of  this  popular  handbook,  reviewing  the 
latest  legislation  and  usage  in  the  field,  is  wel- 
come. Professor  Ray,  who  teaches  at  North- 
western University,  has  produced  the  most  prac- 
tical and  incisive  work  that  has  yet  appeared  in 
this  division  of  social  science.  There  is  scarcely 
a  phase  of  the  subject — from  an  analysis  of  cur- 
rent party  policies  and  methods  to  the  practical 
nominating  and  campaigning  machinery  of  the 
parties  in  action — which  is  not  illumined  by  his 
wide  investigations.  The  extended  bibliographies 
at  the  end  of  each  chapter  are  probably  the  most 
complete  of  the  sort  anywhere  to  be  found  and 
will  be  of  particular  interest  to  students  of  prac- 
tical politics. 


304 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


FROM  FRANCE  COMES  THE  BLACKEST  NEWS 
of  the  war,  as  THE  DIAL  goes  to  press,  and  for 
the  present  everything  else  will  shrivel  into 
insignificance  beside  the  issue  being  decided  in 
that  long  roar  of  guns  whose  steady  throbbing 
can  be  heard  on  the  house-tops  even  in  London. 
Perhaps  when  these  words  are  read  the  final 
direction  of  the  tide  of  battle  will  be  known. 
For  ourselves,  we  cannot  lose  faith.  We  remem- 
ber the  Marne,  and  take  courage.  We  remember 
Ypres.  We  remember  Verdun  and  the  Somme. 
And  one  thing  now  is  clear.  German  autocracy 
must  win  this  battle  or  lose  the  war — the  mili- 
tarists dare  not  stand  upon  the  defensive  and 
appeal  to  the  judgment  of  mankind.  Their  record 
in  Russia  shows  that  they  know  no  other  way  to 
win  peace  than  the  way  of  force.  That  way, 
we  firmly  believe,  is  forever  barred  to  them. 
It  is  no  longer  a  question  whether  militarism 
and  autocracy  will  or  will  not  be  defeated ;  they 
are  already  defeated. 

•          •  • 

AN  ARTISTS'  COMMITTEE  HAS  NOMINATED  TO 
the  War  Department  eight  American  artists  to 
accompany  our  armies  and  make  a  pictorial  rec- 
ord of  the  war.  The  list  is  something  of  a  com- 
mentary on  the  status  of  painting  in  this  country. 
It  includes  only  one  representative  of  the  salon 
tradition  of  vested  "Art" — only  one  of  secure 
reputation — Ernest  Peixotto,  pupil  of  Benjamin- 
Constant,  Doucet,  and  Lefebvre.  It  includes 
only  one  etcher,  J.  Andre  Smith.  There  are  two 
others  who  are  primarily  painters,  neither  of 
whom  is  very  widely  known — Harvey  Dunn  and 
Harry  Townsend.  But  there  are  four  illustra- 
tors: Wallace  Morgan,  Walter  Enright,  Wil- 
liam Aylward,  and  George  Wright.  A  few  of 
these  eight  have  done,  or  bid  fair  to  do,  good 
work;  yet  at  least  half  of  them  are  unknown 
quantities  so  far  as  the  public  is  concerned. 
Britain  and  Canada  (as  Laurence  Binyon  said 
in  THE  DIAL  for  January  31)  have  commis- 
sioned for  the  same  purpose  such  men  as  Muir- 
head  Bone,  William  Orpen,  and  Augustus  John 
— brilliant  painters,  "living  forces."  We  have 
nominated  four  representatives  of  our  craft  of 
illustrating,  than  which  nothing  could  be  more 
stagnantly  conventional,  and  some  young  men  of 
whom  we  have  hopes.  It  is  quite  possible  that 
among  them  the  opportunity  might  discover  a 
man  of  brilliance  and  force;  all  of  us  trust  that 
it  would.  Meanwhile,  however,  shall  we  not 
recognize  that  when  there  arises  an  opportunity 
for  distinguished  talent  and  originality  in  art, 
we  have  to  meet  it  with  practitioners  of  a  popu- 
lar craft,  with  a  graceful  acknowledgment  to  the 
academic,  and  then  with  blank  checks  drawn  on 
our  hopes? 


WHAT  DO  OUR  PUBLIC  LIBRARIES  COST  us? 
The  following  figures  of  appropriations  per 
capita  in  certain  cities  have  been  roughly  com- 
piled from  data  on  library  taxation  in  1916, 
drawn  from  the  current  report  of  the  Pratt 
Library  in  Baltimore,  and  from  the  populations 
reported  in  the  1910  census.  Probably  they  are 
far  from  accurate,  since  some  of  these  cities  grew 
very  rapidly  between  1910  and  1916;  but  if  a 
similar  study  were  to  be  based  on  the  1920  cen- 
sus it  would  doubtless  discover  much  the  same 
general  conditions.  There  are  given  figures  for 
three  cities  of  more  than  one  million  inhabitants : 
New  York  is  taxed  about  29  cents  per  inhabitant, 
Chicago  about  25,  and  Philadelphia  about  18. 
The  next  group  includes  cities  of  less  than  a  mil- 
lion and  more  than  half  a  million:  Cleveland 
73  cents,  Pittsburg  60,  and  St.  Louis  42.  Com- 
parison of  these  groups  suggests  that  there  is 
something  like  a  maximum  cost  for  the  first-class 
library  and  that  it  mounts  much  less  rapidly  than 
does  the  population  the  library  serves.  Baltimore 
would  fall  in  the  second  group;  but  whereas  the 
three  cities  named  in  that  group  average  an  ap- 
propriation of  58  cents  per  capita,  Baltimore  en- 
joys only  9  cents  per  capita,  to  which  must  be 
added  from  its  endowment  9  cents  more.  The 
fact  that  this  total  of  1 8  cents  is  40  cents  less  than 
the  average  for  his  group  certainly  supports  the 
Pratt  Librarian's  plea  for  more  funds.  The  re- 
maining groups  divide  at  the  quarter-million 
mark: 

OVER  250,000  UNDER  250,000 

Los  Angeles 70      Oakland 79 

Detroit 59      Seattle    74 

Minneapolis    56      Springfield    71 

Newark   43       Grand  Rapids 51 

Milwaukee    38      Worcester   44 

Cincinnati   33      St.  Paul 33 

Buffalo 29      Louisville 27 

Denver 26      Omaha 24 

Rochester 24      Atlanta    21 

The  discrepancy  between  the  upper  cities  in  each 
group  and  their  group  averages  is  doubtless  ac- 
counted for  by  their  greatly  augmented  popula- 
tion since  1910.  Fair  averages  might  omit  Los 
Angeles  and  Detroit  from  the  first  column  and 
Oakland,  Seattle,  and  Springfield  from  the  sec- 
ond. That  would  yield  an  average  appropriation 
of  35  cents  for  cities  of  between  a  quarter  and  a 
half  million  population,  and  of  33  cents  for 
cities  of  less  than  a  quarter  million.  Compare 
these  averages  with  those  of  the  million  and 
half-million  groups: 

GROUP  AVERAGES 

Under  250,000 33 

250,000—500,000    35 

500,000—1,000,000  58 

Over  1,000,000 24 

It  would  appear  that  libraries  in  cities  approach- 
ing the  million  mark  cost  per  capita  about  25 
cents  more  than  those  in  cities  of  a  quarter  mil- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


305 


lion,  and  about  34  cents  more  than  those  of  cities 
that  have  passed  the  million  mark.  Accurate 
statistics  would  doubtless  alter  the  relations  be- 
tween particular  cities  in  the  groups  tabulated, 
but  they  would  scarcely  affect  the  expensive  situ- 
ation of  those  in  the  half-million  group.  Appar- 
ently the  American  city  requires  a  metropolitan 
library  long  before  it  is  able  to  finance  one  on  a 
metropolitan  appropriation  per  capita. 
•  •  * 

How  WILL  AMERICA'S  DEMAND  FOR  BOOKS 
during  the  war  differ  from  the  demands  of  the 
other  nations?  Publishers  and  booksellers  have 
long  since  noted  the  shift  in  interest  from  the 
light  sentimental  novel  to  the  political  and  his- 
torical study,  and  the  list  of  war  books  an- 
nounced for  publication  this  spring  is  staggering. 
Yet  the  implications  of  our  peculiar  geographical 
and  psychological  position  have  not  been  fully 
realized.  Curiosity  about  the  war  is  more  in- 
satiable with  us  than  with  other  belligerents, 
who  live  too  close  to  it.  There  is  a  whole  "liter- 
ature of  release"  in  France  and  Germany  and 
England,  the  avowed  object  of  which  is  to  "take 
one's  mind  off  the  war."  With  us,  who  do  not 
live  in  fear  of  air  raids,  any  emotional  strain  is 
quickly  snapped  by  a  visit  to  a  "movie"  house  or 
a  musical  comedy,  perhaps  by  a  detective  story. 
Generally  speaking,  however,  we  can  endure 
much  more  realistic  and  depressing  descriptions 
of  the  battle  line  than  those  peoples  to  whom  the 
trenches  are  only  a  few  hours'  railroad  journey 
distant.  Robert  Dell  has  told  how  little  the  war 
itself  is  mentioned  in  Paris.  In  Holland 
the  one  sure  way  to  make  yourself  unpopular  is 
to  start  a  discussion  about  the  war.  Ambassador 
Gerard  has  told  of  the  great  throngs  at  the  races 
in  Berlin,  and  recent  accounts  from  neutral  cities 
give  the  picture  of  the  German  people  as  in- 
terested in  almost  everything  except  politics  and 
belligerency.  The  theatrical  season  in  London  is 
admittedly  banal,  mere  revivals  or  musical  re- 
views. One  aspect  of  Europe's  war-weariness 
which  has  escaped  attention  is  the  disinclination 
to  buy  just  those  kinds  of  books  which  today 
crowd  our  own  shops.  We  have  an  eagerness  to 
learn  the  political  and  historical  background  of 
the  war,  as  well  as  to  read  the  more  intimate, 
personal  descriptions,  which  would  be  regarded 
with  astonishment  in  any  of  the  European  capi- 
tals. To  us  it  is  all  still  an  intellectual  novelty 
and  an  emotional  novelty.  We  are  only  begin- 
ning to  participate,  and  until  the  autumn  at 
least  it  is  not  likely  that  the  first  wave  of  interest 
will  subside.  We  shall  probably  end  by  being 
better  informed  about  the  war  than  those  who 
live  next  door  to  it.  Who  was  the  peasant  who 
was  born  in  1785  and  lived  until  1840  in  a  sub- 
urb of  Paris,  yet  had  never  heard  of  Napoleon? 


THE  DEBUTS  OF  THREE  MORE  MONTHLY  MAG- 

azines  have  taken  place  in  the  last  few  weeks: 
In  January  appeared  the  first  number  of  "The 
New  World,"  a  liberal  "medium  for  the  free 
discussion  of  questions  relative  to  the  interpre- 
tation of  Christianity  to  our  age  and  its  appli- 
cation for  the  reconstruction  of  society."  It  is 
published  in  New  York  City.  The  editors  are 
Norman  N.  Thomas  (Managing),  Edward  W. 
Evans,  Harold  Hatch,  John  Haynes  Holmes,  Ru- 
fus  Jones,  Richard  Roberts,  Oswald  Garrison 
Villard,  Harry  F.  Ward,  and  Walter  G.  Fuller 
(Secretary).  "The  Liberator,"  of  which  the 
first  issue  appeared  in  February,  has  no  relation 
to  the  late  "Masses" ;  but,  curiously  enough,  Max 
Eastman  is  Editor,  Floyd  Dell  is  Associate  Ed- 
itor, and  the  list  of  Contributing  Editors — which 
includes  Cornelia  Barnes,  Howard  Brubaker, 
John  Reed,  Boardman  Robinson,  Charles  W. 
Wood,  and  Art  Young — no  less  than  the  format, 
suggests  once  more  that  in  real  life  coincidence 
is  often  more  perfect  than  it  is  on  the  stage. 
And  "Bruno's  Bohemia"  makes  its  bow.  "De- 
voted to  Life,  Love,  and  Letters,"  it  is  published 
from  1476  Broadway,  New  York,  by  Guido 
Bruno,  sometime  editor  and  publisher  of  "Bru- 
no's Weekly."  These  periodicals,  together 
with  "Upton  Sinclair's"  and  other  arrivals  that 
THE  DIAL  has  welcomed  to  the  lists  since  the 
first  of  the  year,  should  reassure  all  pessimists. 
The  rising  mortality  among  magazines  need  no 
longer  alarm;  the  birth-rate  is  rising  as  rapidly. 


ONE     HAPPY    SCHEME    .FOR    RAISING     MONEY 

for  the  Red  Cross  we  might  well  copy  from 
England.  For  three  years  the  funds  from  the 
gifts  of  rare  books  and  autographs  have  all  been 
used  for  the  benefit  of  the  Red  Cross.  This  year 
Sir  James  M.  Barrie  and  Mr.  E.  V.  Lucas  have 
control  of  the  collection,  and  Sir  James  has 
written  a  characteristic  letter  to  the  papers  with 
the  felicitous  title  "The  Hundred  Best  Gaps." 
He  pleads  that  in  a  time  of  sacrifice  all  of  us 
may  well  take  from  our  bookshelves  our  one  val- 
uable treasure,  either  a  first  edition  or  a  manu- 
script. Sir  James  has  himself  given  the  original 
manuscript  of  "The  Little  Minister."  Mrs. 
Reginald  Smith  has  given  the  original  manu- 
scripts of  Thomas  Hardy's  "Far  From  the  Mad- 
ding Crowd"  and  of  Stevenson's  "Virginibus 
Puerisque."  But  one  of  the  most  interesting  gifts 
is  that  of  Sir  William  Robertson  Nicoll — the 
actual  copy  of  "Vanity  Fair"  which  Thackeray 
sent  to  Currer  Bell  when  he  first  read  her  novel 
"Jane  Eyre."  He  did  not  then,  of  course,  know 
who  the  author  was,  but  the  book  is  autographed 
with  "W.  M.  Thackeray's  kind  regards."  Surely 
our  own  collectors  and  bibliophiles  will  not  be 
outdone  in  generosity  by  their  English  brethren? 


306 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


NOTES  AXD 


Paul  Rosenfeld,  who  writes  about  Rimsky-Kor- 
sakov  in  this  issue  of  THE  DIAL,  is  a  well-known 
critic  of  the  arts  whose  discussions  have  appeared 
in  various  periodicals.  His  residence  is  in  New 
York. 

Maxwell  Bodenheim  is  one  of  the  "Others"  group. 
His  verse  has  appeared  in  "The  Poetry  Journal," 
"Poetry,"  and  other  magazines. 

The  other  contributors  have  written  for  previous 
issues  of  THE  DIAL. 


"Literary  Chapters,"  by  W.  L.  George,  was  pub- 
lished March  27  under  the  imprint  of  Little,  Brown 
&  Co. 

The  Woman's  Press  announces  for  publication 
early  in  April  "Mobilization  of  Woman-Power," 
by  Harriet  Stanton  Blatch. 

The  Sonnet,"  a  bimonthly  magazine  published 
in  Williamsport,  Pa.,  has  issued  "Sonnets:  A  First 
Series,"  by  its  editor,  Mahlon  Leonard  Fisher. 

Among  the  March  Scribner's  books  about  the 
war  is  the  personal  narrative  of  Capt.  R.  Hugh 
Knyvett,  Anzac  Scout  and  lecturer.  It  is  called 
"  'Over  There'  with  the  Australians." 

Dora  Morrell  Hughes,  sometime  editor  of  one 
or  another  domestic  magizine,  is  the  author  of 
"Thrift  in  the  Household,"  listed  by  Lothrop,  Lee 
&  Shepard. 

Judge  Otto  Schoenrich  has  written  a  survey  of 
the  history  and  present  condition  of  Santo  Domingo. 
The  book,  which  is  entitled  "Santo  Domingo:  A 
Country  with  a  Future,"  is  on  the  spring  list  of 
the  Macmillan  Co. 

Henry  Holt  &  Co.  have  announced  "The  Coun- 
try Air,"  a  volume  containing  "six  long  short- 
stories"  by  L.  P.  Jacks,  editor  of  "The  Hibbert 
Journal."  Two  of  the  stories  end  in  the  Canadian 
Northwest. 

The  New  York  Public  Library  has  lately  re- 
printed from  its  January  "Bulletin"  an  address, 
"The  Joys  of  Librarianship,"  which  Arthur  E. 
Bostwick  delivered  before  its  Staff  Association  last 
fall.  Mr.  Bostwick  is  Librarian  of  the  St.  Louis 
Public  Library. 

Ten  essays  by  Bertrand  Russell  have  been  col- 
lected from  various  periodicals — among  them  "The 
Monist,"  "The  International  Monthly,"  and  "The 
New  Statesman" — and  published  by  Longmans, 
Green  &  Co.,  as  "Mysticism  and  Logic,  and  Other 
Essays." 

Among  the  Harpers  books  announced  for  later 
March  are:  "Songs  of  the  Shrapnel  Shell,"  by 
Cyril  Morton  Home;  "Your  Vote  and  How  to 
Use  It,"  by  Mrs.  Raymond  Brown;  "The  Winning 
of  the  War,"  by  Roland  G.  Usher;  and  a  novel, 
"Miss  Amerikanka,"  by  Olive  Gilbreath. 

The  Marshall  Jones  Co.  announce  that  the 
volumes  of  "The  Mythology  of  All  Races,"  hitherto 
sold  only  in  sets,  may  now  be  obtained  separately. 
Two  volumes  more  are  in  press:  Vol.  iii — "Celtic, 
Slavic,"  by  Canon  John  A.  MacCulloch  and  Jan 
Machal;«  and  Vol.  xii — "Egyptian,  Indo-Chinese," 
by  W.  Max  Miiller  and  Sir  James  George  Scott. 


The  Putnams  will  shortly  publish  "Militarism 
and  Statecraft,"  by  Munroe  Smith,  Professor  of 
Jurisprudence  at  Columbia;  and  a  posthumous 
book  by  Benjamin  Kidd,  "The  Science  of  Power." 
They  also  announce  two  publications  from  the 
Cambridge  University  Press:  "Rabelais  in  His 
Writings,"  by  W.  F.  Smith;  and  "Cambridge  Es- 
says on  Education,"  edited  by  A.  C.  Benson,  with 
an  introduction  by  Viscount  Bryce. 

The  more  recent  "Annals"  of  the  American  Acad- 
emy of  Political  and  Social  Science  have  been: 
November,  "The  World's  Food";  January,  "Financ- 
ing the  War";  March,  "War  Adjustments  in  Rail- 
road Regulation."  The  May  issue  will  be  devoted 
to  "Social  Case  Treatments,"  and  the  July  issue, 
which  will  report  the  proceedings  of  the  annual 
meeting,  will  discuss  "Mobilization  of  America's 
Resources  for  the  Winning  of  the  War." 

Among  the  books  that  B.  W.  Huebsch  has  in 
preparation  are:  a  volume  by  Van  Wyck  Brooks, 
which  will  probably  be  called  "Toward  an  Ameri- 
can Culture";  "Horizons,"  by  Francis  Hackett; 
"Exiles,"  by  James  Joyce;  "The  Poets  of  Modern 
France,"  by  Ludwig  Lewisohn;  and — in  the  field 
of  international  affairs — "Approaches  to  the  Great 
Settlement,"  by  Emily  Greene  Balch;  "The  Aims 
of  Labour,"  by  Arthur  Henderson;  and  "Down- 
fall or  Democracy,"  by  Frank  P.  Walsh  and  Dante 
Barton. 

The  tanks  are  figuring  largely  in  the  new  war 
books.  Following  Derby  Holmes's  "Yankee  in  the 
Trenches"  (Little,  Brown)  and  Ian  Hay's  "All 
In  It"  (Houghton  Mifflin),  both  of  which  gave 
much  space  to  them,  comes  "Life  in  a  Tank,"  by 
Captain  Richard  Haigh,  announced  for  spring  pub- 
lication by  the  latter  company.  Other  Houghton 
Mifflin  publications  are:  March  14 — "On  the 
Stairs,"  by  Henry  B.  Fuller;  "In  the  Heart  of 
German  Intrigue,"  by  Demetra  Vaka;  "Serbia 
Crucified,"  by  Lieutenant  M.  Krunich;  "Creating 
Capital,"  by  Frederick  L.  Lipman;  "Higher  Edu- 
cation and  Business  Standards,"  by  Willard  E. 
Hotchkiss;  and  for  March  28 — "Miss  Pirn's  Cam- 
ouflage," by  Lady  Stanley. 

The  April  list  of  the  Century  Co.  includes  "The 
Blue  Jays  in  the  Sierras,"  camping  experiences  in 
the  California  mountains,  by  Helen  Ellsworth; 
"The  A.  B.  C.  of  Voting,"  a  handbook  for  the 
women  of  New  York  State,  by  Marion  B.  Cothren, 
of  the  New  York  Bar;  "Runaway  Russia,"  a 
woman's  report  of  the  Russian  Revolution,  espe- 
cially as  it  affected  women,  by  Florence  Harper; 
"The  War  Whirl  in  Washington,"  snapshots  of 
the  capital  in  war  time,  by  Frank  Ward  O'Malley; 
"The  Nations  at  the  Peace  Table,"  a  summary  of 
the  problems  must  likely  to  come  up  for  settlement 
after  the  war,  by  Lothrop  Stoddard  and  Glenn 
Frank ;  "Right  Above  Race,"  war  papers  by  Otto  H. 
Kahn;  "Ladies  from  Hell,"  experiences  in  action  of 
a  member  of  the  famous  London  Scottish  regiment, 
R.  K.  Pinkerton ;  Raemaekers's  "Cartoon  History 
of  the  War,"  Vol.  I ;  and  "A  Woman's  War-Time 
Journal,"  an  account  chiefly  of  Sherman's  march 
through  Georgia,  by  Dolly  Summer  Lunt  (Mrs. 
Thomas  Burge),  with  an  introduction  and  notes 
by  Julian  Street. 


THE    DIAL 


307 


Selective  List  of  Spring  Books 

Heretofore  it  has  been  THE  DIAL'S  custom 
at  this  season  to  present  as  complete  a  list  of 
spring  publications  as  trade  conditions  permitted. 
Departing  a  little  from  that  custom  the  present 
list  includes  only  the  more  important  issues  and 
announcements  of  the  publishers.  As  before,  they 
are  classified  according  to  subject-matter.  The 
list  has  been  compiled  from  data  submitted  by 
the  publishers  and  covers  the  entire  field  of 
general  publication,  except  that  new  editions  of 
standard  literature,  works  of  reference,  military 
handbooks  and  manuals,  books  on  woman  and  the 
home,  juvenilia,  and  nature  studies  which  are 
primarily  instructive  have  been  reserved  for  the 
Spring  Educational  Number,  which  will  appear 
April  11. 

BIOGRAPHY  AND   REMINISCENCE 

The  Life  of  John  Fiske,  by  John  Spencer  Clark,  illus., 
2  vols.,  $7.50.— Daniel  Webster  in  England:  The 
Journal  of  Harriet  Story  Paige,  1839,  edited  by  Ed- 
ward Gray,  illus.,  $5. — The  Homely  Diary  of  a 
Diplomat  in  the  East,  1897-1899.  by  Thomas  S. 
Harrison,  illus..  $5. — Lincoln  in  Illinois,  by  Octavia 
Roberts,  illus.,  $5. — Letters  of  John  Holmes  to  James 
Russell  Lowell  and  Others,  edited  by  William 
Roscoe  Thayer,  introduction  by  Alice  M.  Long- 
fellow, illus.,  $2.50. — Lemuel  Shaw,  Chief  Justice 
of  the  Supreme  Judicial  Court  of  Massachusetts,  by 
Frederic  Hathaway  Chase,  frontispiece,  $2. — Life  of 
Naomi  Norsworthy,  by  Frances  Caldwell  Higgins, 
frontispiece,  $1.50.  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 

Correspondence  of  Sir  Arthur  Helps,  K.C.B.,  D.C.L., 
by  E.  A.  Helps,  frontispiece,  $4. — Love  Intrigues  of 
the  Kaiser's  Sons:  Secrets  in  the  Lives  of  the  Ger- 
man Princes,  chronicled  by  William  Le  Queux, 
portraits,  $3. — My  Empress:  Twenty-Three  Years 
of  Intimate  Life  with  the  Empress  of  All  the  Rus- 
sias,  from  Her  Marriage  to  the  Day  of  Her  Exile, 
by  Madame  Marfa  Mouchanow,  First  Maid  in 
Waiting  to  the  Czarina  Alexandra,  illus.,  $2.50. — 
In  the  Days  of  Victoria,  by  Thomas  F.  Plowman, 
illus.,  $2.50.  (John  Lane  Co.) 

Thomas  Woolner,  Sculptor  and  Poet:  His  Life  in 
Letters,  by  Amy  Woolner,  illus.,  $6. — The  Life  of 
Sir  Clements  R.  Markham,  K.C.B.,  F.R.S.,  by  Ad- 
miral Sir  Albert  Hastings  Markham. — The  Devon- 
shire House  Circle,  by  Hugh  Stokes,  $5. — Further 
Memories,  by  Lord  Redesdale,  foreword  by  Ed- 
mund Gosse,  illus.,  $3.50. — Memories  of  Eton  Sixty 
Years  Ago,  by  Arthur  C.  Ainger,  $3.50. — The 
Diaries  of  Leo  Tolstoy — Youth,  4  vols.  Vol.  I, 
1847-1852,  $2.  (E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.) 

Recollections,  by  John,  Viscount  Morley,  2  vols.,  $7.50. 
— The  Life  of  Benjamin  Disraeli,  Earl  of  Beacons- 
field,  Vol.  V,  by  George  Earl  Buckle,  in  succession 
to  W.  F.  Monypenny,  illus.,  $3.25.  (The  Mac- 
millan  Co.) 

The  Mad  Monk  of  Russia,  Iliodor:  Life,  Confessions, 
and  Memoirs  of  Sergei  M.  Trufanoff,  illus.,  $2. — 
Roving  and  Fighting:  Adventures  under  Four 
Flags,  by  Major  Edward  S.  (Tex)  O'Reilly,  illus., 
$2.— A  Woman's  War-Time  Journal,  by  Dolly 
Sumner  Lunt,  introduction  and  notes  by  Julian 
Street,  60  cts.  (The  Century  Co.) 

Irish  Memories,  by  E.  CE.  Somerville  and  Martin  Ross, 
illus.,  $4.20.— The  Life  of  John  Cardinal  McClos- 


key,   First  Prince  of  the  Church  in  America,   1810- 

1885,    by    John    Cardinal     Farley,    illus.,    $3.50.— 

Portuguese  Portraits,  by  A.  F.  G.  Bell,  illus.,  $1.75. 

(Longmans,  Green  &  Co.) 
Memoirs  of  the  Comte  de  Mercy  Argenteau,  translated 

and   edited   by   George   S.    Hellman,   illus.,   2  vols., 

$10. — Glimpses    of   the    Cosmos:     A    Mental    Auto- 
biography,   by    Lester   F.   Ward,    6    vols.,    Vol.    VI. 

1897-1912,   $2.50.      (G.    P.   Putnam's   Sons.) 
A   Lieutenant   of   Cavalry  in   Lee's  Army,  by   G.  W. 

Beale,  $1.75. — Lincoln,  the  Politician,  by  T.  Aaron 

Levy,  $1.50.     (Richard  G.  Badger.) 
Latest    Light    on    Abraham    Lincoln    and    War-Time 

Memories,  by  Ervin    Chapman,   illus.,   2   vols.,  $5. 

(Fleming  H.  Reyell  Co.) 
The    Life    and    Times    of    Stephen    Girard,    by    John 

Bach  McMaster,  2  vols.,  illus.,  $5.     (J.  B.  Lippin- 

cott  Co.) 
Love  Stories  of  Court  Beauties,  by  Franzisca,  Baroness 

von  Hedemann,  illus.,  $3.     (George  H.  Doran  Co.) 
The    Reminiscences    of    Raphael    Pumpelly,    2    vols., 

boxed.     (Henry  Holt  &  Co.) 
Life   of  Charles   Carroll   of   Carrollton,   by  Lewis  A. 

Leonard,   illus.,  $2.50.      (Moffat,   Yard   &  Co.) 
The  History  of  Henry  Fielding,  by  Wilbur  L.  Cross. 

(Yale   University  Press.) 
The  Life  of  Sir  Joseph  Hooker,  by  Leonard  Huxley, 

2  vols.,  illus.,  $12.     (D.  Appleton  &  Co.) 
My    Life   with    Young   Men,    by   Richard    C.    Morse, 

illus.,  $3.50.     (Association  Press.) 
The   Voice  of  Lincoln,   by  R.  M.  Wanamaker,  $2.50. 

(Charles  Scribner's  Sons.) 
The    Unbroken    Tradition,    by   Nora    Connolly,    illus., 

$1.25.     (Boni  &  Liveright.) 

HISTORY 

The  National  History  of  France,  edited  by  Fr.  Funck- 
Brentano,  introduction  by  J.  E.  C.  Bodley,  6  vols.,  3 
ready:  The  Century  of  the  Renaissance,  by  Louis 
Batiffol ;  The  Eighteenth  Century  in  France,  by 
Casimir  Stryienski;  The  French  Revolution,  by 
Louis  Madelin,  $2.50  per  vol. — France,  England, 
and  European  Democracy,  1215-1915:  An  Histori- 
cal Survey  of  the  Principles  Underlying  the  Entente 
Cordiale,  by  Charles  Cestre,  $2.50.— A  Short  His- 
tory of  Rome:  From  the  Foundation  of  the  City 
to  the  Fall  of  the  Empire  of  the  West,  by  Gug- 
lielmo  Ferrero  and  Corrado  Barbagallo,  2  vols., 
Vol.  I,  To  the  Death  of  Julius  Caesar,  $1.90  per 
vol. — Reconstruction  in  Louisiana,  by  Ella  Lonn, 
maps. — Sweden  and  Denmark,  With  Finland  and 
Iceland,  by  Jon  Stefansson,  preface  by  Viscount 
Bryce,  illus.,  $1.50.  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.) 

The  Guardians  of  the  Gate :  Historical  Lectures  on 
the  Serbs,  by  R.  G.  Latfan,  foreword  by  Vice- 
Admiral  E.  T.  Trowbridge,  illus.,  $2.25. — Japan: 
The  Rise  of  a  Modern  Power,  by  Robert  P.  Porter, 
illus.,  $2.25. — A  History  of  South  Africa,  by  D. 
Fairbridge,  illus.,  $1.40. — Ireland  in  the  Last  Fifty 
Years  (1866-1916),  by  Ernest  Barker,  paper,  60  cts. 
(Oxford  University  Press.) 

The  Rise  of  the  Spanish  Empire  in  the  Old  World 
and  in  the  New,  by  R.  B.  Merriman,  maps,  4  vols., 
Vol.  I,  The  Middle  Ages;  Vol.  II,  The  Catholic 
Kings,  $7.50  the  set. — The  Cambridge  Medieval  His- 
tory, planned  by  J.  B.  Bury,  edited  by  H.  M. 
Gwatkin;  J.  P.  Whitney,  Vol.  III.,  maps,  $5.— 
America  Among  the  Nations,  by  H.  H.  Powers, 
$1.50.  (The  Macmillan  Co.) 

The  Progress  of  Continental  Law  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  by  A.  Alvarez,  L.  Duguit,  J.  Charmont, 
E.  Ripert,  and  others,  $5. — History  of  Germanic  Pri- 
vate Law,  by  Rudolph  Huebner,  translated  by  Fran- 
cis S.  Philbrick,  $4.50.— Three  Centuries  of  Treaties 


308 


THE   DIAL 


[March  28 


of  Peace   and   Their   Teaching,   by   Sir  W.    G.   F. 
Phillimore,  Bart,  $2.50.     (Little,  Brown  &  Co.) 

The  Expansion  of  Europe:  A  History  of  the  Develop- 
ment of  Modern  Civilization,  by  Wilbur  Cortez 
Abbott,  illus.,  2  vols.,  Vol.  I,  1415-1603;  Vol.  II, 
1603-1789. — National  Self-Government:  Its  Growth 
and  Principles,  by  Ramsay  Muir,  $2.50.  (Henry 
Holt  &  Co.) 

The  Fall  of  the  Romanoffs,  by  the  author  of  "Rus- 
sian Court  Memoirs,"  $5. — National  History  of  Aus- 
tralia, New  Zealand,  and  the  Adjacent  Islands,  by 
Robert  P.  Thomson. — Light  and  Shade  in  Irish 
History,  by  "Tara."  (E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.) 

Index  to  United  States  Documents  Relating  to  Foreign 
Affairs,  1828-1861,  by  Adelaide  R.  Hasse. — Euro- 
pean Treaties  Bearing  on  the  History  of  the  United 
States  and  Its  Dependencies,  to  1648,  by  Frances 
G.  Davenport.  (Carnegie  Institution.) 

Social  History  of  the  American  Family  from  Colonial 
Times  to  the  Present,  by  A.  W.  Calhoun,  3  vols., 
Vol.  II,  "From  Independence  Through  the  Civil 
War,"  $5.,  or  $12.50  for  the  set.  (Arthur  H. 
Clark  Co.) 

John  Pory's  Lost  Description  of  Plymouth  Colony, 
edited  by  Champlin  Burrage,  $5. — The  Rise  of 
Nationality  in  the  Balkans,  by  R.  W.  Seton-Watson, 
maps,  $3.  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 

The  History  of  Germany  in  the  Nineteenth  Century, 
by  Heinrich  von  Treitschke,  translated  by  Eden  and 
Cedar  Paul,  Vol.  IV,  $3.25.  (Robert  M.  McBride 
&  Co.) 

The  Processes  of  History,  by  Frederick  J.  Teggart. 
— An  Outline  Sketch  of  English  Constitutional  His- 
tory, by  George  Burton  Adams,  $1.75.  (Yale 
University  Press.) 

National  Progress,  1907-1917,  by  Frederic  Austin  Ogg, 
Vol.  27  in  "The  American  Nation:  A  History," 
edited  by  Albert  Bushnell  Hart,  maps,  $2.  (Har- 
per &  Brothers.) 

The  Rise  of  the  Spanish-American  Republics,  by 
William  Spence  Robertson,  illus.,  $3. — American 
Negro  Slavery,  by  Ulrich  Phillips,  $3.  (D.  Apple- 
ton  &  Co.) 

Norman  Institutions,  Vol.  24  of  "The  Harvard  His- 
torical Studies,"  by  Charles  Homer  Haskins,  illus., 
$2.75.  (Harvard  University  Press.) 

Aram  and  Israel,  or  The  Aramaeans  in  Syria  and 
Mesopotamia,  by  Emil  G.  H.  Kraeling,  map,  $1.50. 
(Columbia  University  Press.) 

Beaumarchais  and  the  War  of  American  Independence, 
by  Elizabeth  S.  Kite,  2  vols.,  $5.  (Richard  G. 
Badger.) 

The  Formation  of  the  State  of  Oklahoma,  by  Roy 
Gittinger,  illus.,  $2.  (University  of  California 
Press.) 

Dramatic  Moments  in  American  Diplomacy,  by  Ralph 
W.  Page,  frontispiece,  $1.25.  (Doubleday,  Page 
&  Co.) 

Illustrations  of  Chaucer's  England,  by  Dorothy 
Hughes,  preface  by  A.  F.  Pollard,  $2.50.  (Long- 
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On  Reading  Nietzsche,  by  Emile  Faguet,  translated 
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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


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Emile  Verhaeren,  translated  by  Charles  R.  Mur- 
phy, $1. — The  Day,  and  Other  Poems,  by  Henry 
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The  Book  of  New  York  Verse,  edited  by  Hamilton 
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ceval Graves,  $1.75. — Ardours  and  Endurances,  by 
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Nocturne  of  Remembered  Spring,  and  Other  Poems, 
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Sassoon,  $2. — A  Manual  of  Mystic  Verse,  by  Louise 

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Sonnets   of  Sorrow   and  Triumph,   by  Ella   Wheeler 

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310 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


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ispiece, $1.35.  (Harper  &  Brothers.) 

The  Standard-Bearers,  by  Katherine  Mayo,  illus., 
$1.75. — On  the  Stairs,  by  Henry  B.  Fuller,  $1.50.— 
The  Statue  in  the  Wood,  by  Richard  Pryce,  $1.50.— 
My  Antonia,  by  Willa  Sibert  Cather,  illus.,  $1.50. 
— Impossible  People,  by  Mary  C.  E.  Wemyss,  $1.50. 
— Miss  Pirn's  Camouflage,  by  Lady  Stanley,  $1.50. — 
Oh,  Money!  Money!  by  Eleanor  H.  Porter,  illus., 
$1.50. — The  Son  Decides:  The  Story  of  a  Young 
German-American,  by  Arthur  S.  Pier,  illus.,  $1.35. 
— The  Finding  of  Norah,  by  Eugenia  Brooks  Froth- 
ingham,  75  cts.  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 

Pan  Tadeusz,  or  The  Last  Foray  in  Lithuania,  by 
Adam  Mickiewicz,  translated  by  George  Rapall 
Noyes,  $2.25. — To  Arms!  by  Marcelle  Tinayre, 
translated  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey,  introduction  by 
John  Finley,  $1.50.— Children  of  Passage,  by  Fred- 
erick Watson,  $1.50. — A  Happy  Garret,  by  V. 
Goldie,  $1.50.— The  Unwilling  Vestal,  by  Edward 
Lucas  White,  $1.50.— My  Two  Kings:  1674-1686,  by 
Mrs.  Evan  Nepean,  $1.50.  (E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.) 

Film  Folk:  "Close-Ups"  of  the  Men,  Women,  and 
Children  Who  Make  the  "Movies,"  by  Rob  Wagner, 
illus.,  $2. — Comrades,  by  Mary  Dillon,  illus.,  $1.40. 
— The  Firefly  of  France,  by  Marion  Polk  Angelloti, 
illus.,  $1.40.— The  Happiest  Time  of  Their  Lives, 
by  Alice  Duer  Miller,  illus.,  $1.40.— Caste  Three, 
by  Gertrude  M.  Shields,  frontispiece,  $1.40. — Just 
Outside,  by  Stacy  Aumonier,  frontispiece,  $1.40. — 
The  Return  of  the  Soldier,  by  Rebecca  West,  illus., 
$1.  (The  Century  Co.) 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


311 


The  Pawns  Count,  by  E.  Phillips  Oppenheim,  frontis- 
piece, $1.50. — Sunshine  Beggars,  by  Sidney  McCall, 
illus.,  $1.50. — The  Hope  Chest,  by  Mark  Lee  Luther, 
frontispiece,  $1.50. — Mrs.  Marden's  Ordeal,  by 
James  Hay,  Jr.,  frontispiece,  $1.50.— The  Wolf-Cub, 
t>y  Patrick  and  Terence  Casey,  frontispiece,  $1.40. 
— The  Adventures  of  Arnold  Adair,  American  Ace, 
by  Laurence  La  Tourette  Driggs,  illus.,  $1.35. 
(Little,  Brown  &  Co.) 

Pelle  the  Conqueror,  by  M.  A.  Nexo,  2  vols.,  $2.  per 
vol. — The  Old  Madhouse,  by  William  De  Morgan, 
$1.75.— Strayed  Revellers,  by  Allan  Updegraff. — 
Hope  Trueblood,  by  Patience  Worth,  edited  by 
Casper  S.  Yost. — Rekindled  Fires,  by  Joseph 
Anthony,  frontispiece,  $1.40. — Professor  Latimer's 
Progress:  A  Noval  of  Contemporaneous  Adventure, 
anon.,  illus. — The  Country  Air,  by  L.  P.  Jacks,  $1.25. 
(Henry  Holt  &  Co.) 

Tarr,  by  Wyndham  Lewis,  $1.60. — Martin  Rivas,  by 
Alberto  Blest-Gana,  $1.60. — A  Little  Boy  Lost,  by 
W.  H.  Hudson,  $1.50. — Gold  and  Iron,  by  Joseph 
Hergesheimer,  $1.50. — Where  Bonds  Are  Loosed,  by 
E.  L.  Grant  Watson,  $1.50.— The  Mainland,  by  E. 
L.  Grant  Watson,  $1.50. — Pilgrimage:  III.  Honey- 
comb, by  Dorothy  Richardson,  $1.50. — The  Three 
Cornered  Hat,  Pedro  Alarcon,  $1.25.  (Alfred  A. 
Knopf.) 

The  Bag  of  Saffron,  by  Bettina  von  Hutten,  illus., 
$1.50. — The  Way  Out,  by  Emerson  Hough,  illus., 
$1.50. — An  Orkney  Maid,  by  Amelia  E.  Barr,  front- 
ispiece, $1.50. — The  Restless  Sex,  by  Robert  W. 
Chambers,  illus.,  $1.50. — The  Lucky  Seven,  by  John 
Taintor  Foote,  $1.40.  (D.  Appleton  &  Co.) 

Carniola,  by  Theodore  Watts-Dunton,  $1.50.— The 
Best  People,  by  Anne  Warwick,  $1.50.— The  Man 
Who  Lost  Himself,  by  H.  De  Vere  Stacpoole,  $1.50. 
—The  Best  in  Life,  by  Muriel  Hine,  $1.50.— His 
Job,  by  Horace  Bleackley,  $1.40.  (John  Lane  Co.) 

Drift,  by  Mary  Aldis,  illus.,  $1.50.— After,  by  Fred- 
eric P.  Ladd,  $1.50.— The  Key  of  the  Fields; 
Boldero,  by  Henry  M.  Rideout,  $1.35. — Paulownia: 
Stories  by  Contemportary  Japanese  Writers,  edited 
by  T.  Taketomo,  introduction  by  John  Erskine,  $1.25. 
(Duffield  &  Co.) 

People  of  Borg,  by  Gunnar  Gunnarsson,  translated  by 
Alex  Gerfalk,  $1.50.— Eastern  Red,  by  Helen  Hunt- 
ington,  $1.50. — Maktoub,  by  Matthew  Craig,  $1.50. — 
The  Secret  of  the  Marne,  by  Marcel  and  Maud 
Berger,  $1.50. — Schonbrunn,  by  J.  A.  Cramb  (J.  A. 
Revermort),  frontispiece,  $1.50.  (G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons.) 

The  House  of  Conrad,  by  Elias  Tobenkin,  $1.50. — 
Stepsons  of  France,  by  Capt.  Percival  C.  Wren, 
$1.50.— The  Treshold  of  Quiet,  by  Daniel  Corkery. 
— Soldiers  Both,  by  Gustave  Guiche,  $1.40. — The 
White  Morning,  by  Gertrude  Atherton,  $1. — Way- 
siders,  by  Seumas  O'Kelly.  (Frederick  A.  Stokes 
Co.) 

The  Earthquake,  by  Arthur  Train,  $1.50.— Five  Tales, 
by  John  Galsworthy,  $1.50.— The  Flower  of  the 
Chapdelaines,  by  George  W.  Cable,  frontispiece, 
$1.35. — His  Daughter,  by  Gouverneur  Morris, 
frontispiece,  $1.35. — Branded,  by  Francis  Lynde, 
illus.,  $1.35. — The  Airman  and  the  Tramp,  by  Jean- 
nette  Lee,  75  cts.  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons.) 

Marie  Grubbe,  by  Jens  Peter  Jacobsen,  $1.50.— 
Bertha  Garlan,  by  Arthur  Schnitzler,  60  cts. — The 
Seven  That  Were  Hanged;  The  Red  Laugh,  by 
Leonid  Andreyev,  60  cts. — Creatures  That  Once 
Were  Men,  and  Other  Stories,  by  Maxim  Gorky, 
60  cts.  (Boni  &  Liver ight.) 

Twinkletoes,  by  Thomas  Burke,  $1.35. — Sister  Clare, 
by  M.  Reynes-Monlaur,  translated  by  M.  E.  Aren- 
drup,  $1.25—  Peasant  Tales  of  Russia,  by  V.  F. 


Nemirovitch-Dantchenko,  translated  by  Claude 
Field,  $1.25.  (Robert  M.  McBride  &  Co.) 

Rinconete  and  Cortadillo,  by  Miguel  de  Cervantes, 
translated  with  introduction  and  notes  by  Mariano 
J.  Lorente,  preface  by  R.  B.  Cunninghame  Graham, 
illus.,  $1.50. — Teepee  Neighbors,  by  Grace  Coolidge, 
$1.50.  (The  Four  Seas  Co.) 

Vicky  Van,  by  Carolyn  Wells,  frontispiece,  $1.35. — The 
Enchanted  Barn,  by  Grace  L.  H.  Lutz,  illus.,  $1.35. 
— The  Apple  Tree  Girl,  by  George  Weston,  illus., 
$1.  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Co.) 

The  Whirlwind,  by  Edna  Worthley  Underwood, 
illus.,  $1.50. — The  Best  Short  Stories  of  1917,  edited 
by  Edward  J.  O'Brien,  $1.50.  (Small,  Maynard 
&  Co.) 

The  Little  Red  House  in  the  Hollow,  by  Amanda  B. 
Hall,  illus.,  $1.35. — Ibsen's  Ghosts,  novelized  by 
Draycott  M.  Dell,  $1.25.  (George  W.  Jacobs  & 
Co.) 

Love  and  Liberty:  or  Nelson  at  Naples,  by  Alexander 
Dumas,  $1.40. — Ramuntcho,  by  Pierre  Loti,  $1.35. 
(Brentano.) 

Dawson  Black,  Retail  Merchant,  by  Harold  White- 
head,  illus.,  $1.50—  The  Mt.  Blossom  Girls,  by  Isla 
May  Mullins,  illus.,  $1.35.  (The  Page  Co.) 

Nine  Humorous  Tales,  by  Anton  Chekhov. — The 
Short  Story  in  the  College:  A  Collection,  introduc- 
tion by  Edward  J.  O'Brien.  (The  Stratford  Co.) 

The  Great  Adventure,  by  Peter  Stuyvesant,  illus., 
$1.50.  (Standard  Publishing  Co.) 

The  Imprisoned  Freeman,  by  Helen  S.  Woodruff, 
$1.35.  (George  Sully  &  Co.) 

Gradiva:  The  Dream  Girl,  by  W.  Jensen,  $1.25. 
(Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.) 

Where  the  Souls  of  Men  Are  Calling,  by  Credo 
Harris,  $1.35.  (Britton  Publishing  Co.) 

Shorty  McCabe  Looks  'Em  Over,  by  Sewell  Ford. 
(Edward  J.  Clode.) 

Vain  Adventure,  anon.     (Marshall  Jones  Co.) 

TRAVEL  AND  DESCRIPTION 

Japan  Day  by  Day,  by  Edward  S.  Morse,  illus.,  2 
vols.,  $8. — The  Cruise  of  the  Corwin,  by  John  Muir, 
edited  by  William  Frederic  Bade,  illus.,  $2.75. — In 
Audubon's  Labrador,  by  Charles  Wendell  Town- 
send,  illus.,  $2.50. — Cape  Cod,  New  and  Old,  by 
Agnes  Edwards,  illus.,  $2.50. — Your  National  Parks, 
by  Enos  A.  Mills,  illus.,  $2.50. — Tenting  Tonight, 
by  Mary  Roberts  Rinehart,  illus.,  $1.75.  (Houghton 
Mifflin  Co.) 

Historic  Mackinac,  by  Edwin  O.  Wood,  illus.,  2  vols., 
$10. — Santo  Domingo:  A  Country  with  a  Future,  by 
Otto  Schoenrich,  illus.,  $3. — Our  Hawaii,  by  Char- 
mian  Kittredge  London,  illus.,  $2.25. — Two  Chil- 
dren in  Old  Paris,  by  Gertrude  Slaughter,  illus., 
$1.25.  (The  Macmillan  Co.) 

Travels  in  London,  by  Charles  Morley,  with  Recol- 
lections by  Sir  Edward  Cooks,  J.  A.  Spender,  and 
J.  P.  Collins,  illus.,  $2.— On  the  Winds  of  the 
Morning,  by  Arthur  Grant,  $2. — Early  English  Av- 
ventures  in  the  East,  by  Arnold  Wright.  (E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co.) 

The  Virgin  Islands  of  the  United  States  of  America, 
by  Luther  K.  Zabrishie,  illus.,  $4. — The  Note  Book 
of  an  American  Parson  in  England,  by  G.  Monroe 
Royce,  illus.,  $2.50. — Vacation  Journeys — East  and 
West,  by  David  M.  Steele,  illus.,  $1.50.  (G.  P. 
Putnam's  Sons.) 

Florida:  The  Land  of  Enchantment,  by  Nevin  O. 
Winter,  illus.,  boxed,  $3.50. — Colorado:  The  Queen 
Jewel  of  the  Rockies,  by  Mae  Lucy  Baggs,  illus., 
boxed,  $3.50. — Sunset  Canada:  British  Columbia 
and  Beyond,  by  Archie  Bell,  illus.,  boxed,  $3.50. 
(The  Page  Co.) 


312 


THE    DIAL 


[March  28 


Balkan  Home  Life,  by  Lucy  M.  J.  Garnett,  illus.,  $3. 
— Beyond  the  Rhine,  by  Marc  Henry,  $2.50. — Japan 
at  First  Hand,  by  Joseph  I.  C.  Clarke,  illus.,  $2.50. 
— A  Roumanian  Diary:  1915,  1916,  1917,  by  Lady 
Kennard,  illus.,  $1.25.  (Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.) 

In  the  White  North:  Four  Years  of  Arctic  Explora- 
tion, by  Donald  B.  Macmillan,  illus. — Along  the 
New  England  Coast,  by  Holman  Day,  illus.,  $2. 
(Harper  &  Brothers.) 

The  Virgin  Islands:  Our  New  Possessions  and  the 
British  Islands,  by  Theodoor  de  Booy  and  John  T. 
Paris,  illus.,  $3. — Over  Here,  by  Lieut.  Hector  Mac- 
Quarrie.  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Co.) 

The  Sunny  South  and  Its  People,  by  Charles  W. 
Johnston,  $1.50. — Along  the  Pacific,  by  Charles  W. 
Johnston,  $1.25.  (Rand  McNally  &  Co.) 

Asia  Minor,  by  W.  A.  Hawley,  illus.,  $3.50. — Memor- 
ials of  a  Yorkshire  Parish,  by  J.  S.  Fletcher,  illus., 
$2.50.  (John  Lane  Co.) 

The  Desert:  Further  Studies  in  Natural  Appear- 
ances, by  John  C.  Van  Dyke,  illus.,  $2. — Scotland 
of  the  Scots,  by  G.  R.  Blake.  (Charles  Scribner's 
Sons.) 

Camps  and  Trails  in  China,  by  Roy  Chapman  An- 
drews and  Yvette  Borup  Andrews,  illus.,  $3.  (D. 
Appleton  &  Co.) 

Finding  the  Worthwhile  in  the  Southwest,  by  Charles 
Francis  Saunders,  illus.,  $1.25.  (Robert  M.  Mc- 
Bride  &  Co.) 

Through  Lapland  with  Skis  and  Reindeer,  by  Frank 
Hedges  Butler,  illus.,  $4.  (Frederick  A.  Stokes 
Co.) 

On  Two  Frontiers,  by  George  T.  Buffum,  illus.,  $1.35. 
(Lothrop,  Lee  &  Shepard  Co.) 

Alone  in  the  Caribbean,  by  Frederick  A.  Fenger,  illus., 
$2.  (George  H.  Dor  an  Co.) 

Seven  Legs  Across  the  Seas,  by  Samuel  Murray,  illus., 
$2.50.  (Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.) 

The  Seventh  Continent,  by  Helen  S.  Wright,  $2.50. 
(Richard  G.  Badger.) 

ART,  ARCHITECTURE,  MUSIC,  AND 
ARCHAEOLOGY 

Old  Sheffield  Plate:  Its  Technique  and  History  as 
Illustrated  in  a  Single  Private  Collection,  by  Julia 
W.  Torrey,  illus.,  $7.50. — Hints  on  Landscape  Gar- 
dening, by  Prince  von  Puckler-Muskau,  edited  by 
Samuel  Parsons,  illus.,  $3.50.— The  Bethlehem  Bach 
Choir,  by  Raymond  Walters,  illus.,  $2.50.— Frank 
Duveneck,  by  Norbert  Heermann,  illus.,  $2. — Modern 
Water-Colour,  by  Romilly  Fedden,  illus.,  $2. 
(Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 

Ozias  Humphry,  by  George  C.  Williamson,  illus.,  $20. 
— Dancing  with  Helen  Moller,  edited  by  Curtis 
Dunham,  illus.,  $6. — Early  English  Portrait  Minia- 
tures: In  the  Collection  of  the  Duke  of  Buccleuch, 
special  number  of  "The  International  Studio,"  illus., 
boards,  $3.  (John  Lane  Co.) 

A  History  of  Architecture,  by  Fiske  Kimball  and 
George  Harold  Edgell,  illus.,  $3.50.— The  Lure  of 
Music,  by  Olin  Downes,  illus.,  $1.25.— That  Rookie 
of  the  13th  Squad,  by  Lieut.  P.  L.  Crosby,  boards, 
75  cts.  (Harper  &  Brothers.) 

Early  Christian  Iconography  and  a  School  of  Ivory- 
Carvers  in  Provence,  by  E.  Baldwin  Smith. — Early 
Egyptian  Records  of  Travel,  by  David  Paton,  Vol. 
III.  (Princeton  University  Press.) 

The  Art  of  Rodin,  introduction  by  Lewis  Weinberg, 
illus.,  60  cts. — The  Art  of  Aubrey  Beardsley,  intro- 
duction by  Arthur  Symons,  illus.,  60  cts.  (Boni  & 
Liveright.) 

The  Small  Place:  Its  Landscape  Architecture,  by 
Elsa  Rehmann,  illus.— Fragments  from  France: 
Sketches,  by  Bruce  Bairnsfather,  $1.75.  (G.  P.  Put- 
nam's Sons.) 


Giotto,  and  Some  of  His  Followers,  by  Osvald  Sir^n, 
translated  by  Frederic  Schenck,  illus.,  $12.  (Har- 
vard University  Press.) 

Beyond  Architecture,  by  A.  Kingsley  Porter,  illus. — 
The  Meaning  of  Architecture,  by  Irving  K.  Pond, 
illus.  (Marshall  Jones  Co.) 

A  History  of  Italian  Furniture,  by  William  M.  Odom, 
illus.,  2  vols.,  $30.  per  vol.  (Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.) 

History  and  Methods  of  Ancient  and  Modern  Paint- 
ing, by  James  Ward,  Vol.  II,  $3.50.  (E.  P.  Dutton 
&  Co.) 

Cartoon  History  of  the  War,  by  Louis  Raemaekers,  4 
vols.,  Vol.  I,  $1.50.  (The  Century  Co.) 

The  Western  Front:  Official  Drawings,  by  Muirhead 
Bone,  50  cts.  per  part.  (George  H.  Doran  Co.) 

Pictures  of  War  Work  in  America,  by  Joseph  Pen- 
nell,  lithographs,  $2.  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Co.) 

A  History  of  Ancient  Coinage  700-300  B.  C.,  by  P. 
Gardner,  illus.,  $7.20.  (Oxford  University  Press.) 

SOCIOLOGY,  PUBLIC  HEALTH,  ECONOM- 
ICS, AND  POLITICS 

History  of  Labor  in  the  United  States,  by  John  R. 
Commons  and  collaborators,  introduction  by  Henry 
W.  Farnam,  2  vols.,  $6.— The  Blind:  Their  Condi- 
tion and  the  Work  Being  Done  for  Them  in  the 
United  States,  by  Harry  Best,  $3. — Cooperation: 
The  Hope  of  the  Consumer,  by  Emerson  P.  Harris, 
introduction  by  John  Graham  Brooks,  $2. — War 
Time  Control  of  Industry:  The  Experience  of  Eng- 
land, by  Howard  L.  Gray,  $1.50. — Departmental 
Cooperation,  by  Albert  Russell  Ellingwood. — Na- 
tional Statistics:  Their  History  and  Development 
in  Europe,  America,  Australia,  and  India,  collected 
and  edited  by  John  Koren. — Statistical  Methods,  by 
Horace  Secrist,  $2. — Applied  Eugenics,  by  Paul 
Popence  and  Roswell  Hill  Johnson. — Dispensaries: 
Their  Management  and  Development,  by  Michael 
M.  Davis,  Jr. — The  Vocational-Guidance  Move- 
ment, by  John  M.  Brewer. — Vocational  Guidance  for 
Girls  and  Women,  by  Albert  L.  Leake. — Crimi- 
nology, by  Maurice  Parmelee. — Theories  of  Social 
Progress,  by  Arthur  J.  Todd,  $2.25.  (The  Mac- 
millan Co.) 

Twentieth  Century  France,  by  M.  Betham-Edwards, 
$4. — The  Great  Problems  of  British  Statesmanship, 
by  J.  Ellis  Barker,  $4. — Industrial  Reconstruction: 
A  Symposium  on  the  Situation  after  the  War,  by 
Huntly  Carter. — A  National  System  of  Economics, 
by  J.  Taylor  Peddie,  $2.50. — State  Services,  by 
George  Radford,  $1.50. — Use  Your  Government,  by 
Alissa  Franc,  $1.50. — Our  Money  and  the  State,  by 
Hartley  Withers,  $1.25— The  Book  of  Municipal 
Housekeeping,  by  William  P.  Capes.  (E.  P.  Dutton 
&  Co.) 

A  History  of  American  Journalism,  by  James  Mel- 
vin  Lee,  illus.,  $3.50. — The  Chicago  Produce 
Market,  by  Edwin  G.  Nourse,  illus.,  $2.25.— Railway 
Rates  and  the  Canadian  Railway  Commission,  by 
Duncan  A.  MacGibbon,  $1.75. — A  New  Basis  for 
Social  Progress,  by  William  C.  White  and  Louis 
Jay  Heath,  $1.25.  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 

Conditions  of  Labor  in  American  Industries,  by  W. 
Jett  Lauck  and  Edgar  Sydenstricker,  $1.75.— The 
United  States  Post  Office,  by  Daniel  C.  Roper,  illus., 
$1.50.— The  Drug  Peril,  by  Ernest  S.  Bishop,  $1.25. 
— Alcohol:  Its  Relations  to  Human  Efficiency  and 
Longevity,  by  Eugene  Lyman  Fisk,  $1.  (Funk  & 
Wagnalls  Co.) 

Socialism  and  Feminism,  by  Correa  Moylan  Walsh, 
3  vols.:  The  Climax  of  Civilization,  $1.25;  Social- 
ism, $1.50;  Feminism,  $2.50;  $4.50  the  set. — Univer- 
sal Service:  The  Hope  of  Humanity,  by  L.  H. 
Bailey,  $1.25.  (Sturgis  &  Walton  Co.) 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


313 


The  Problem  of  a  National  Debt,  by  William  Frank- 
lin Willoughby. — A  New  Municipal  Program, 
edited  by  Clinton  R.  Woodruff  (National  Munici- 
pal League  Series),  $2. — The  Regulation  of  Rail- 
ways, by  Samuel  O.  Dunn,  $1.75.  (D.  Appleton  & 
Co.) 

Judicial  Tenure  in  the  United  States:  With  Espe- 
cial Reference  to  the  Tenure  of  Federal  Judges,  by 
William  S.  Carpenter. — Storage  and  Utilization  of 
Water,  by  Frederick  H.  Newell.  (Yale  University 
Press.) 

Postal  Savings,  by  Edwin  Walter  Kemmerer,  maps, 
$1.25.— ABC  of  the  Federal  Reserve  System,  by 
Edwin  Walter  Kemmerer. — Financing  the  War,  by 

A.  Barton  Hepburn. — Crime  Prevention,  by  Arthur 
Woods.    (Princeton  University  Press.) 

Social  Insurance  in  the  United  States,  by  Gurdon 
Ransom  Miller,  60  cts. — Individual  and  Social  An- 
tagonism, by  Arland  D.  Weeks,  60  cts. — Women  and 
the  Franchise,  by  Josephine  Schain,  60  cts.  (A.  C. 
McClurg  &  Co.) 

The  Polish  Peasant  in  Europe  and  America:  Mono- 
graph of  an  Immigrant  Group,  by  William  I. 
Thomas  and  Florian  Znaniecki,  5  vols.,  Vols.  I  and 
II,  $5.50  for  the  two.  (University  of  Chicago 
Press.) 

Index  of  Economic  Material  in  the  Documents  of 
Pennsylvania,  by  Adelaide  R.  Hasse. — Federal  Sys- 
tem of  the  Argentine  Republic,  by  L.  S.  Rowe. 
(Carnegie  Institution.) 

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1918] 


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1918] 


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AS  JESUS  SAW  THEM 

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IIIIIIUIIIlllUIIIHUUmilHUIIMmittniHIIHimilUN 


By  THOMAS  BURKE 
Author  of  "  Limehouie  Night*" 


TWINKLETOES  they  called  her,  although  her  real  name 
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body  whirling  in  the  mazes  of  a  dance  could  question 
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MY  ADVENTURES  AS  A  GERMAN  SECRET  AGENT 
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THE  NEW  UNIONISM 

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account  might  be  looked  at  as  a  valuable  handbook,  supplement- 
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SYNDICALISM,   INDUSTRIAL 
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THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


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VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  764 


APRIL  11,  1918 


CONTENTS 


EDUCATION  AND  SOCIAL  DIRECTION  . 
THE  UNIVERSITY  AND  DEMOCRACY  .  . 
ON  CREATING  A  USABLE  PAST  .  .  . 
THE  CREATIVE  AND  EFFICIENCY  CON- 
CEPTS OF  EDUCATION  Helen  Marot 


John  Dewey     . 
Charles  A.  Beard  . 
Fan  Wyck  Brooks 


Verse 


ON  THE  BREAKWATER  . 
OUR  PARIS  LETTER  .     .     .     .  - 
SHADES  FROM  THE  TORY  TOMB 
THE  OXFORD  SPIRIT     .     .     . 

POETS  AS  REPORTERS Conrad  Aiken  . 

APPLIED  PSYCHOLOGY  ON  TRIAL     .     .     Joseph  J as  trow 


Helen  Hoyt     . 
Robert  Dell     . 
Harold  J.  Laski 
R.  K.  Hack 


333 
335 
337 

341 
344 
344 
349 
350 
351 
353 


A  LONG  WAIT  IN  VAIN 


M.  C.  Otto 355 

358 


CLIPPED  WINGS Randolph  Bourne  .     . 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS     . 360 

History  of  India. — Diderot's  Early  Philosophical  Works. — The  Development  of 
the  British  West  Indies,  1700-1763. — The  Spirit  of  Revolt  in  Old  French  Litera- 
ture.— The  Great  Problems  of  British  Statesmanship. — American  Pictures  and 
Their  Painters. — The  New  Greek  Comedy. — The  Story  of  the  Salonika  Army. 

CASUAL  COMMENT  .     .     . 364 

COMMUNICATION      .......'.... 366 

American  Liberals  and  the  War. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 367 

SELECTIVE  SPRING  EDUCATIONAL  LIST 368 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 374 

STATEMENT  OF  OWNERSHIP,  MANAGEMENT,  CIRCULATION,  ETC  .  378 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor  HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

Contributing  Editors 

CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

ROBERT  DELL  HENRY  B.  FULLER  CLARENCE  BRITTEN 

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Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
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Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel 
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332 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11,  1918 


History  of  Labor  in  the  United  States 

By  JOHN  R.  COMMONS 

With  collaborators,  John  B.  Andrews,  Helen  L.  Sumner,  H.  E.  Hoagland,  Selig  Perlman,  David 
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The  relation  of  this  war  to  the  history  of 
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HISTORIC  MACKINAC 

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By  HOWARD  L.  GRAY 

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Si  JFortniff&tlj?  Journal  of  Critfctem  and  SDtecuwton  of  Eitetatute  and 

Education  and  Social  Direction 


It  is  not  surprising  that  many  persons 
in  the  United  States  who  are  accustomed 
to  think  of  themselves  as  belonging  to 
the  "upper"  and  therefore  rightfully  rul- 
ing class,  and  who  are  impressed  by  the 
endurance  and  resistance  of  Germany  in 
the  war,  should  look  with  envious  admira- 
tion upon  the  Prussian  system  of  authori- 
tarian education.  To  suppose  however 
that  they  desire  a  direct  importation  of 
the  German  system  of  autocratic  power 
and  willing  submissiveness  in  order  to  se- 
cure the  discipline  and  massive  order  of 
Germany,  is  to  make  a  blunder.  They  see 
America  retaining  its  familiar  traditions; 
for  the  most  part  they  would  be  sincerely 
shocked  at  a  suggestion  of  surrender  of 
democratic  habits.  What  they  see  in  their 
fancy  is  an  America  essentially  devoted 
to  democratic  ideals  and  rising  to  the 
service  of  these  ideals  with  a  thorough- 
ness, a  unanimity,  an  efficiency  and  ordered 
discipline  which  they  imagine  would  be 
secured  by  a  judicious  adoption  of  German 
methods.  Since  they  do  not  perceive  the 
interdependence  of  ends  and  means,  or  of 
purposes  and  methods,  their  error  is  intel- 
lectual rather  than  perversely  immoral. 
They  are  stupid  rather  than  deliberately 
disloyal. 

It  is  one  of  the  many  merits  of  Veblen's 
most  enlightening  book  on  Imperial  Ger- 
many that  he  makes  clear  the  high  human 
cost  of  the  envied  German  habit.  Under 
modern  conditions  social  automatism  is 
not  automatically  self-sustaining.  It  repre- 
sents a  delicate  and  complicated  piece  of 
machinery  which  can  be  kept  in  proper 
working  order  only  by  immense  pains. 
The  obedient  mind  is  not  a  thing  which 
can  be  achieved  by  the  segregated  means 
of  school  discipline  alone.  All  the  re- 
sources of  all  social  institutions  have  to  be 
centred  upon  it  without  let-up.  "It  can 
be  maintained  only  by  unremitting  habit- 
uation,  discipline  sagaciously  and  relent- 
lessly directed  to  this  end."  Successful 


warfare,  the  effects  of  warlike  prepara- 
tion, and  indoctrination  with  warlike  arro- 
gance are  more  necessary  than  the 
technique  of  the  class  room.  Only  "bureau- 
cratic surveillance  and  unremitting  inter- 
ference in  the  private  life"  of  subjects  can, 
in  the  face  of  the  disintegrating  tendencies 
of  contemporary  industry  and  trade,  de- 
velop that  "passionate  aspiration  for  sub- 
servience" which  is  a  marked  feature  of 
the  Prussian  diathesis.  If  we  look  these 
facts  in  the  face,  we  shall  quickly  see  the 
romanticism  of  any  proposal  to  secure  the 
German  type  of  disciplined  efficiency  and 
of  patient  and  persistent  "industry"  by 
borrowing  a  few  features  of  the  personal 
relation  of  teacher  and  pupil  and  install- 
ing them  in  the  school.  Only  an  occasional1 
pedagogical  Dogberry  can  rise  to  the  level 
of  a  New  York  school  administrator  who 
would  secure  permanent  good  loyal  citizen- 
ship by  "teaching  [sic]  instinctive  obedi- 
ence" in  the  schools. 

Taken  in  this  crude  form,  the  desire  to 
Prussianize  the  disciplinary  methods  of 
American  schools  is  too  incoherent  and 
spasmodic  to  constitute  a  serious  danger. 
A  serious  danger  there  is,  however,  and 
it  lies  in  the  confused  thinking  which  such 
efforts  stimulate  and  strengthen.  The  dan- 
ger lies  not  in  any  likelihood  of  success. 
Save  here  and  there  and  for  a  brief  period, 
the  attempts  run  hopelessly  counter  to  the 
trend  of  countless  social  forces.  The  dan- 
ger is  that  the  vague  desire  and  confused 
thought  embodied  in  them  will  cover  up 
the  real  problems  involved  in  securing  an 
effectively  loyal  democratic  citizenship, 
and  distract  attention  from  the  construc- 
tive measures  required  to  develop  the  kind 
of  social  unity  and  social  control  required 
in  a  democracy.  For  the  whole  tendency 
of  current  lamentations  over  the  failure  of 
American  education  to  secure  social  inte- 
gration and  effective  cohesion,  is  to  put 
emphasis  upon  the  futile  and  irritating 
relations  of  personal  authority  and  per- 


334 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


sonal  subjection,  or  else  upon  the  regu- 
lative power  of  blind  engrained  habits, 
whose  currency  presupposes  an  authori- 
tative deus  ex  machina  behind  the  scenes 
to  supply  the  ends  for  which  the  habits 
are  to  work.  And  anybody  who  hasn't 
put  his  soul  to  sleep  with  the  apologetics 
of  soporific  "idealism"  knows  that  at  the 
present  time  the  power  which  would  fix 
the  ends  to  which  the  masses  would  be 
habituated  is  the  economic  class  which  has 
a  selfish  interest  in  the  exercise  of  control. 
To  cater  to  this  class  by  much  talk  of  the 
importance  of  discipline,  obedience,  habit- 
uation,  and  by  depreciation  of  initiative 
and  creative  thought  as  socially  dangerous, 
may  be  a  quick  path  to  favor.  But  it  rep- 
resents an  ignobility  of  spirit  which  is 
peculiarly  out  of  place  in  an  educator,  who 
above  all  others  is  called  upon  to  keep  his 
supreme  interest  sensitively  human. 

Unfortunately  there  is  much  in  the  tradi- 
tion of  what  is  regarded  as  scientific 
sociology  which  lends  itself,  unwittingly,  ^to 
such  base  uses.  Sociological  science  in- 
herited a  basic  error  from  the  older 
political  science,  and  has  too  often  devoted 
itself  to  a  pompous  dressing-out  of  solu- 
tions of  a  problem  resting  upon  a  "fact" 
which  isn't  a  fact.  It  has  taken  as  its 
chief  problem  how  individuals  who  are 
(supposedly)  non-social  become  social- 
ized, how  social  control  becomes  effective 
among  individuals  who  are  naturally  hos- 
tile to  it.  The  basic  supposition  is,  of 
course,  mythological.  Docility,  desire  for 
direction,  love  for  protective  control  are 
stronger  original  traits  of  human  nature 
than  is  insubordination  or  originality.  The 
scales  are  always  weighted  in  favor  of 
habituation  and  against  reflective  thought. 
Routine  is  so  easy  as  to  be  "natural,"  and 
initiative  is  so  difficult  as  to  require  the 
severe  discipline  of  art.  But  the  socio- 
logical antithesis  of  the  individual  and  the 
social  has  invaded  educational  thought  and 
is  employed  by  the  pedagogue  to  defend 
unintelligent  convention,  unexamined  tra- 
dition, and  to  feed  the  irritable  vanity  of 
that  petty  tyrant,  the  educational  adminis- 
trator, who  learns  by  study  of  the  new 
sociological  pedagogy  that  the  exercise  of 
his  personal  authority  is  in  reality  an 
exemplar  of  the  great  problem  of  soci- 


ology— the  "social  control"  of  the  unre- 
generate,  unsocialized  individual. 

This  thoughtless  sociology  does  some- 
thing, however,  even  more  harmful  than 
the  rationalization  of  mere  personal 
authority.  It  serves  to  justify  the  laziness, 
the  intellectual  inertia,  of  the  educational 
routineer.  The  latter  finds  it  easier,  say, 
to  rely  upon  books  than  to  make  himself 
a  well  informed  man  at  first  hand.  He  is 
solemnly  told  that  textbooks  socialize  the 
pupil,  for  they  embody  the  intellectual 
heritage  of  the  race.  He  then  puts  to  one 
side  the  onerous  task  of  achieving  any  per- 
sonal originality  in  the  subjects  he  teaches, 
lest  he  might  fire  his  students  with  "indi- 
vidualism" having  socially  disastrous  con- 
sequences. An  uneasy  intellectual  con- 
science tells  a  teacher  that  in  his  methods 
he  is  following  the  lines  of  least  resistance 
furnished  by  school  customs  which  he  has 
unreflectively  picked  up.  But  he  is  con- 
soled by  being  told  that  thinking  merely 
develops  individualism,  that  custom  is  the 
great  social  balance  wheel.  And  far  be 
it  from  him  to  undermine  the  sanctities 
of  institutionalized  habit  by  a  little  adven- 
ture in  personal  reflection.  He  has  a  sense 
that  his  ways  of  dealing  with  pupils  are 
external  and  perfunctory.  He  feels  that 
if  he  took  pains  to  acquaint  himself  with 
the  scientific  methods  of  gaining  insight 
into  human  nature  and  applied  himself 
with  sympathy  to  understanding  it  in  its 
immense  diversity,  he  might  be  able  to 
work  from  the  inside  to  release  potentiali- 
ties instead  of  from  the  outside  to  impose 
conventionalities.  But  then  the  solemn 
guardian  of  "social  control"  comes  along 
and  warns  him  of  the  "social"  value  of 
respect  for  authority  as  such,  and  the  dan- 
gers of  "catering"  to  individuality.  A 
scientific  excuse  for  natural  laziness  and 
ignorance  can  go  a  long  way. 

The  worst  of  all  this,  I  repeat,  is  that 
it  leaves  problems  which  are  pressing  un- 
touched and  ignores  the  urgent  need  for 
the  particular  kind  of  social  direction  fitted 
to  a  democratic  society — the  direction 
which  comes  from  heightened  emotional 
appreciation  of  common  interests  and 
from  an  understanding  of  social  responsi- 
bilities, an  understanding  to  be  secured 
only  by  experimental  and  personal  partici- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


335 


pation  in  the  conduct  of  common  affairs. 
At  this  point  the  antithesis  between  indi- 
vidual and  social  ceases  to  be  merely  silly. 
It  becomes  dangerous.  For  the  unsolved 
problem  of  democracy  is  the  construction 
of  an  education  which  will  develop  that 
kind  of  individuality  which  is  intelligently 
alive  to  the.  common  life  and  sensitively 


loyal  to  its  common  maintenance.  It  is  not 
an  antithesis  of  social  control  and  indi- 
vidual development  which  our  education 
requires.  We  want  that  type  of  education 
which  will  discover  and  form  the  kind  of 
individual  who  is  the  intelligent  carrier  of 
a  social  democracy — social  indeed,  but 
still  a  democracy.  JQHN  DEWEY. 


The  University  and  Democracy 


Though  personalities  and  institutional 
jealousies  thrust  themselves  into  the  field 
of  academic  controversy,  those  who  really 
care  most  about  the  future  of  the  university 
in  America  must  ignore  them.  They  must 
keep  for  guidance  one  ideal — the  orderly 
and  progressive  development  of  democ- 
racy in  the  United  States.  Whether  this 
college  professor  is  unworthy  of  his  call- 
ing, or  that  college  president  is  clearly 
lacking  in  courage  and  understanding,  is 
of  slight  moment.  Solemn  before  us  is 
the  future  of  our  country — war  against  the 
German  menace  to  civilization;  the  im- 
pending, nay  existing,  struggles  between 
capital  and  labor;  grave  problems  of  effi- 
cient government;  the  abolition  of  unde- 
served poverty;  the  call  for  science  and 
service,  for  the  counsel  and  advice  of  the 
wisest  and  best,  of  the  unafraid  and  the 
unbought.  At  bottom  and  forever,  the 
question  of  academic  freedom  is  the  ques- 
tion of  intellectual  and  spiritual  leadership 
in  American  democracy.  Those  who  lead 
and  teach,  are  they  free,  fearless,  and 
worthy  of  trust?  If  they  fain  would  lead 
the  people,  do  they  lead  under  the  eye  of 
eternity  or  under  the  eye  of  the  trustees' 
committee  on  salaries,  pensions,  and  pro- 
motions? If  they  find  through  research 
and  mature  thought  that  a  popular  move- 
ment is  full  of  peril  can  they  say  so  and 
command,  as  known  freemen,  the  respect 
of  the  masses?  When  they  face  the  ques- 
tioning multitude,  whose  whimsies  and 
fallacies  they  would  overbear,  do  they 
encounter  distrust  and  contempt  or  high 
esteem  and  confidence? 

Everywhere  the  tide  of  democracy 
comes  in.  Ancient  China  struggles  for  a 
republic.  The  crown  of  the  Romanoffs  is 
in  the  dust.  Labor  rises  higher  and  higher 


in  the  scale  of  power.  The  agrarians  are 
astir  once  more.  Great  hopes  shine  in  at 
the  Eastern  door,  but  who  knows  what 
trials  or  what  disasters  await?  The  wrath 
of  man  may  praise  God,  but  it  cannot  man- 
age an  industry  or  conduct  a  government. 
It  may  pull  down  such  pillars  of  order 
and  justice  as  we  have  now  erected,  and 
leave— dust  and  ashes.  Every  student  of 
democracy,  every  enlightened  socialist 
familiar  with  history,  knows  that  popular 
uprisings  may  lead  to  ruin  as  well  as  to 
higher  things.  The  fate  of  republics, 
democracies,  and  empires  teaches  us  this. 
The  wise  Aristotle  learned  it  centuries  ago. 
When  the  fierce  light  of  popular  inquiry 
beats  upon  our  institutions  of  government 
and  property  after  the  great  war  is  over, 
where  is  to  be  found  the  trusted  leader- 
ship that  can  guide  and  mould  the  forces 
that  may  upbuild — or  destroy — civiliza- 
tion? What  can  wisdom  accomplish  if  it 
is  regarded  with  suspicion  and  distrust? 
How  can  the  calm  voice  of  reason  prevail 
if  it  is  known  to  be  modulated  to  suit  the 
whims  of  paymasters  who  come  once  a 
month  to  see  that  their  servants  have 
obeyed  orders?  And  if  our  universities 
are  to  be  distrusted  by  the  people  whose 
labor  of  hand  and  brain  supports  them, 
whether  they  be  public  or  private,  why 
should  educational  incomes  and  endow- 
ments be  maintained?  A  democracy  that 
suspects  will  disestablish  and  disendow. 
The  smug  security  afforded  by  the  Dart- 
mouth College  case  will  avail  little  against 
a  people  demanding  services  from  those 
who  have  privileges.  Loud  professions  of 
self-approved  righteousness  will  become 
merely  amusing.  Those  who  behold  as  well 
as  those  who  perform  the  auguries  will 
laugh,  and  the  day  of  undoing  will  come. 


336 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


Intimately  related  to  this  greater  ques- 
tion of  spiritual  leadership  is  the  effect 
of  trustee  guardianship  upon  the  class  of 
men  who  will  seek  academic  positions. 
President  Lowell  has  called  our  attention 
sharply  to  this  point.  Men  who  love  the 
smooth  and  easy  will  turn  to  teaching.  As 
long  as  they  keep  silent  on  living  issues, 
their  salaries  will  be  secure.  It  will  not 
be  important  that  they  should  arouse  and 
inspire  students  in  the  class  room.  They 
need  not  be  teachers.  They  are  asked  to 
be  only  purveyors  of  the  safe  and  insignifi- 
cant. Afraid  of  taking  risks,  they  will 
shrink  into  timid  pusillanimity.  Risking 
nothing,  they  will  make  no  mistakes;  risk- 
ing nothing,  they  will  accomplish  nothing. 
Perfunctory  performance  of  statutory 
duties  will  bring  the  pay  check.  They  may 
sit  in  the  chimney  corner  and  curse  the 
trustees  and  president  and  even  laugh  at 
capitalists,  providing  they  laugh  softly. 
Men  of  will,  initiative,  and  inventiveness, 
not  afraid  of  falling  into  error  in  search 
for  truth,  will  shun  such  a  life  of  futile 
lubricity,  as  the  free  woman  avoids  the 
harem.  Undoubtedly  it  will  be  possible 
to  fill  all  vacant  chairs  and  keep  the  num- 
ber of  "learned"  publications  up-to-date; 
but  to  what  purpose?  That  the  belly  may 
be  full,  the  mind  slothful  with  paid  and 
pensioned  ease?  Those  who  have  the 
great  passion  to  create,  to  mould,  to  lead, 
to  find  new  paths  will  look  upon  the  uni- 
versity professorship  as  an  unclean  thing, 
or  at  best  no  thing  to  challenge  their  hope 
and  courage. 

We  have  before  us  two  ideals.  Accord- 
ing to  one  of  them,  a  board  of  trustees, 
who  meet  for  an  hour  or  two  once  a  month 
or  once  every  three  months,  will  assume 
full  and  undivided  responsibility  "as  to 
whether  the  influence  of  a  given  teacher 
is  injurious  to  private  morals  or  dangerous 
to  public  order  and  security."  They  will 
guarantee  the  intellectual  output  of  their 
factory  to  be  100  per  cent  pure.  Any 
member  of  their  institution  who  teaches 
or  writes,  either  as  a  professor  or  as  a 
citizen,  will  have  their  stamp  as  to  the 
correctness  of  his  views.  The  professors' 
commodities  will  bear  the  trade-mark  of 
the  firm.  The  teachers  are  to  be  relieved 
of  moral  responsibility.  As  long  as  they 
are  retained,  they  are  pure.  The  trustees 


get  what  they  pay  for,   and  the  teacher 
delivers  standardized  goods. 

To  many  a  simple  mind  this  seems 
sound  enough.  But  let  us  examine  the 
working  of  this  doctrine.  A  great  uni- 
versity has  several  hundred  professors  in 
all  the  known  sciences  and  arts,  from 
anthropologists,  biologists,  and  chemists 
down  through  historians  and  political 
economists  to  zymotic  disease  experts. 
They  speak  a  various  language  which  only 
the  adept  understands.  It  is  a  matter  of 
common  knowledge  that  an  expert  can 
teach  the  most  violent  and  subversive  doc- 
trines in  technical  terminology,  which  the 
students  of  the  subject  understand,  but 
which  would  be  as  Greek  to  the  average 
lawyer  or  business  man.  By  spending  a 
few  hours  a  week  or  a  month  on  censor- 
ship, however,  the  trustees  are  to  guaran- 
tee that  all  the  teachings  of  all  the  experts 
are  pure,  100  per  cent  pure!  Obviously, 
the  advocates  of  the  trade-marked  aca- 
demic article  are  amusing  as  well  as  Prus- 
sian. They  can  silence  the  coward  and 
transform  the  frightened  professor  into  a 
master  of  ingenious  evasiveness.  Having 
done  this,  they  may  be  as  smug  as  they 
like. 

It  is  significant  that  this  factory  brand 
of  learning,  guaranteed  pure,  has  been 
utterly  rejected  by  the  three  leading  jour- 
nals that  appeal  to  the  intellectual  classes 
of  America— THE  DIAL,  "The  Nation," 
and  "The  New  Republic."  The  youth 
and  the  faith  of  America  reject  it.  The 
American  Association  of  University  Pro- 
fessors rejects  it,  demanding  that  proceed- 
ings against  any  professor  should  be  "in 
accord  with  the  principle  of  faculty 
responsibility,"  and  that  the  accused  should 
have  "a  fair  trial  on  those  charges  before 
either  the  judicial  committee  of  the  faculty 
or  a  joint  committee  composed  of  an  equal 
number  of  professors  and  trustees." 

One  college  president,  among  the  first 
in  the  land,  President  Lowell  of  Harvard, 
has  utterly  rejected  the  childish  philosophy 
of  standardized  learning.  In  fine  and 
restrained  language,  revealing  a  clear 
vision  and  a  firm  grasp  of  the  problem  and 
its  solution,  President  Lowell,  in  his  report 
of  December  12,  1917,  enunciates  the  ideal 
which  will  command  the  hearty  approval 
of  the  American  people.  It  is  to  be  re- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


337 


gretted  that  his  classic  statement  cannot  be 
reprinted  here  in  full,  but  the  two  main 
points  deserve  repetition: 
The  teaching  by  the  professor  in  his  class  room 
on  the  subjects  within  the  scope  of  his  chair  ought 
to  be  absolutely  free.  He  must  teach  the  truth 
as  he  has  found  it  and  sees  it.  This  is  the  primary 
condition  of  academic  freedom,  and  any  violation 
of  it  endangers  intellectual  progress. 

On  other  questions  and  outside  his  class 
room  the  professor  speaks  as  a  citizen.  Of 
the  professor's  rights  as  a  citizen  Presi- 
dent Lowell  says: 

In  spite,  however,  of  the  risk  of  injury  to  the 
institution,  the  objections  to  restraint  upon  what 
professors  may  say  as  citizens  seem  to  me  far 
greater  than  the  harm  done  by  leaving  them  free. 
In  the  first  place,  to  impose  upon  the  teacher  in  a 
university  restrictions  to  which  members  of  other 
professions  .  .  .  are  not  subjected,  would  produce  a 
sense  of  irritation  and  humiliation.  In  accepting  a 
chair  under  such  conditions  a  man  would  surrender 
a  part  of  his  liberty;  what  he  might  say  would  be 
submitted  to  the  censorship  of  a  board  of  trustees, 
and  he  would  cease  to  be  a  free  citizen.  .  .  Such  a 
policy  would  tend  seriously  to  discourage  some  of 
the  best  men  from  taking  up  the  scholar's  life.  It 


is  not  a  question  of  academic  freedom,  but  of  per- 
sonal liberty  from  constraint,  yet  it  touches  the 
dignity  of  the  academic  career.  .  .  If  a  university  or 
college  censors  what  its  professors  may  say,  if  it 
restrains  them  from  uttering  something  which  it 
does  not  approve,  it  thereby  assumes  responsibility 
for  that  which  it  permits  them  to  say.  This  is 
logical  and  inevitable,  but  it  is  a  responsibility 
which  an  institution  of  learning  would  be  unwise  in 
assuming. 

There  is  no  more  to  be  said.  A  scholar 
and  a  gentleman,  commanding  the  confi- 
dence of  the  best  men  and  women  in 
America,  secure  in  his  own  position  as  an 
intellectual  leader,  secure  in  his  social  posi- 
tion, secure  in  the  splendid  traditions  of 
his  university,  has  spoken  in  language  that 
cannot  be  misunderstood.  His  report  for 
1917  will  be  the  Magna  Carta  to  which 
universities  in  all  times  and  in  all  countries 
may  turn  for  guidance  in  sound  principles. 
No  nobler  word  has  been  spoken  in  the 
present  crisis;  no  greater  promise  of  the 
future  in  America  has  been  given. 

CHARLES  A.  BEARD. 


On  Creating  a  Usable  Past 


There  is  a  kind  of  anarchy  that  fosters 
growth  and  there  is  another  anarchy  that 
prevents  growth,  because  it  lays  too  great 
a  strain  upon  the  individual — and  all  our 
contemporary  literature  in  America  cries 
out  of  this  latter  kind  of  anarchy.  Now, 
anarchy  is  never  the  sheer  wantonness  of 
mind  that  academic  people  so  often  think 
it;  it  results  from  the  sudden  unbottling  of 
elements  that  have  had  no  opportunity  to 
develop  freely  in  the  open;  it  signifies, 
among  other  things,  the  lack  of  any  sense 
of  inherited  resources.  English  and 
French  writers,  European  writers  in  gen- 
eral, never  quite  separate  themselves  from 
the  family  tree  that  nourishes  and  sustains 
them  and  assures  their  growth.  Would 
American  writers  have  done  so,  plainly 
against  their  best  interests,  if  they  had  had 
any  choice  in  the  matter?  I  doubt  it,  and 
that  is  why  it  seems  to  me  significant  that 
our  professors  continue  to  pour  out  a 
stream  of  historical  works  repeating  the 
same  points  of  view  to  such  an  astonishing 
degree  that  they  have  placed  a  sort  of  Tal- 
mudic  seal  upon  the  American  tradition. 
I  suspect  that  the  past  experience  of  our 


people  is  not  so  much  without  elements 
that  might  be  made  to  contribute  to  some 
common  understanding  in  the  present,  as 
that  the  interpreters  of  that  past  experi- 
ence have  put  a  gloss  upon  it  which  renders 
it  sterile  for  the  living  mind. 

I  am  aware,  of  course,  that  we  have 
had  no  cumulative  culture,  and  that  conse- 
quently the  professors  who  guard  the  past 
and  the  writers  who  voice  the  present 
inevitably  have  less  in  common  in  this 
country  than  anywhere  in  the  Old  World. 
The  professors  of  American  literature  can, 
after  all,  offer  very  little  to  the  creators 
of  it.  But  there  is  a  vendetta  between  the 
two  generations,  and  the  older  generation 
seems  to  delight  in  cutting  off  the  supplies 
of  the  younger.  What  actuates  the  old 
guard  in  our  criticism  and  their  energetic 
following  in  the  university  world  is  appar- 
ently no  sort  of  desire  to  fertilize  the 
present,  but  rather  to  shame  the  present 
with  the  example  of  the  past.  There  is 
in  their  note  an  almost  pathological  vin- 
dictiveness  when  they  compare  the  "poet- 
asters of  today"  with  certain  august 
figures  of  the  age  of  pioneering  who  have 


338 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


long  since  fallen  into  oblivion  in  the  minds 
of  men  and  women  of  the  world.  Almost 
pathological,  I  say,  their  vindictiveness 
appears  to  be;  but  why  not  actually  so?  I 
think  it  is;  and  therefore  it  seems  to  me 
important,  as  a  preliminary  step  to  the 
reinterpretation  of  our  literature,  that  we 
should  have  the  reinterpretation  of  our 
professors  that  now  goes  merrily  forward. 

For  the  spiritual  past  has  no  objective 
reality;  it  yields  only  what  we  are  able  to 
look  for  in  it.  And  what  people  find  in 
literature  corresponds  precisely  with  what 
they  find  in  life.  Now  it  is  obvious  that 
professors  who  accommodate  themselves 
without  effort  to  an  academic  world  based 
like  ours  upon  the  exigencies  of  the  com- 
mercial mind  cannot  see  anything  in  the 
past  that  conflicts  with  a  commercial 
philosophy.  Thanks  to  his  training  and 
environment  and  the  typically  non-creative 
habit  of  his  mind,  the  American  professor 
by  instinct  interprets  his  whole  field  of 
learning  with  reference  to  the  ideal  not 
of  the  creative,  but  of  the  practical  life. 
He  does  this  very  often  by  default,  but 
not  less  conclusively  for  that.  The  teach- 
ing of  literature  stimulates  the  creative 
faculty  but  it  also  and  far  more  effectually 
thwarts  it,  so  that  the  professor  turns 
against  himself.  He  passively  plays  into 
the  hands  that  underfeed  his  own  imagi- 
native life  and  permits  the  whole  weight 
of  his  meticulous  knowledge  of  the  past 
to  tip  the  beam  against  the  living  present. 
He  gradually  comes  to  fulfill  himself  in  the 
vicarious  world  of  the  dead  and  returns 
to  the  actual  world  of  struggling  and  mis- 
educated  mortals  in  the  majestic  raiment 
of  borrowed  immortalities.  And  he  pours 
out  upon  that  world  his  own  contempt  for 
the  starveling  poet  in  himself.  That  is 
why  the  histories  of  our  literature  so  often 
end  with  a  deprecating  gesture  at  about 
the  year  1890,  why  they  stumble  and  hesi- 
tate when  they  discuss  Whitman,  why  they 
disparage  almost  everything  that  conies 
out  of  the  contemporary  mind. 

Now  it  is  this  that  differentiates  the 
accepted  canon  of  American  literature 
from  those  of  the  literatures  of  Europe, 
and  invalidates  it.  The  European  pro- 
fessor is  relatively  free  from  these  in- 
hibitions; he  views  the  past  through  the 
spectacles  of  his  own  intellectual  freedom ; 


consequently  the  corpus  of  inherited 
experience  which  he  lays  before  the  prac- 
ticing author  is  not  only  infinitely  richer 
and  more  inspiring  than  ours,  but  also 
more  usable.  The  European  writer,  what- 
ever his  personal  education  may  be,  has 
his  racial  past,  in  the  first  place,  and  then 
he  has  his  racial  past  made  available  for 
him.  The  American  writer,  on  the  other 
hand,  not  only  has  the  most  meager  of 
birthrights  but  is  cheated  out  of  that.  For 
the  professorial  mind,  as  I  have  said,  puts 
a  gloss  upon  the  past  that  renders  it  sterile 
for  the  living  mind.  Instead  of  reflecting 
the  creative  impulse  in  American  history, 
it  reaffirms  the  values  established  by  the 
commercial  tradition ;  it  crowns  everything 
that  has  passed  the  censorship  of  the  com- 
mercial and  moralistic  mind.  And  it  ap- 
pears to  be  justified  because,  on  the  whole, 
only  those  American  writers  who  have 
passed  that  censorship  have  undergone  a 
reasonably  complete  development  and  in 
this  way  entered  what  is  often  considered 
the  purview  of  literary  criticism. 

What  kind  of  literature  it  is  that  has 
passed  that  censorship  and  "succeeded"  in 
this  bustling  commercial  democracy  of 
ours,  we  all  know  very  well.  It  has  been 
chiefly  a  literature  of  exploitation,  the 
counterpart  of  our  American  life.  From 
Irving  and  Longfellow  and  Cooper  and 
Bryant,  who  exploited  the  legendary  and 
scenic  environment  of  our  grandfathers, 
through  the  local  colorists,  who  dominated 
our  fiction  during  the  intermediate  age  and 
to  whom  the  American  people  accounted 
for  artistic  righteousness  their  own  pro- 
vincial quaintnesses,  down  to  such  living 
authors,  congenial  to  the  academic  mind, 
as  Winston  Churchill,  who  exploits  one 
after  another  the  "problems"  of  modern 
society,  the  literature  that  has  been  al- 
lowed to  live  in  this  country,  that  has  been 
imaginatively  nourished,  has  been  not 
only  a  literature  acceptable  to  the  mind 
that  is  bent  upon  turning  the  tangible 
world  to  account  but  a  literature  produced 
by  a  cognate  process.  Emerson,  Thoreau, 
Whitman — there  you  have  the  exceptions, 
the  successful  exceptions;  but  they  have 
survived  not  because  of  what  they  still  offer 
us,  but  because  they  were  hybrids,  with 
enough  pioneer  instinct  to  pay  their  way 
among  their  contemporaries. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


339 


There  is  nothing  to  resent  in  this;  it 
has  been  a  plain  matter  of  historic  destiny. 
And  historically  predestined  also  is  the 
professorial  mind  of  today.  But  so  is  the 
revolt  of  the  younger  generation  against 
the  professorial  mind.  Aside  from  any 
personal  considerations,  we  have  the  clear- 
est sort  of  evidence  that  exploitation  is 
alien  to  the  true  method  of  literature,  if 
only  because  it  produces  the  most  lament- 
able effect  on  the  exploiter.  Look  at  the 
local  colorists!  They  have  all  come  to  a 
bad  end,  artistically  speaking.  Is  it  neces- 
sary to  recall  the  later  work  of  Bret  Harte 
after  he  had  squeezed  the  orange  of  Cali- 
fornia? Or  the  lachrymosity  of  Mr. 
James  Lane  Allen's  ghost  revisiting  the 
Kentucky  apple  tree  from  which  he  shook 
down  all  the  fruit  a  generation  ago  ?  That 
is  the  sort  of  spectacle  you  have  to  accept 
complacently  if  you  take  the  word  of  the 
professors  that  the  American  tradition  in 
literature  is  sound  and  true;  and  the  pub- 
lic in  general  does  accept  it  complacently, 
because  it  is  not  averse  to  lachrymosity  and 
cares  nothing  about  the  ethics  of  personal 
growth.  But  the  conscientious  writer 
turns  aside  in  disgust.  Seeing  nothing  in 
the  past  but  an  oblivion  of  all  things  that 
have  meaning  to  the  creative  mood,  he 
decides  to  paddle  his  own  course,  even  if  it 
leads  to  shipwreck. 

Unhappily,  the  spiritual  welfare  of  this 
country  depends  altogether  upon  the  fate 
of  its  creative  minds.  If  they  cannot  grow 
and  ripen,  where  are  we  going  to  get  the 
new  ideals,  the  finer  attitudes,  that  we 
must  get  if  we  are  ever  to  emerge  from 
our  existing  travesty  of  a  civilization? 
From  this  point  of  view  our  contemporary 
literature  could  hardly  be  in  a  graver 
state.  We  want  bold  ideas,  and  we  have 
nuances.  We  want  courage,  and  we  have 
universal  fear.  We  want  individuality, 
and  we  have  idiosyncrasy.  We  want  vital- 
ity, and  we  have  intellectualism.  We  want 
emblems  of  desire,  and  we  have  Niagaras 
of  emotionality.  We  want  expansion  of 
soul,  and  we  have  an  elephantiasis  of  the 
vocal  organs.  Why?  Because  we  have 
no  cultural  economy,  no  abiding  sense  of 
spiritual  values,  no  body  of  critical  under- 
standing? Of  course;  that  is  the  burden 
of  all  our  criticism.  But  these  conditions 
result  largely,  I  think,  from  another  condi- 


tion that  is,  in  part  at  least,  remediable. 
The  present  is  a  void,  and  the  American 
writer  floats  in  that  void  because  the  past 
that  survives  in  the  common  mind  of  the 
present  is  a  past  without  living  value.  But 
is  this  the  only  possible  past?  If  we  need 
another  past  so  badly,  is  it  inconceivable 
that  we  might  discover  one,  that  we  might 
even  invent  one? 

Discover,  invent  a  usable  past  we  cer- 
tainly can,  and  that  is  what  a  vital  criticism 
always  does.  The  past  that  Carlyle  put 
together  for  England  would  never  have 
existed  if  Carlyle  had  been  an  American 
professor.  And  what  about  the  past  that 
Michelet,  groping  about  in  the  depths  of 
his  own  temperament,  picked  out  for  the 
France  of  his  generation?  We  have  had 
our  historians,  too,  and  they  have  held 
over  the  dark  backward  of  time  the  divin- 
ing-rods of  their  imagination  and  conjured 
out  of  it  what  they  wanted  and  what  their 
contemporaries  wanted — Motley's  great 
epic  of  the  self-made  man,  for  instance, 
which  he  called  "The  Rise  of  the  Dutch 
Republic."  The  past  is  an  inexhaustible 
storehouse  of  apt  attitudes  and  adaptable 
ideals;  it  opens  of  itself  at  the  touch  of 
desire;  it  yields  up,  now  this  treasure,  now 
that,  to  anyone  who  comes  to  it  armed  with 
a  capacity  for  personal  choices.  If,  then, 
we  cannot  use  the  past  our  professors  offer 
us,  is  there  any  reason  why  we  should  not 
create  others  of  our  own?  The  grey  con- 
ventional mind  casts  its  shadow  backward. 
But  why  should  not  the  creative  mind 
dispel  that  shadow  with  shafts  of  light? 

So  far  as  our  literature  is  concerned, 
the  slightest  acquaintance  with  other  na- 
tional points  of  view  than  our  own  is 
enough  to  show  how  many  conceptions  of 
it  are  not  only  possible  but  already  exist  as 
commonplaces  in  the  mind  of  the  world. 
Every  people  selects  from  the  experience 
of  every  other  people  whatever  con- 
tributes most  vitally  to  its  own  develop- 
ment. The  history  of  France  that  survives 
in  the  mind  of  Italy  is  totally  different 
from  the  history  of  France  that  survives 
in  the  mind  of  England,  and  from  this 
point  of  view  there  are  just  as  many  his- 
tories of  America  as  there  are  nations  to 
possess  them.  Go  to  England  and  you 
will  discover  that  in  English  eyes  "Amer- 
ican literature"  has  become,  while  quite  as 


340 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


complete  an  entity  as  it  is  with  us,  an 
altogether  different  one.  You  >will  find 
that  an  entire  scheme  of  ideas  and  tenden- 
cies has  survived  there  out  of  the  Ameri- 
can past  to  which  the  American  academic 
point  of  view  is  wholly  irrelevant.  This, 
I  say,  is  a  commonplace  to  anyone  whose 
mind  has  wandered  even  the  shortest  way 
from  home,  and  to  travel  in  one's  imagina- 
tion from  country  to  country,  from  decade 
to  decade,  is  to  have  this  experience  indefi- 
nitely multiplied.  Englishmen  will  ask  you 
why  we  Americans  have  so  neglected  Her- 
man Melville  that  there  is  no  biography 
of  him.  Russians  will  tell  you  that  we 
never  really  understood  the  temperament 
of  Jack  London.  And  so  on  and  so  on, 
through  all  the  ramifications  of  national 
psychology.  By  which  I  do  not  mean  at 
all  that  we  ought  to  cut  our  cloth  to  fit 
other  people.  I  mean  simply  that  we  have 
every  precedent  for  cutting  it  to  fit  our- 
selves. Presumably  the  orthodox  inter- 
preters of  our  literature  imagine  that  they 
speak  for  the  common  reason  of  human- 
kind. But  evidently  as  regards  modern 
literature  that  common  reason  is  a  very 
subtle  and  precarious  thing,  by  no  means 
in  the  possession  of  minds  that  consider  it 
a  moral  duty  to  impose  upon  the  world 
notions  that  have  long  since  lost  their  sap. 
The  world  is  far  too  rich  to  tolerate  this. 
When  Matthew  Arnold  once  objected  to 
Sainte-Beuve  that  he  did  not  consider 
Lamartine  an  important  writer,  Sainte- 
Beuve  replied,  "Perhaps  not,  but  he  is  im- 
portant for  us."  Only  by  the  exercise  of 
a  little  pragmatism  of  that  kind,  I  think, 
can  the  past  experience  of  our  people  be 
placed  at  the  service  of  the  future. 

What  is  important  for  us?  What,  out 
of  all  the  multifarious  achievements  and 
impulses  and  desires  of  the  American  lit- 
erary mind,  ought  we  to  elect  to  remem- 
ber? The  more  personally  we  answer  this 
question,  it  seems  to  me,  the  more  likely 
we  are  to  get  a  vital  order  out  of  the 
anarchy  of  the  present.  For  the  imper- 
sonal way  of  answering  it  has  been  at  least 
in  part  responsible  for  this  anarchy,  by 
severing  the  warm  artery  that  ought  to 
lead  from  the  present  back  into  the  past. 
To  approach  our  literature  from  the 
point  of  view  not  of  the  successful  fact 
but  of  the  creative  impulse,  is  to  throw  it 


into  an  entirely  new  focus.  What  emerges 
then  is  the  desire,  the  aspiration,  the  strug- 
gle, the  tentative  endeavor,  and  the  appall- 
ing obstacles  our  life  has  placed  before 
them.  Which  immediately  casts  over  the 
spiritual  history  of  America  a  significance 
that,  for  us,  it  has  never  had  before. 

Now  it^is  impossible  to  make  this  ap- 
proach without  having  some  poignant 
experience  of  the  shortcomings,  the  needs, 
and  the  difficulties  of  our  literary  life  as 
it  is  now  conditioned.  Its  anarchy  is 
merely  a  compound  of  these,  all  of  which 
are  to  be  explained  not  so  much  by  the 
absence  of  a  cultural  past  as  by  the  pres- 
ence of  a  practical  one.  In  particular,  as 
I  have  said,  this  anarchy  results  from  the 
sudden  unbottling  of  elements  that  have 
had  no  opportunity  to  develop  freely  in 
the  open.  Why  not  trace  those  elements 
back,  analyzing  them  on  the  way,  and 
showing  how  they  first  manifested  them- 
selves, and  why,  and  what  repelled  them? 
How  many  of  Theodore  Dreiser's  defects, 
for  example,  are  due  to  an  environment 
that  failed  to  produce  the  naturalistic  mind 
until  the  rest  of  the  world  had  outgrown 
it  and  given  birth  to  a  more  advanced  set 
of  needs?  And  there  is  Vachel  Lindsay. 
If  he  runs  to  sound  and  color  in  excess  and 
for  their  sake  voids  himself  within,  how 
much  is  that  because  the  life  of  a  Middle 
Western  town  sets  upon  those  things  an 
altogether  scandalous  premium?  Well, 
there  you  have  two  of  the  notorious  diffi- 
culties of  contemporary  authorship;  and 
for  all  that  our  successful  tradition  may 
say,  difficulties  like  those  have  been  the 
death  of  our  creative  life  in  the  past.  The 
point  for  us  is  that  they  have  never  pre- 
vented the  creative  impulse  from  being 
born.  Look  back  and  you  will  see,  drift- 
ing in  and  out  of  the  books  of  history, 
appearing  and  vanishing  in  the  memoirs  of 
more  aggressive  and  more  acceptable 
minds,  all  manner  of  queer  geniuses, 
wraith-like  personalities  that  have  left  be- 
hind them  sometimes  a  fragment  or  so 
that  has  meaning  for  us  now,  more  often 
a  mere  eccentric  name.  The  creative  past 
of  this  country  is  a  limbo  of  the  non-elect, 
the  fathers  and  grandfathers  of  the  talent 
of  today.  If  they  had  had  a  little  of  the 
sun  and  rain  that  fell  so  abundantly  upon 
the  Goliaths  of  nineteenth-century  philis- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


341 


tinism,  how  much  better  conditioned  would 
their  descendants  be ! 

The  real  task  for  the  American  literary 
historian,  then,  is  not  to  seek  for  master- 
pieces— the  few  masterpieces  are  all  too 
obvious — but  for  tendencies.  Why  did 
Ambrose  Bierce  go  wrong?  Why  did  Ste- 
phen Crane  fail  to  acclimatize  the  modern 
method  in  American  fiction  twenty  years 
ago  ?  What  became  of  Herman  Melville  ? 
How  did  it  happen  that  a  mind  capable  of 
writing  "The  Story  of  a  Country  Town" 
should  have  turned  up  thirty  years  later 
with  a  book  like  "Success  Easier  Than 
Failure"?  If  we  were  able  to  answer  the 
hundred  and  one  questions  of  this  sort 
that  present  themselves  to  every  curious 


mind,  we  might  throw  an  entirely  new 
face  not  only  over  the  past  but  over  the 
present  and  the  future  also.  Knowing 
that  others  have  desired  the  things  we  de- 
sire and  have  encountered  the  same  ob- 
stacles, and  that  in  some  degree  time  has 
begun  to  face  those  obstacles  down  and 
make  the  way  straight  for  us,  would  not 
the  creative  forces  of  this  country  lose  a 
little  of  the  hectic  individualism  that  keeps 
them  from  uniting  against  their  common 
enemies  ?  And  would  this  not  bring  about, 
for  the  first  time,  that  sense  of  brother- 
hood in  effort  and  in  aspiration  which  is 
the  best  promise  of  a  national  culture? 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS. 


The  Creative  and  Efficiency  Concepts  of  Education 


Since  Germany  has  evolved  the  best 
known  methods  of  attaining  industrial  effi- 
ciency, and  since  the  German  schools  have 
played  a  leading  part  in  that  attainment, 
our  own  business  men  often  argue  that — 
for  patriotic  reasons — the  German  system 
of  industrial  education  should  be  given  a 
trial  in  the  United  States.  If  the  system 
were  introduced  here  it  is,  of  course,  not 
certain  that  it  would  be  effective;  we  can 
by  no  means  be  sure  that  it  would  produce 
wage  earners  readier  for  service,  more 
single  purposed  in  their  industrial  activity 
than  they  now  are.  In  Germany  it  was  a 
comparatively  simple  matter  for  the 
schools  to  prepare  the  children  for  effec- 
tive and  efficient  service.  For  when  the 
modern  system  of  industry,  with  its  own 
characteristic  enslavement,  was  imposed 
ready-made  upon  the  German  people  their 
psychology  was  still  a  feudal  psychology. 
Unlike  the  Anglo-Saxon,  the  German  has 
not  experienced  the  liberating  effects  of 
the  political  philosophy  which  developed 
along  with  modern  technology  in  both 
England  and  America. 

First,  then,  it  is  not  certain  that  the 
system  of  German  industrial  education,  if 
introduced  into  this  country,  would  suc- 
ceed. Second,  if  it  did  succeed,  is  it  the 
sort  of  education  that  America  wants? 
Let  us  see. 

As  a  requisite  of  efficiency,  Germany 
classified  its  people;  gave  them  a  definite 


place  in  the  scheme  of  things  and  rigidly 
held  them  there.  By  circumscribing  the 
experiences  of  individuals  and  by  produc- 
ing specialists,  the  scheme  both  increased 
production  and  aided  the  dynastic  pur- 
poses of  the  Empire.  This  classification 
and  training  of  the  people  was  naturally 
the  work  of  the  schools.  The  sorting 
begins  in  the  elementary  schools  at  the 
early  age  of  ten.  The  child's  social  posi- 
tion is  determined  at  that  time.  It  is 
decided  then  whether  the  child  shall  enter 
the  great  army  of  wage  earners  or  whether 
he  shall  be  trained  for  one  of  the  several 
vocations  higher  than  that  of  the  common 
laborer.  This  tolling  off  of  children  at  the 
age  of  ten- — the  assigning  of  them  to  a 
place  for  life  in  the  social  scheme — is  not 
American  in  spirit  or  purpose.  To  be 
sure,  our  habit  of  letting  children  escape 
into  life  with  their  places  undetermined  has 
made  difficulties  for  our  promoters  of 
industry.  These  difficulties  in  Germany 
were  avoided  in  exact  proportion  to  the 
elimination  of  the  workers'  chances  of 
escape  from  their  predestined  position. 
Avenues  of  escape  from  jobs  because  they 
are  uncongenial  are  effectively  denied,  and 
apparently  to  the  German  they  are  ac- 
ceptably denied.  The  German  has  no 
pressing  sense  of  the  need  to  experiment 
with  life.  Compulsory  attendance  at  a 
continuation  trade  school  is  required  of  all 
German  children  between  the  ages  of  four- 


342 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


teen  and  eighteen  years.  It  is  this  final 
moulding  of  each  young  person  to  fit  a 
specific  trade,  which  protects  the  German 
manufacturer  and  the  national  industrial 
efficiency  as  a  whole  against  such  vagaries 
as  individual  preference  for  this  or  that 
job.  It  is  true  that  in  no  country  do 
modern  conditions  of  industry  offer  gen- 
erous opportunity  for  individual  prefer- 
ence. Yet  when  people's  desire  to  choose 
for  themselves  is  inhibited  by  such  a 
scheme  of  national  organization  as  ob- 
tains in  Germany,  their  enslavement  is 
assured. 

Before  the  war  the  movement  in  Amer- 
ica for  industrial  education,  based  on  the 
German  idea,  was  faltering  in  its  progress 
because  the  German  idea  was  essentially 
at  variance  with  our  national  concepts  and 
political  institutions.  Moreover,  our  pro- 
moters of  the  scheme  were  suspended  be- 
tween conflicting  interests:  industry,  as  it 
is  actually  administered,  stultifies  individ- 
ual development,  while  the  development 
of  children  necessitates  some  linking-up  of 
the  school  with  the  world  of  work.  The 
result  is  that  as  the  system  has  been  intro- 
duced in  America  it  neither  prostitutes 
the  schools  in  the  interest  of  industry, 
nor  does  it  give  the  children  the  power 
through  experience  to  meet  the  real  prob- 
lems of  industry.  In  our  industrial  schools 
there  is  an  elaboration  of  technology; 
there  is,  as  well,  its  application  to  the 
general  principles  of  physical  science,  in- 
dustrial and  political  history,  even  to  the 
aesthetics  of  industry.  But  all  of  these 
attempts  have  emphasized  the  absence  of 
the  really  significant  factors. 

These  factors  are  those  which  give 
men  the  ability  to  control  industry.  After 
all,  no  work  in  the  subject  matter  of 
industry  is  educational  which  does  not 
in  intention  or  in  fact  give  the  persons 
involved  the  ability  to  participate  in 
the  administration  of  industry.  Even  the 
best  of  schemes  for  industrial  education 
have  so  far  left  the  pupils  helpless  before 
their  subject.  As  they  furnish  them  with  a 
certain  dexterity  and  acquaintance  with  the 
processes  and  a  supply  of  subject  matter 
necessarily  more  or  less  isolated,  the 
pupils  gain  more  the  sense  of  the  power 
of  the  subject  to  control  them,  than  an 


experience  in  their  power  to  master  the 
subject. 

It  is  often  suggested  that  .civilization 
demands  the  elimination  of  machinery  and 
the  division  of  labor.  In  a  spirit  of  weari- 
ness we  are  sometimes  told  that  we  must 
retrace  our  steps  and  go  back  to  crafts- 
manship and  guilds.  But  it  is  idle  to  talk 
about  going  back  or  eliminating  institu- 
tionalized features  of  society.  We  can- 
not go  back,  we  have  not  the  ability  to 
discard  this  or  that  part  of  our  environ- 
ment except  as  we  make  it  over.  This 
making  over  might  be  vitalized  by  methods 
which  belonged  to  earlier  periods.  But 
neither  the  methods  nor  the  periods,  we 
can  safely  say,  will  live  again.  Neither 
our  own  nor  future  generations  will  escape 
the  influence  of  modern  technology.  It 
will  play  its  part.  It  may  be  a  part  which 
will  lead  away  from  some  of  the  destruc- 
tive influences  which  developed  in  the  era 
of  craftsmanship — and  which  dominate 
the  present  era. 

In  machine  production  and  in  the  divi- 
sion of  labor  there  are  emotional  and 
intellectual  possibilities  which  were  non- 
existent in  the  earlier  and  simpler  methods 
of  production.  As  the  power  latent  in 
inorganic  matter  has  been  freed  and 
applied  to  common  needs,  an  environment 
has  been  evolved,  filled  with  situations 
incomparably  more  dramatic  and  signifi- 
cant than  the  provincial  affairs  of  detached 
peoples  and  communities.  But  technolog- 
ical subject  matter,  rich  in  opportunities 
for  associated  adventure  and  discovery, 
is  not  a  part  of  common  experience.  But 
isolated  as  it  is,  it  exists,  and  if  released 
for  common  experimentation,  it  is  fit  mat- 
ter for  making  science  a  vital  experience 
in  everyday  life.  And  since  capital — 
and,  up  to  the  present  time,  labor — has 
failed  to  make  industry  an  expansive  ex- 
perience, it  becomes  the  business  of  edu- 
cators, concerned  with  the  growth  of 
individuals,  to  cultivate  the  field. 

If  educators  regard  such  opportunities 
for  growth  with  sufficient  jealousy,  they 
will  not  wait  for  industry  to  emerge  with  a 
new  programme,  or  with  a  new  system  of 
production.  They  will  of  themselves  ini- 
tiate productive  enterprises  wherein  young 
people  will  be  free  to  gain  first-hand  ex- 
perience in  the  problems  of  industry,  as 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


343 


those  problems  stand  in  relation  to  their 
own  time  and  generation.  The  alliance 
of  educators  should  be  made  with  engin- 
eers and  architects  and  those  managers  of 
industry  who,  through  experience  and 
training,  have  made  themselves  the  mas- 
ters of  applied  science  and  of  the  economics 
of  production.  Engineers,  not  under  the 
influence  of  business,  are  qualified  to  open 
up  the  creative  aspects  of  production  to 
the  workers  and  convince  them  through 
their  own  experience  that  there  are  adven- 
turous possibilities  in  industry  outside  the 
meagre  offerings  of  pay-day.  Mr.  Robert 
Wolf  is  one  of  the  engineers  who  is  ready 
for  the  venture.  He  told  the  members  of 
the  Taylor  Society  that  "scientific  man- 
agers have  not  been  scientific  enough  in 
dealing  with  this  very  important  subject  of 
stimulating  the  thinking  and  reasoning 
power  of  the  workman,  thereby  making 
him  self-reliant  and  creative."  In  describ- 
ing the  field  in  which  practical  engineers 
should  operate  he  laid  stress  on  their 
giving  large  space  to  the  originating, 
choosing,  adapting  power  in  men  and  the 
direction  of  it  into  positive  constructive 
channels — to  men's  self-consciousness  of 
their  place  in  the  great  scheme  of  things. 
This  conception  of  the  field  of  opera- 
tion for  engineers  also  describes  the  field 
for  educators.  In  the  present  industrial 
arrangement  the  latter  have  failed  to  seize 
the  chance  for  the  development  of  "the 
originating,  choosing  power"  in  the  work- 
ingman  because  they  have  been  obsessed 
by  the  business  appreciation  of  the  work- 
ingman's  power  of  adaptation.  It  is 
because  they  labor  under  this  obsession 
that  they  turn  industrial  education  into 
industrial  training  whenever  they  include 
industry  in  their  curricula.  Educators 
know  that  there  is  adventure  in  industry, 
but  they  believe  that  the  adventure  is  the 
rare  property  of  a  few.  They  believe 
this  so  finally  that  they  surrender  this 
great  field  of  experience,  with  its  priceless 
educational  content,  without  reserving  the 
right  of  such  experience  even  for  youth. 
They  know,  as  we  all  do,  that  industrial 
problems  carry  those  who  participate  in 
their  solution  into  pure  and  applied  sci- 
ence, into  the  study  of  the  market  for  raw 
materials  and  finished  products,  into  the 
search  for  unconquered  wealth.  They 


know  that  the  marketing  of  goods  is  an 
extensive  experience  in  the  world  of  men 
and  desires.  They  are  not  alone  in  their 
lack  of  courage  in  admitting  that  to  limit 
this  experience  perverts  normal  desires 
and  creates  false  ones.  For  the  sake  of 
education  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  such  en- 
gineers as  Mr.  Wolf  may  overcome  the 
timidity  of  educators,  and  that  in  conjunc- 
tion with  men  capable  of  productive  enter- 
prise they  will  undertake  to  give  young 
people,  not  an  experience  which  is  tagged 
on  to  industry  under  the  influence  of 
profits,  but  an  experience  which  is  inspired 
by  the  desire  to  produce  and  the  oppor- 
tunity to  develop  the  inspiration. 

America  is,  of  course,  "different"  from 
Germany.  Yet  so  is  our  position  in  the 
world  different  from  what  it  was.  Our 
position  is  not  now,  nor  could  it  be,  pre- 
cisely the  German  position.  Our  past  is 
different,  and  that  alone,  if  nothing  else, 
will  continuously  have  its  effect  on  our 
future.  But  we  are  facing  a  great  period 
of  change,  and  the  strongest  forces  in  the 
country  are  the  industrial  forces,  and  the 
strongest  leaders  are  the  financial  leaders. 
What  the  financiers  and  the  industrial 
managers  most  want  is  efficient,  docile 
labor.  The  German  system  of  education, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  we  are  "different," 
might  conceivably  have  that  effect  on  the 
youth  of  the  country.  Under  the  pressure 
of  industrial  rivalry  after  the  war,  under 
the  pressure  of  an  imperial  industrial 
policy,  it  might  be  that  the  people  of  the 
country  would  yield  to  the  introduction  of 
a  scheme  of  education  which  had  been 
proven  elsewhere  could  better  than  any 
other  known  scheme  fit  children  into  a 
system  of  mass  production. 

It  is  clear  that  industry  could  set  up 
models  of  behavior  more  successfully  in 
the  name  of  education  than  in  its  own,  and 
to  the  extent  American  children  come  up  to 
these  models  the  more  employable  they 
would  be  from  the  standpoint  of  business. 
If  the  pressure  is  sufficiently  strong,  the 
people  may  yield  to  the  introduction  of  a 
system  of  compulsory  continuation  schools 
similar  to  those  of  Germany.  If  they  do, 
I  believe  they  will  eventually  fail.  But 
there  is  danger  and  loss  of  purpose  in  their 
introduction.  The  problem  for  American 
educators  is  the  retention  of  our  native 


344 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


concept  of  experimental  life  and  the  at- 
tainment of  standards  of  workmanship 
— the  realization  of  the  strength  of  asso- 
ciated effort,  together  with  the  advance  of 
wealth  production. 

In  conjunction  with  educators  it  is  the 
business  of  engineers,  architects,  and 
others  who  know  the  releasing  power  of 
creative  effort  to  make  it  clear  to  the 
people  of  the  country  that  our  industrial 
structure  is  built  on  a  predatory  concept 
instead  of  a  creative  one.  They  need  to 
make  clear  that  as  capture  is  rewarded 
rather  than  work,  as  the  possessive  desire 
is  stimulated  and  the  productive  impulse 
sacrificed,  as  employers  of  men  and  own- 
ers of  machinery  do  not  engage  in  produc- 
tion because  of  any  interest  in  the  process 
or  the  product,  as  wage  earners  hire  out 
for  the  day's  work  and  continue  in  their 
trade  without  interest  in  its  development 
because,  like  their  employers,  they  want 
the  highest  cash  return — wealth  exploita- 
tion has  come  to  be  synonymous  in  the 
minds  of  men  with  wealth  creation.  A 
creative  concept  which  can  survive  and 
inhibit  the  predatory  concept  must  rest 
upon  a  people's  desire  for  productive 
experience,  and  their  ability  to  associate 
together  for  that  common  end. 

HELEN  MAROT. 


On  the  Breakwater 

O  breadth  and  beauty 

And  placid  splendor  of  water, 

How  fierce 

For  all  the  smooth  quiet, 

Must  be  that  secret  sharpness  of  your  waves' 

teeth 
Eating  the  drowned  earth. 

What  bar  has  man  to  your  unresting  purpose? 
What  are  these  pillars  and  high  walls  of  wood 
And  heaped  stone 

Before  the  advancement  of  your  soft  delicate 
Most  subtle  entrances? 

These  jagged  rocks, 

This  chained  solidity  of  beams, 

And  forged  bands^ 

What  is  their  strength  against  your  patient 

Ceaseless  tireless 

Pushing,  pushing,  pushing 

Of  multitudinous  impact? 

HELEN  HOYT. 


Our  Paris  Letter 

"This  book  is  an  act  of  faith  in  and  love  for 
that  Greek  and  Latin  tradition,  all  wisdom  and 
beauty,  outside  of  which  there  is  but  error  and 
confusion."  This  epitome  of  the  creed  of  Ana- 
tole  France  is  quoted  from  his  few  lines  of 
preface  to  "Le  Genie  Latin,"  of  which  a  "new 
edition  revised  by  the  author"  ( Calmann-Levy, 
Paris)  lies  before  me.  The  whole  work  of 
Anatole  France — his  whole  outlook  on  life — is 
inspired  by  that  tradition ;  no  faith  has  been  more 
operant  than  his.  He  is  lineally  descended  from 
the  great  French  classics  of  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries,  through  them  from  Rabe- 
lais, and  ultimately  from  the  Greek  and  Latin 
founders  of  European  civilization.  "The  France 
of  Montesquieu  and  of  Voltaire — that  is  the 
great,  the  true,  France,"  I  heard  him  say  in  a 
speech  at  London  in  1913:  to  that  France  he 
himself  belongs. 

There  is  a  reaction  at  present  against  a 
classical  education;  it  has  some  justification. 
Most  of  us  wasted  our  time  at  school  on  Latin 
and  Greek,  since  we  spent  several  years  in  their 
almost  exclusive  study  and  learned  neither  of 
them.  Few  men  when  they  leave  school,  or 
even  when  they  leave  the  university,  can  read 
with  ease  or  pleasure  Horace  or  Vergil,  Homer 
or  Sophocles  in  the  originals,  or  have  the  least 
desire  ever  to  open  a  Greek  or  Latin  book  again. 
The  result  of  a  classical  education  in  most  cases 
is  a  hearty  dislike  for  the  classics.  But  I  cannot 
admit  that  a  kno.wledge  of  Greek  and  Latin 
civilization  and  culture  is  useless;  a  knowledge 
of  the  sources  of  our  civilization  cannot  but  be 
useful.  The  fault  of  a  classical  education  is  that 
as  a  rule  it  does  not  give  that  knowledge.  We 
cannot  return  to  Greek  or  Latin  civilization  and 
we  do  not  want  to,  but  they  are  part  of  our 
heritage  and,  even  if  it  may  not  be  necessary  to 
read  Greek  and  Latin  authors  in  their  own 
tongues — although  it  is  always  an  advantage  to 
read  an  author  in  the  original — they  should  re- 
main an  integral  part  of  our  instruction. 

As  Anatole  France  says  in  the  remaining  lines 
of  the  preface  just  quoted,  "we  owe  everything — 
philosophy,  art,  science,  jurisprudence — to  Greece 
and  to  her  conquerors  whom  she  conquered.  The 
ancients,  yet  living,  teach  us  still."  They  have, 
indeed,  still  much  to  teach  us.  The  modern 
world  is  the  result  of  a  return  to  the  Greek 
tradition  after  its  normal  development  had  been 
arrested  by  a  reaction  which  kept  back  human 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


345 


progress  for  centuries.  Unfortunately,  thanks  to 
Martin  Luther,  the  Renaissance  itself  was 
arrested  by  another  reaction  and  I  doubt  whether, 
in  all  respects,  we  have  yet  covered  the  lost 
ground  or  quite  caught  up  with  the  Greeks.  We 
need  not,  therefore,  be  too  proud  to  learn  from 
them.  It  is  not  my  experience  that  a  real  knowl- 
edge of  the  classics  makes  men  reactionary  or 
even  conservative.  Is  not  Anatole  France  him- 
self a  Socialist  and,  at  the  age  of  seventy-three, 
in  the  vanguard  of  contemporary  thought?  One 
might,  indeed,  say  that  the  two  permanent  cur- 
rents in  human  thought  are  represented  by  the 
Greek  tradition  on  the  one  hand  and  the  Catholic 
or  medieval  on  the  other. 

To  review  at  length  "Le  Genie  Latin"  would 
be  superfluous.  Readers  of  Anatole  France  know 
it  already  and  are  aware  that  it  is  among  the 
slighter  of  his  works.  I  have  not  made  a  detailed 
comparison  of  the  revised  with  the  original  edi- 
tion, but  I  can  see  that  the  revision  has  been 
thorough ;  there  are  many  changes,  and  the  result 
is  a  perfected  work.  The  short  essay  of  ten 
pages  on  "Daphnis  and  Chloe,"  with  which  the 
book  begins,  is  a  fine  piece  of  criticism  which 
exposes  the  artistic  skill  of  the  unknown  author 
of  that  ancient  love  story.  The  other  essays  of 
which  the  book  is  composed  are  for  the  most 
part  biographical;  the  exceptions  are  the  interest- 
ing discussion  of  La  Fontaine's  vocabulary 
and  the  appreciations  of  Benjamin  Constant's 
"Adolphe"  and  of  Sainte-Beuve's  poetry,  the  lat- 
ter particularly  important.  But  the  biographies 
contain  incidental  passages  of  searching  criticism 
and  characteristic  flashes  of  inimitable  irony. 
"Beware  of  those  that  are  hard  on  themselves," 
says  the  author  in  the  essay  on  Paul  Scarron, 
"they  will  illtreat  you  by  mistake."  The  essays 
on  Scarron  and  on  the  Abbe  Prevost  are  per- 
haps among  the  most  interesting,  partly  because 
the  subjects  are  eminently  suited  to  Anatole 
France,  partly  because  we  know  less  about 
Scarron  and  Prevost  than  about  Moliere,  Racine, 
Chateaubriand,  and  some  of  the  others  whom  the 
author  has  chosen  as  subjects.  Few  men  have 
had  so  extraordinary  a  career  as  the  Benedictine 
author  of  "Manon  Lescaut,"  a  prolific  writer 
with  a  dangerous  facility,  who  produced  his  one 
masterpiece  by  accident,  throwing  it  off  in  a  few 
weeks  as  a  supplement  to  his  plethoric  and 
rambling  "Memoires  d'un  Homme  de  Qualite." 
To  its  author  "Manon  Lescaut"  was  a  trifle,  and 
it  has  made  him  immortal.  Of  all  the  essays  in 
"Le  Genie  Latin,"  however,  that  on  Bernardin 


de  Saint-Pierre  seems  to  me  the  most  character- 
istic and  the  most  entirely  successful;  it  is  an 
appreciation  of  remarkable  justice  and  critical 
insight.  One  need  not  at  this  time  of  day  praise 
the  style  of  Anatole  France,  which  makes  what 
he  writes  a  pleasure  to  read  for  the  sheer  beauty 
of  the  language.  French  prose  at  its  best  has 
no  equal,  and  he  writes  French  prose  at  its  best. 

The  sumptuous  limited  edition  of  the  story  of 
Hassan  Badreddine,  illustrated  by  M.  Kees  van 
Dongen  (Les  Editions  de  la  Sirene,  12  bis  rue 
La  Boetie,  Paris),  is  beyond  the  reach  of  many 
purses,  for  the  lowest  price  at  which  it  can  be 
obtained  is  $100.  M.  van  Dongen's  drawings 
are  distinguished  by  a  firm  line  and  remarkable 
decorative  design;  they  are,  moreover,  inspired 
by  the  spirit  of  the  "Thousand  and  One 
Nights"  and  their  Oriental  flavor  is  natural  and 
sincere.  M.  van  Dongen  has  also  designed  the 
book  itself,  so  that  there  is  a  harmony  between 
the  drawings  and  the  printed  page  which  pro- 
duces an  artistic  whole.  The  artist  has  evidently 
found  a  means  of  expression  peculiarly  suited  to 
his  very  personal  talent  and  he  should  continue 
on  this  path.  The  text  of  the  story  is  that  of 
Dr.  J.  C.  Mardrus's  French  translation  of  the 
"Thousand  and  One  Nights,"  the  best  in  the 
language.  The  book  is  beautifully  printed  in  a 
fine  font  of  type  by  Lahure,  and  the  reproduc- 
tions are  unusually  successful,  especially  those  in 
color.  The  hundred  pages  of  black  and  white 
drawings  are  printed  from  blocks  by  Demoulin 
Freres,  and  M.  J.  Saude  is  responsible  for  the 
seven  reproductions  of  water  colors. 

The  new  monthly  publication  called  "Les 
Cahiers  Britanniques  et  Americains"  (Georges- 
Bazille,  16  rue  Taitbout,  Paris)  is  an  attempt 
to  familiarize  the  French  public  with  English  and 
American  authors  which  deserves  success.  The 
third  number,  just  published,  is  an  excellent 
translation  by  M.  Georges-Bazille  of  Mr. 
Stephen  Leacock's  essay  on  American  humor. 
Each  number  costs  1  fr.  50  and  it  is  not  pos- 
sible of  course  to  present  the  translation  of  a 
long  book  for  that  price,  especially  in  war  time; 
but  the  object  of  the  "Cahiers"  is  to  introduce 
the  public  to  short  stories,  essays,  and  so  on  that 
have  not  yet  been  translated  into  French. 

Bolo  has  been  convicted  and  condemned  to 
death  in  order,  as  the  public  prosecutor  said  at 
the  beginning  of  his  speech  at  the  trial,  to  "give 
satisfaction  to  public  opinion";  but  most  lawyers 
are  not  satisfied  with  the  evidence  of  treason. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  obtained  money 


346 


THE    DIAL 


[April  1 1 


from  the  German  Government,  but  he  used 
about  half  of  it  to  finance  "jusqu'auboutiste" 
propaganda  and  put  the  rest  in  his  own  pocket. 
He  gave  money  to  the  committee  for  annexing 
the  left  bank  of  the  Rhine,  but  not  a  sou  did  he 
ever  give  to  "pacifist"  or  "defaitiste"  propaganda. 
All  the  witnesses  for  the  prosecution,  with  one 
shady  exception,  said  that  they  had  never  heard 
from  Bolo  any  but  the  most  patriotic  sentiments, 
and  there  was  not  the  smallest  evidence  of  any 
connection  on  his  part  with  any  but  ultra- 
patriotic  movements.  Unless  it  is  treasonable  to 
advocate  the  annexation  of  the  left  bank  of  the 
Rhine  and  war  to  the  bitter  end,  it  is  difficult  to 
see  where  the  treason  comes  in.  It  is  clear  that 
Bolo,  being  in  need  of  money,  jumped  at  the 
chance  of  getting  it  which  was  afforded  by  M. 
Charles  Humbert's  desire  to  find  $1,100,000  for 
the  "Journal."  He  got  more  than  double  that 
sum  from  Germany  on  the  pretext  of  influencing 
the  press,  and  did  not  use  quite  half  of  the  total 
in  financing  newspapers.  The  case  is  one  of  com- 
mon swindling.  M.  Charles  Humbert  has  been 
arrested,  also  perhaps  in  order  to  satisfy  public 
opinion.  Neither  the  Bolo  trial  nor  that  of  cer- 
tain wealthy  capitalists  accused  of  selling  to  Ger- 
many a  chemical  used  in  the  manufacture  of 
explosives  increases  one's  confidence  in  trial  by 
court-martial.  The  accused  in  the  latter  case 
were  acquitted  in  the  teeth  of  the  evidence,  and 
the  public  prosecutor  almost  asked  for  their  ac- 
quittal. 

The  hunt  for  traitors  continues  and  new 
"affairs"  crop  up  every  week.  Last  week  we  had 
a  sensational  story  of  the  discovery  of  a  "nest  of 
spies"  at  St.  Etienne,  the  great  industrial  centre 
which  M.  Briand  represents  in  the  Chamber. 
The  chief  conspirator  was  a  German  officer  who, 
by  some  mysterious  means,  had  obtained  a  permit 
de  sejour  and  was  running  a  cafe  at  St.  Etienne; 
a  cipher  correspondence  was  seized  and  there 
seemed  to  be  all  the  material  of  a  first-rate  spy 
novel.  Alas!  the  German  officer  has  turned  out 
to  be  a  French  citizen  of  Alsatian  descent  and 
the  cipher  correspondence  relates  to  the  "White 
Slave"  traffic  and  to  the  smuggling  of  absinthe, 
which  are  the  chief  occupations  of  the  persons 
arrested.  The  press  has  hastily  dropped  the 
matter  and  the  St.  Etienne  newspapers  are  mak- 
ing rude  remarks  about  M.  Clemenceau. 

Much  more  serious  is  the  organized  campaign 
to  discredit  French  public  men  and,  with  them, 
the  Republic  itself.  After  the  Caillaux  affair  we 
have  now  the  Painleve  and  Viviani  affairs  and, 


if  their  authors  succeed  in  their  object,  M.  Ribot 
and  M.  Briand  will  be  the  next  victims.  M. 
Viviani  is  violently  attacked  by  the  Royalist 
paper,  the  "Action  Frangaise,"  because  during 
the  last  week  of  July,  1914  he  very  properly 
kept  the  French  troops  at  a  distance  of  some  six 
and  a  quarter  miles  from  the  frontier  to  prevent 
any  risk  of  frontier  incidents.  The  "Action 
Frangaise"  asserts  that  the  measure  was  taken  at 
the  suggestion  of  a  German  Socialist,  who  arrived 
in  Paris  on  August  1  to  confer  with  the  French 
Socialists;  whereas  I  myself  was  informed  of 
it  at  the  Ministry  of  Foreign  Affairs  on  July  30, 
1914  and  on  that  day  M.  Viviani  mentioned  it 
in  a  despatch  to  the  French  Ambassador  at 
London  (See  No.  106  in  the  French  Yellow 
Book,  1914).  The  attack  on  M.  Viviani  is 
grotesque,  but  so  deplorable  a  state  of  mind  has 
been  created  by  the  treason  hunt  that  people  are 
ready  to  suspect  anybody  and  to  scent  traitors 
everywhere. 

There  are  two  accusations  against  M.  Pain- 
leve. One  of  them — that  he  tried  to  hush  up 
the  Bolo  affair — he  easily  disposed  of  in  a  short 
and  dignified  speech  in  the  Chamber  on  Feb- 
ruary 2.  He  was  loudly  applauded  by  the  whole 
of  the  Left,  especially  when  he  said  that  there 
was  an  organized  conspiracy  to  discredit  the 
Republic  by  discrediting  every  successive  Prime 
Minister  since  the  war,  "except  the  last."  He 
might  have  added  that  the  very  people  who  now 
attack  him  wanted  to  hush  up  the  Bolo  affair 
because  Bolo  was  on  their  side  in  politics  and 
discovered  that  it  was  a  "vast  plot"  only  when 
they  discovered  that  Bolo  knew  M.  Caillaux. 
The  other  and  much  more  serious  charge  against 
M.  Painleve  is  that  he  stopped  the  French 
offensive  last  April  just  when  it  was  going  to  be 
a  success.  This  story,  embellished  with  a  wealth 
of  fictitious  details,  has  reached  the  American 
public  through  the  medium  of  a  popular  weekly. 
It  is  quite  untrue,  and  it  is  of  course  equally 
untrue  that  there  was  ever  the  slightest  chance 
that  "the  war  might  have  ended  with  an  Allied 
military  victory  before  Christmas  Day" — why 
not  before  May  1,  since  it  appears  that  "the  end 
of  the  German  invasion  in  France  seemed  at 
hand"  ?  I  am  sure  that  the  writer  of  the  article 
in  which  these  absurd  statements  occurred  cannot 
have  realized  what  harm  such  assertions  might 
do  to  Franco-American  relations  by  leading  the 
American  public  to  believe  that  the  French  Gov- 
ernment had  prevented  an  Allied  victory.  The 
internal  evidence  of  the  article  itself  should  make 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


347 


it  quite  clear  by  whom  the  writer  was  inspired, 
and  the  American  public  is  certainly  intelligent 
enough  to  understand  that  generals  who  have 
been  removed  for  incompetence  and  for  uselessly 
sacrificing  French  lives  by  their  blunders  nat- 
urally bear  a  grudge  against  the  Minister  who 
had  the  courage  to  do  his  duty  by  removing  them. 
It  is  a  great  pity  that  France  had  not  at  the 
beginning  pf  the  war  a  Minister  of  War  with  the 
courage  to  act  after  the  disasters  of  Charleroi 
and  Morhange  as  M.  Painleve  acted  after  the 
disastrous  offensive  of  last  April.  Nothing  is 
more  convenient  than  to  put  the  blame  for  one's 
own  mistakes  on  to  other  people  and  generals 
find  it  convenient  to  put  the  blame  on  the  "poli- 
ticians" when  things  go  wrong.  It  should  be 
understood  in  America  once  and  for  all  that  the 
responsibility  for  the  strategical  and  tactical 
blunders  which  have  cost  the  Allies  so  dear  lies 
entirely  with  the  military  authorities.  If  the 
politicians  have  erred  it  has  been  in  giving  the 
military  too  free  a  hand. 

Paris  has  been  deluged  with  copies  of  the 
American  magazine  containing  this  grossly  unjust 
attack  on  M.  Painleve  and  French  readers  of 
the  article  in  question  have  been  painfully  sur- 
prised at  the  callous  way  in  which  the  writer  of 
it  speaks  of  French  losses.  It  appears  to  be  to 
him  a  light  matter  whether  a  few  thousand 
Frenchmen  more  or  less  are  sacrificed.  Perhaps 
if  he  himself  were  at  the  front,  or  even  if  the 
United  States  had  had  about  1,700,000  men 
killed  in  the  war,  he  would  think  differently. 
Over  here  we  do  not  like  people  who  are  bellicose 
in  arm-chairs  and  risk  other  people's  lives  with 
a  light  heart;  there  are  still  a  good  many  such 
people  in  France  and  they  are  very  unpopular, 
especially  at  the  front.  I  arn  sure  that  the  writer 
of  the  article  in  question  does  not  represent 
American  opinion,  but  such  articles  are  neverthe- 
less extremely  mischievous.  They  unwittingly 
help  to  undo  the  good  that  is  being  done  by 
President  Wilson's  policy. 

Mr.  Wilson  is  now  extremely  popular  in 
France.  His  last  speech  to  Congress  was  hailed 
as  a  welcome  contrast  to  the  Note  of  the  Ver- 
sailles Council,  which  was  very  badly  received 
by  the  mass  of  the  French  people.  The  "Pays" 
described  the  Versailles  Note  as  "a  fresh  declara- 
tion of  war"  and  that  was  the  prevailing  opinion 
about  it.  It  is  not  a  fresh  declaration  of  war 
that  the  French  or  any  other  people  in  Europe 
wants  just  now.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
the  French  people  pins  its  hope  of  peace  to  a  great 


extent  on  President  Wilson  and  was  immensely 
relieved  to  learn  that  he  had  no  Responsibility 
for  the  Versailles  Note.  In  fact,  the  American 
Ambassador  did  not  attend  any  of  the  Varsailles 
meetings;  a  secretary  of  the  Embassy  was  present 
at  them,  or  some  of  them,  but  only  as  an  observer ; 
he  did  not  take  part  in  the  discussions  or  deci- 
sions. The  decision  of  the  Inter-Allied  Socialist 
Conference  held  in  London  last  week  to  send  a 
delegation  to  Mr.  Wilson  shows  what  confidence 
is  felt  in  him  by  the  mass  of  the  people  in  all  the 
Allied  countries.  The  delegation  will  also  prob- 
ably visit  Mr.  Gompers  and  enlighten  him  in 
regard  to  the  European  situation.  [Since  Mr. 
Dell's  letter  was  received,  this  delegation  has 
been  appointed. — Ed.]  Astonishment  was 
caused  by  a  report  in  the  press  that  he  had  tele- 
graphed to  Mr.  Henderson  that  the  Inter-Allied 
Conference  was  inspired  by  German  influences. 
Mr.  Henderson  has  explained  that  the  report 
was  false  and  that  the  telegram  received  by  him 
contained  no  such  statement,  but  it  has  since 
been  reported  that  Mr.  Gompers  has  declared 
that  peace  cannot  be  made  until  France  and  Bel- 
gium have  been  evacuated  by  the  Germans. 
Everybody  here  is,  of  course,  agreed  that  com- 
plete evacuation  is  an  essential  condition  of  peace, 
but  that  is  quite  a  different  matter.  Nobody  now 
imagines  that  complete  evacuation  will  precede 
peace  negotiations.  A  few  jingo  papers  may 
applaud  such  utterances  as  that  attributed  to  Mr. 
Gompers,  but  they  make  a  very  bad  impression 
on  the  general  public  in  France. 

May  I,  without  giving  offense,  beg  Americans 
to  be  careful  what  they  say  about  such  matters? 
They  need  not  be  more  exacting  than  the  French 
people.  I  am  neither  an  American  nor  a  French- 
man, but  I  have  been  deeply  attached  all  my 
life  both  to  France  and  to  America  and  I  believe 
that  it  is  through  France  that  America  can  most 
easily  get  into  touch  with  Europe.  That  is  why 
I  venture  to  make  this  suggestion.  The  Wash- 
ington correspondent  of  the  London  "Times" 
recently  said  that  it  was  the  growing  opinion  in 
America  that  it  would  not  be  to  the  "interest" 
of  the  United  States  that  the  war  should  end 
soon.  The  effect  over  here  of  such  statements 
as  that  is  deplorable.  President  Wilson  knows 
how  to  appeal  to  the  French  people  and,  indeed, 
to  all  the  belligerent  peoples  of  Europe ;  questions 
of  war  aims  and  peace  conditions  had  much 
better  be  left  to  him. 

The  unanimity  of  the  Inter-Allied  Socialist 
Conference  at  London  is  a  great  step  in  advance 


348 


THE    DIAL 


[April  1 1 


if,  as  there  is  good  reason  to  hope,  it  proves  to 
be  real  and  not  merely  verbal.  The  Socialist 
party  in  every  belligerent  country  has  hitherto 
been  paralyzed  by  internal  dissension,  but  now 
the  Socialists  of  all  the  Allied  countries  in  Europe 
have  unanimously  declared  in  favor  of  an  inter- 
national conference.  The  delegates  from  the 
British  Labor  party  who  came  to  Paris  just  be- 
fore the  London  conference  are  in  great  measure 
responsible  for  this  happy  result,  particularly  Mr. 
Henderson  and  Mr.  Ramsay  MacDonald,  as  is 
also  M.  Camille  Huysmans,  the  able  secretary 
of  the  Socialist  International  Bureau,  who  accom- 
panied them.  [M.  Huysmans  is  the  head  of  the 
delegation  to  America. — Ed.]  They  appealed 
to  the  French  Socialists  to  sink  their  differences 
in  order  to  get  an  international  conference,  and 
the  appeal  was  heard.  The  memorandum  on  peace 
conditions,  like  all  compromises,  is  not  always 
very  clear.  For  instance,  the  paragraph  relating 
to  Alsace-Lorraine  contains  some  superfluous 
verbiage  introduced  to  satisfy  those  that  had  pre- 
viously objected  to  a  consultation  of  the  inhabit- 
ants, but  its  practical  conclusion  is  in  favor  of 
leaving  the  future  of  Alsace-Lorraine  to  be 
decided  by  the  inhabitants,  which  is  the  only  just 
and  reasonable  course.  There  was  some  difficulty 
in  obtaining  agreement  on  this  point  at  the 
National  Council  of  the  French  Socialist  party, 
which  preceded  the  London  conference,  but  it 
was  obtained  at  last. 

On  questions  of  internal  policy  the  French 
Socialist  party  is  still  sharply  divided ;  one  of  the 
burning  questions  is  whether  the  Socialist  deputies 
shall  continue  to  vote  the  war  credits.  At  the 
National  Council  the  delegates  were  just  about 
equally  divided  on  this  point;  one  vote  gave 
1476  mandates  for  refusing  war  credits  at  once 
and  1461  for  continuing  to  vote  them  at  present. 
Ultimately  the  Council  decided  by  1548  man- 
dates against  1415  to  vote  them  for  the  present, 
but  to  reconsider  the  matter  if  the  Government 
refused  passports  for  an  international  conference. 
At  present  M.  Clemenceau  is  believed  to  be 
opposed  to  giving  passports,  but  the  British  Gov- 
ernment is  prepared  to  give  them  and  so,  I 
understand,  is  the  Italian.  M.  Clemenceau  at 
first  refused  permission  to  the  delegates  of  the 
Italian  official  Socialist  party  to  cross  France  in 
order  to  attend  the  London  conference,  although 
they  had  been  given  passports  by  their  own 
government;  but  in  consequence  of  a  vigorous 
and  unanimous  protest  by  the  French  Socialists, 
backed  by  the  British  and  Belgian  delegates,  he 


gave  way  and  the  Italian  delegates  went  to 
London. 

Nobody  here  blinks  the  fact  that  the  military 
situation  is  very  grave  and  that  we  are  at  the 
most  critical  and  the  darkest  moment  of  the  war. 
[Written,  of  course,  before  the  present  German 
offensive. — Ed.]  The  German  triumph  in  Rus- 
sia is  a  melancholy  confirmation  of  M.  Marcel 
Sembat's  warning  about  the  policy  of  refusing 
to  "recognize"  the  Maximalist  government. 
Allied  diplomacy  in  regard  to  Russia  has,  un- 
fortunately, been  deplorably  inefficient  and  it 
has  a  large  share  of  the  responsibility  for  the 
present  disastrous  state  of  affairs  in  that  coun- 
try. It  was  the  bourgeois  parties  of  the  Ukraine 
who  by  making  a  separate  peace  betrayed  Russia 
and  forced  the  Maximalists  to  yield  to  Germany ; 
those  parties  were  actually  subsidized  by  the 
French  government,  which  sent  a  military  mis- 
sion to  the  Ukraine  just  before  the  separate 
peace  was  made.  M.  Clemenceau  and  M.  Pichon 
were  warned  by  everybody  that  knew  Russia 
that  they  were  making  a  mistake;  but  although 
M.  Pichon  was  ready  to  listen  to  advice,  M. 
Clemenceau  was  not.  In  particular,  M. 
Maklakoff,  the  Russian  Ambassador  at  Paris 
appointed  by  M.  Milyoukoff  and  confirmed  by 
M.  Kerensky,  implored  M.  Clemenceau  to  recog- 
nize the  Maximalist  government  and  warned 
him  against  trusting  to  the  Ukranians.  M. 
Maklakoff  is  a  "Cadet"  of  the  Right  wing,  who 
has  not  the  least  sympathy  with  the  opinions  or 
policy  of  M.  Lenine  and  M.  Trotzky,  but  he  be- 
lieved that  it  was  to  the  interest  both  of  Russia 
and  of  the  Allies  to  recognize  facts  and  that 
nothing  but  harm  could  be  done  by  refusing 
to  get  into  touch  with  the  men  that  had  the 
power  in  Russia.  [There  is  a  movement  now 
on  foot  in  France  to  recognize  the  Soviets' 
government.  Seemingly,  even  M.  Clemenceau 
now  supports  it. — ED.] 

The  policy  of  the  Allied  governments,  of 
which  the  results  are  now  before  us,  closely 
resembles  that  of  Burke  in  regard  to  Robes- 
pierre, against  which  Charles  James  Fox  so 
eloquently  but  vainly  protested.  The  speeches 
of  Fox  read  as  if  they  were  delivered  yesterday, 
so  exactly  do  they  apply  to  the  present  war. 
The  adoption  by  England  of  the  policy  of  Burke 
produced  Napoleon  and  led  to  twenty  years  of 
war.  Let  us  hope  that  the  similar  blunder  of 
the  Allies  will  not  have  a  similar  result. 


Paris,  March  6,  1918. 


ROBERT  DELL. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


349 


Shades  from  the  Tory  Tomb 

POLITICAL  PORTRAITS.   By  Charles  Whibley.   Mac- 
millan;  $2.50. 

Mr.  Whibley  has  an  excellent  style  and  his 
book  is  in  every  sense  entertaining,  but  he  belongs 
to  a  bygone  time  and  it  is  perhaps  in  that  aspect 
that  he  most  deserves  analysis.  For  he  belongs 
in  reality  to  those  great  dead  days  when  the 
"Edinburgh"  and  "Quarterly"  Reviews  decided 
the  reputation  of  statesmen.  Like  the  first-rate 
journalist,  he  has  read  the  right  books  and  has 
all  the  fitting  anecdotes  at  his  fingers'  ends.  He 
can  retell  what  every  one  knows,  with  a  certain 
fine  simplicity  that  almost  conceals  the  fact  of  its 
threadbare  antiquity.  He  has  all  the  splendid 
prejudices  of  Macaulay,  and  a  genius  for  invec- 
tive that  has  not  a  little  of  the  arch-Whig's 
charm.  Only,  and  this  is  for  him  of  vital  im- 
portance, he  is  definitely  on  the  other  side. 

He  likes  the  past.  He  clings  to  the  venerable 
umbrae  nominis  we  call  Church  and  King  and 
Aristocracy.  He  sniffs  doughtily  in  the  presence 
of  dissenters.  He  can  hardly  breathe  when  a 
manufacturer  obtrudes  his  personality  into  poli- 
tics. He  does  not  doubt  that  not  Thomas 
Aquinas  (as  Acton  said)  but,  in  sober  truth, 
the  devil  was  the  first  Whig.  He  dispenses  the 
kind  of  patriotism  which  consists  in  a  loud- 
mouthed assertion  of  the  superiority  of  your 
own  country  in  every  quality  that  makes  life 
a  thing  worthy  to  be  lived.  He  seems  to  have 
no  hesitation  in  pronouncing  that  a  very  special 
Providence  was  good  enough,  somewhere  about 
the  time  of  Agincourt,  to  take  charge  of  the 
destinies  of  England.  He  is  certain  that  the 
rural  arts  are  superior  to  the  industrial.  He 
likes  the  kind  of  world  in  which  the  working- 
man  knows  his  proper  place.  He  has  the  right 
sort  of  fine,  literary  contempt  for  the  low  huck- 
sters of  political  wares.  What  he  likes  is  the 
stern  bluff  soldier  like  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
or  the  haughty  gout-tortured  rhetorician  like  the 
Earl  of  Chatham.  Of  course  he  is  a  stern 
Protectionist;  and  he  still  gnashes  his  political 
teeth  in  anger  when  he  thinks  how  Peel  betrayed 
the  country  gentlemen  in  1846.  The  strong 
silent  man  is  his  beau  ideal  of  a  ruler;  except 
when,  under  the  name  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
his  strength — here,  admittedly,  tempered  by 
garrulousness — goes  to  the  enrichment  of  Ger- 
many. He  wants  his  statesmen  to  look  upon 
humanity  with  their  tongues  in  their  cheeks  like 
that  prince  of  ignoble  tricksters,  Talleyrand,  or 


from  a  lofty  and  self-erected  pinnacle  like  the 
younger  Pitt.  He  hates  men  like  Fox  who  think 
there  may  have  been  some  right  on  the  French 
side  in  1792,  or  Cobden,  who  preached  the 
mean  commercialism  of  free  trade  to  benefit  his 
own  pocket.  For  him  the  true  civilization  is 
neatly  ordered  into  ranks  and  classes,  and  the 
coachman  knows  that  he  is  inferior  to  the  man 
inside  the  coach.  He  wants  our  gratitude  for 
the  Duke  of  Devonshire  because  he  Engaged  in 
politics  when  he  might  have  been  at  agricultural 
shows;  or  for  Lord  George  Bentinck  because  he 
sold  his  stud  to  oppose  the  abolition  of  the  sugar 
duties.  It  all  has  the  fine  air  of  a  Hannah 
More  turned  Archbishop  of  Canterbury.  The 
gait  is  masculine  but  mincing.  The  air  is 
pleasant  so  long  as  you  are  content  to  rest  on 
Olympus;  but  the  sad  fact  is  that  there  are 
valleys  beneath  and  those  valleys  are  the  facts 
that  Mr.  Whibley  most  blithely  avoids. 

Not  that  he  cannot  give  you  the  air  of  scholar- 
ship. He  can  quote  you  the  long  out-of-print 
book  of  Mr.  Brewer  on  Henry  VIII ;  though 
he  flanks  it  by  an  admiring  reference  to  an 
essay  of  Mr.  Law's  which  is  only  a  worthless 
piece  of  war-time  bookmaking.  That  makes  you 
suspect  that  Mr.  Whibley's  scholarship  is  rather 
of  the  drawing-room  variety.  It  goes  pleasantly, 
doubtless,  at  a  fashionable  dinner,  or  barks  with 
a  certain  air  of  fantastic  charm  when  the  ladies 
have  gone  out  and  the  cigars  are  lit.  But  Mr. 
Whibley  is  about  as  competent  to  interpret  his 
story  as  a  dinosaur.  A  man  who  can  think  of 
Charles  James  Fox  only  as  a  somewhat  dishonest 
gamester  of  pleasing  manners;  a  man  who  has 
the  historic  insolence  solemnly  to  urge  that 
Cobden  favored  corn  law  repeal  for  purely  selfish 
reasons ;  who  can  exalt  with  enthusiasm  Disraeli's 
treatment  of  Peel  and  never  mention  that  Dis- 
raeli was  at  one  time  his  sycophantic  suppliant; 
who  praises  Bentinck's  attitude  on  the  sugar 
duties  of  1846  and  does  not  know  that  the 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  in  1852  admitted 
that  the  Tory  policy  in  that  regard  was  one 
long  economic  mistake;  who  tells  us  in  seeming 
seriousness  that  Wolsey  was  the  government  of 
England,  and  Henry  a  mere  puppet,  in  the  face 
of  so  solid  and  final  a  document  as  Professor 
Pollard's  history;  who  can  write  twenty  eulo- 
gistic pages  on  Clarendon  and  yet  forbear  to 
mention  the  hideous  iniquity  of  the  Clarendon 
Code;  whose  study  of  Metternich  sees  nothing 
of  his  lies,  his  trickery,  his  coldness,  his  utter 
incapacity  for  generous  aspiration — this  surely  is 


350 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


no  trustworthy  chronicler.  His  hero,  if  he  has 
one,  seems  to  be  William  Lamb,  Lord  Mel- 
bourne. Lamb  was,  indeed,  kindly  enough;  but 
one  of  those  cheap  gamesters  who  treat  politics 
as  a  branch  of  the  hunting-field  and  are  con- 
sidered learned  because  they  have  read  the  classics 
is  hardly  material  for  a  Pantheon.  "He  ab- 
horred high-sounding  talk,"  says  Mr.  Whibley, 
by  which,  if  he  means  that  Melbourne  cared 
nothing  for  what  was  great  and  generous  in  his 
age,  I  judge  that  Mr.  Whibley  likes  politicians 
who  shift  a  twopenny  tax  on  malt  or  alter  the 
constitution  of  that  kind  of  government  board 
which  never  meets.  "Born  out  of  my  due  time," 
Mr.  Whibley  might  well  cry  with  a  far  dif- 
ferent critic  of  his  age,  "why  should  I  try  to  set 
the  crooked  straight?"  It  needs  no  assurance  to 
urge  Mr.  Whibley  to  absolve  himself  from  fur- 
ther efforts. 

In  the  good  old-fashioned  days  the  man  of 
letters  was  the  timid  dependent  of  a  great  lord. 
He  published  his  books  by  subscription,  and 
boasted  of  the  names  displayed  in  the  list.  He 
wrote  sonnets  to  my  lady  on  the  birth  of  her 
eldest  son,  and  Latin  elegiacs  to  his  Majesty 
on  a  fortunate  recovery  from  a  serious  illness. 
He  was  adept  in  the  gentle  art  of  album-verses, 
the  sly  insertion  of  an  asterisked  paragraph  in 
a  morning  paper.  He  frequented  the  clubs  and 
carried  rumor  abroad.  He  was  indispensable  at 
a  dinner-party  when  a  desired  guest  failed  in  his 
response.  He  had  always  a  smiling  face  for 
rank  and  income.  Poor  enough  himself,  no  one 
treated  with  greater  contumely  the  shivering 
curs  who  pressed  their  faces  to  the  railings  in 
Berkeley  Square  to  catch  a  cheering  glimpse  of 
the  radiance  within.  After  middle  age  the  gout 
afflicted  him,  and  he  retired  to  Bath  or  the 
Wells  to  support  himself  on  whist  and  faded 
memories.  A  century  has  passed  since  then; 
and  the  Tory  man  of  letters  is  independent.  He 
curses  the  poor  and  the  peaceful  and  the  radical. 
He  likes  the  glitter  of  Ascot  and  the  mahogany 
magnificence  of  Pall  Mall.  He  reads  the 
"Quarterly"  and  "Blackwood's"  and  the  "Morn- 
ing Post,"  and  chuckles  over  the  fine  logic  of 
Mr.  W.  H.  Mallock.  He  discusses  port  and 
the  latest  bishopric  and  the  deterioration  of 
our  times.  He  sees  with  disturbed  distress  radi- 
cals as  prime  ministers,  heretics  as  bishops,  scien- 
tists as  heads  of  colleges.  Yet,  in  a  sense,  he  is 
the  most  fortunate  of  mortals;  for  he  does  not 
know  that  he  is  dead. 

HAROLD  J.  LASKI. 


The  Oxford  Spirit 

OUR  RENAISSANCE:    ESSAYS  ON  THE  REFORM   AND 
REVIVAL  OF  CLASSICAL  STUDIES.  By  Henry  Browne, 
SJ.     Longmans,  Green;  $2.60. 
VALUE  OF  THE   CLASSICS.     Edited   by  Dean  An- 
drew F.  West.     Princeton  University  Press;  $1. 
THE  OXFORD  STAMP.    By  Frank  Aydelotte.     Ox- 
ford University  Press;  $1.20. 
EDUCATION  AFTER  THE  WAR.     By  J.   H.  Badley. 
Longmans,  Green;  $1.25. 

LATIN   AND  THE   A.B.   DEGREE.     By   Charles  W. 
Eliot.     General  Education  Board. 
THE    WORTH    OF   ANCIENT   LITERATURE    TO   THE 
MODERN  WORLD.     By  Viscount  Bryce.     General 
Education  Board. 

With  one  or  two  exceptions,  this  group  of 
books  and  pamphlets  deals  directly  with  the 
classics;  it  is  therefore  gratifying  to  find  that 
they  are  comparatively  free  from  the  rage  of  con- 
troversy. Father  Browne's  essays  are  a  thought- 
ful and  at  times  eloquent  argument  on  behalf  of 
internal  reform  among  teachers  of  the  classics. 
The  "Value  of  the  Classics"  is  a  record  of  the 
addresses  delivered  at  the  Conference  on  Classi- 
cal Studies  held  at  Princeton  in  1917;  and  the 
great  names  contained  in  it,  together  with  the 
long  series  of  opinions  derived  from  business  men, 
scientists,  and  professional  men,  will  undoubtedly 
encourage  many  a  timid  soul  who  looks  forward 
with  horror  to  the  total  disappearance  of  Greece 
and  Rome  from  the  school.  J.  H.  Badley's  small 
volume  is  a  sensible  but  not  inspiring  plea  for  a 
national  system  of  education  in  England;  the 
best  thing  in  it  is  his  emphasis  upon  the  neces- 
sity of  making  the  system  a  highroad  accessible 
to  all  who  have  the  ability. 

But  on  turning  to  Frank  Aydelotte's  "The  Ox- 
ford Stamp,"  we  find  a  genuine  note  of  original- 
ity. Mr.  Aydelotte  is  one  of  those  rare  men  who 
have  noticed  that  here  in  the  United  States  a 
tremendous  amount  of  time  is  devoted  to  the 
study  of  the  English  language  and  literature, 
without  the  attainment  of  any  proportionate 
result.  He  gives  several  very  interesting  chap- 
ters to  his  diagnosis  of  the  disease,  and  to  the 
discussion  of  the  remedy;  and  these  chapters 
should  be  read  by  every  one  who  has  suffered 
under  the  old  thoughtless  regime  of  "composi- 
tion" and  skeletonized  fragments  of  the  living 
body  of  literature.  The  conclusion  to  which 
he  comes  is  that  the  "point  of  view  which  is 
destined  to  be  the  salvation  of  our  English  studies 
has  much  in  common  with  the  Oxford  study  of 
the  literatures  of  Greece  and  Rome;  our  study 
of  the  classics  and  of  English  literature  as  well 
has  tended  to  confine  itself  to  belles-lettres,  while 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


351 


the  study  of  the  classics  at  Oxford  owes  its  dis- 
tinction to  the  fact  that  it  is  a  study  of  Greek 
and  Roman  civilization." 

Now  this  statement  is  substantially  true,  and 
the  only  danger  in  making  it  is  that  Americans 
who  have  heard  of  Gilbert  Murray  and  have 
only  the  vaguest  ideas  about  Oxford  will  at  once 
admit  the  truth  of  Mr.  Aydelotte's  statement 
and  nevertheless  deny  that  it  carries  any  lesson 
for  us.  Men  who  ought  to  know  better,  in- 
cluding many  so-called  educational  experts,  are 
fond  of  saying  that  the  undoubted  success  of  the 
classical  studies  at  Oxford  is  due  really  to  the 
intellectual  traditions  and  training  of  an  aris- 
tocratic class  of  students.  Some  misconceptions 
will  never  die,  but  it  may  be  worth  while  to 
point  out  that  this  perennial  error  has  its  root 
in  intellectual  laziness.  The  secret  of  the  suc- 
cess of  classical  studies  at  Oxford  is  simply  that 
the  student  has  to  study  and  to  acquire  for 
himself;  he  is  compelled  to  sharpen  his  com- 
prehension by  an  ever-renewed  effort  to  under- 
stand the  history,  literature,  and  philosophy  of 
the  greatest  periods  of  Greece  and  Rome.  The 
real  doctrine  of  Oxford  is  the  doctrine  of  con- 
centrated intellectual  hard  work;  and  since  that 
doctrine  is  the  very  anthithesis  of  the  educational 
dogmas  current  among  us,  since  we  are  so  busy 
devising  machinery  for  the  dissipation  of  intel- 
lectual energy,  we  are  inclined  to  explain  away 
the  good  results  obtained  in  the  Oxford  school 
of  Literae  Humaniores,  and  to  attribute  them  to 
any  reason  but  the  true  one. 

Mr.  Aydelotte  has  called  our  attention  to  a 
way  in  which  the  methods  of  classical  Oxford 
can  be  utilized  for  the  study  of  English.  And 
now  we  are  in  urgent  need  of  some  book  which 
will  disengage  the  doctrine  of  Oxford  from  its 
merely  local  and  temporal  associations  and  show 
us  how  it  could  be  applied  not  only  to  the  study 
of  English,  but  to  the  regeneration  of  our  whole 
secondary  and  college  system.  There  are  signs 
of  healthy  discontent  among  us;  the  future  does 
not  seem  so  secure  as  it  did  a  few  years  ago ; 
and  the  law  of  automatic  progress  has  been  dis- 
credited, except  among  the  members  of  that 
earnest  but  old-fashioned  school  of  thought  to 
which  President  Eliot  and  Mr.  Flexner  belong. 
It  is,  for  example,  manifest  from  President 
Eliot's  pamphlet  on  Latin  that  he  still  believes 
in  Herbert  Spencer;  the  world  has  only  to 
abolish  a  few  more  "requirements  for  the  A.B. 
degree,"  and  to  put  "science"  on  a  pedestal,  in 
order  to  be  quite  happy  and  virtuous.  If  we 


desire  the  next  generation  to  be  even  more  sleepy 
and  self-satisfied  than  this  one  is,  then  we  can 
follow  President  Eliot's  advice.  But  if  we  are 
tired  of  narcotics  and  if  we  are  fond  of  liberty, 
then  we  shall  insist  that  the  next  generation  study 
science  to  be  sure,  and  plenty  of  it,  but  above 
all  that  they  apply  themselves  more  and  more 
vigorously  to  the  study  of  the  history  and  litera- 
ture and  thought  of  the  past.  Our  freedom  in 
the  present  is  exactly  proportionate  to  our  under- 
standing of  the  failures  as  well  as  of  the  suc- 
cesses of  the  past ;  and  that  understanding  can  be 
won  only  by  hard  personal  work.  There  will 
ofv  course  be  nothing  easy  in  this  process;  it  is 
always  easier  to  relax  "requirements"  and  to  take 
the  class  on  a  jaunt  to  the  City  Hall  to  study 
"civics,"  or  to  show  them  how  to  make  a  fire- 
less  cooker.  But  (pace  Mr.  Flexner)  it  is  never 
easy  to  be  free.  R> 


Poets  as  Reporters 

A  BOOK  OF  VERSE  OF  THE  GREAT  WAR.     Edited 

by  W.  R.  Wheeler.    With  a  preface  by  Charlton 

M.  Lewis.     Yale  University  Press;  $2. 

A  TREASURY  OF  WAR  POETRY.    Edited  by  George 

Herbert   Clark.     Houghton    Mifflin;  $1.25.   . 

THE  WIND  IN  THE  CORN.    By  Edith  Wyatt.    Ap- 

pleton ;  $1. 

BEGGAR  AND  KING.    By  Richard  Butler  Glaenzer. 

Yale  University  Press;  $1. 

SONGS  FOR  A  LITTLE  HOUSE.    By  Christopher  Mor- 

ley.     Doran;  $1.25. 

Poets,  it  may  be  said,  quite  as  clearly  as  scien- 
tists or  historians,  are  reporters  for  the  Journal 
of  Humanity.  They  are  the  scientists  of  the  soul, 
or  as  others  might  prefer,  of  the  heart,  or  of 
consciousness.  We  can  imagine  them  sallying 
forth  into  the  city  of  consciousness  to  report  to 
us  what  is  going  on  there — some  of  them  per- 
haps to  get  no  further  than  the  main  thorough- 
fare or  the  shopping  centres,  while  others,  bolder 
spirits,  penetrate  to  obscure  and  dismal  alleys  or 
to  suburbs  so  remote  and  unfrequented  that  we 
are  at  first  inclined  to  question  whether  they  exist 
at  all.  In  any  generation  the  great  majority  of 
the  ephemeral  poets  are  those  who  early  in  life 
have  discovered  the  park  in  this  city  and  are 
forever  after  to  be  found  there,  loitering.  One 
conceives  them  as  saying:  "This  is  pleasant,  so 
why  go  farther?  No  doubt  there  are  mean 
streets,  sinister  purlieus,  but  let  us  not  distress 
ourselves  over  them!"  If  we  reproach  them  for 
thus  misrepresenting  our  city,  for  exaggerating 
the  relative  importance  and  beauty  of  the  park, 


352 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


(calling  them,  as  Freud  does,  wish-thinkers)  they 
can  retort  that  those  who  ferret  out  exclusively 
the  mean  and  sinister  are  quite  as  precisely  wish- 
thinkers — impelled,  as  Nietzsche  said  of  Zola,  by 
the  "delight  to  stink."  To  this,  of  course,  we 
reply  that  our  ideal  reporter — who  only  turns  up 
at  rare  intervals,  as  a  Shakespeare,  a  Dante,  a 
Balzac,  a  Turgenev,  a  Dostoevsky — is  the  one 
who  sees  the  city  whole.  We  might  also  add  that 
those  who  report  extensively  on  the  shabby  pur- 
lieus are  so  much  in  the  minority  always  that 
they  are  far  more  worthy  of  encouragement  than 
the  park  loungers.  Their  influence  is,  in  the 
aggregate,  healthy. 

Miss  Wyatt,  Mr.  Glaenzer,  and  Mr.  Morley 
are  all  three  in  this  sense  devotees  of  the  park. 
But  if  they  are  at  one  in  their  representing  the 
park  as  of  supreme  importance,  their  reports  are 
delivered  in  manners  quite  distinct.  Miss  Wyatt 
is  clearly  more  aware  than  the  other  two  that 
there  are  other  aspects  to  the  city — she  has 
glimpsed  them;  she  alludes  to  them;  she  is  a 
little  uneasy  about  them.  She  has  heard  the 
factory  whistles  at  morning  and  evening,  and  seen 
people  going  to  work.  Is  it  possible  that  there  is 
a  certain  amount  of  suffering  and  fatigue  and 
dulness  entailed  ?  Yes,  it  is ;  but  at  this  point  she 
closes  her  eyes,  and  goes  into  a  dactylic  trance 
with  regard  to  wind,  rain,  flowers,  wheat,  water- 
falls, sunset  over  a  lake.  Life  is  beautiful,  dis- 
turbing; it  moves  one  to  exclamation  or  subdued 
wonder. 

The  Vesper  star  that  quivers  there 
A  wonder  in  the  darkening  air, 
Still  holds  me  longing  for  the  height 
And  splendor  of  the  fall  of  night. 

In  these  four  lines  Miss  Wyatt  gives  us  her 
poetic  attitude — hands  clasped  and  lips  parted. 
A  great  poet  could  endow  this  attitude  with 
dignity  and  power;  but  Miss  Wyatt  is  not  a 
great  poet.  She  lacks  on  the  one  hand  the  pre- 
cision, on  the  other  hand  the  magic,  for  the  task, 
though  in  such  a  poem  as  "An  Unknown  Coun- 
try" she  comes  close  enough  to  the  latter  quality 
to  make  us  regret  that  she  could  not  come  closer. 
She  succeeds  in  making  us  see  how  beautiful  this 
poem  might  have  been,  by  comparison  with  which 
vision  the  actual  accomplishment  leaves  us  frus- 
trate. Rhyme  and  rhythm — particularly  the 
dactyl  and  the  use  of  repetition — tyrannize  over 
Miss  Wyatt,  frequently  to  her  undoing;  and  this 
sort  of  tyranny  is  symptomatic.  It  relates  to  a 
certain  emotional  or  intellectual  incompleteness. 
Of  the  other  two  poets  Mr.  Glaenzer  is  dis- 
tinctly the  more  varied.  He  accepts  the  park 


gladly  and  without  question,  and  he  observes  it 
carefully.  His  report  is  mildly  rich,  blandly 
sensuous,  unoriginally  tuneful.  His  observations 
are  more  precise  than  Miss  Wyatt's,  his  technique 
more  secure.  On  the  other  hand  he  lacks  force 
or  direction,  he  seems  to  be  unable  to  transpose 
from  one  key  to  another  so  as  to  obtain  climax, 
and  the  exigencies  of  rhyme  lead  him  a  helpless 
captive.  It  should  also  be  remarked  that  his 
sense  of  humor  occasionally  fails  him,  as  when  he 
directs  his  plover  to  exclaim : 

Goodie     .     .     .     coodle     .     .     .    Hist! 
Expletives  of   this  sort — and   one   recalls   Miss 
Lowell's  tong-ti-bumps  and  Mr.  Lindsay's  boom- 
lay-booms — are  dangerous,  to  say  the  least. 

Mr.  Morley,  one  is  at  first  inclined  to  add, 
would  not  have  made  this  error,  for  one  of  the 
dominants  in  his  book,  "Songs  for  a  Little 
House,"  is  humor.  And  yet,  on  second  thought, 
that  is  not  so  certain,  for  Mr.  Morley  has  a 
disheartening  talent  for  spoiling  an  otherwise 
refreshingly  light  or  fancifully  humorous  lyric 
by  collapsing  at  the  close  in  a  treacle  of  hideous 
sentimentality.  Sentimentality  is  Mr.  Morley 's 
dark  angel,  and  it  is  curious  to  see  how  at  the 
first  whisper  of  its  approach  his  sense  of  humor 
either  abandons  him  incontinently  or  assumes  a 
heavy-footed  ness  and  loutishness  which  suggests 
the  Teutonic — as  indeed  his  sentimentality  does 
also.  Thus,  as  an  example  of  the  latter  quality : 

Pure  as  the  moonlight,  sweet  as  midnight  air, 
Simple  as  the  primrose,  brave  and  just  and  fair, 
Such  is  my  wife.    The  more  unworthy  I 
To  kiss  the  little  hand  of  her  by  whom  I  lie. 

And  of  the  former: 

More  bright  than  light  that  money  buys, 
More  pleasing  to  discerners, 
The  shining  lamps  of  Helen's  eyes, 
Those  lovely  double  burners ! 

One  must  turn  to  some  of  Mr.  Morley's  sonnets 
for  a  maturer  and  more  persuasively  imaginative 
touch,  or  to  his  parodies  for  a  surer  delicacy  of 
humor.  The  parodies  of  Hilaire  Belloc  and 
Edgar  Lee  Masters  are  excellent. 

If  these  three  poets  are  all  determined,  as  re- 
porters, to  emphasize  the  pretty  and  sweet  and 
to  ignore  the  surlier  and  more  tragic  demons  of 
consciousness,  one  finds  in  the  anthologies  of  war 
verse  edited  respectively  by  Mr.  WTieeler  and 
Mr.  Clark  that  the  disposition  to  glorify,  to 
escape  the  unpleasant,  is  equally  prevalent.  One 
would  have  supposed  that  by  this  time  war  would 
have  become  so  terribly  real  as  to  paralyze  any 
such  attempt;  yet  here  they  are,  hundreds  of 
poets,  frantically  waving  once  more  the  dubious 
emblems  of  honor,  glory,  duty,  revenge,  self- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


353 


sacrifice.  So  unanimous  is  it  that  it  has  almost 
the  air  of  a  conspiracy.  An  amazing  intoxica- 
tion! Yet  truth  has  many  ways  of  revenging 
itself,  and  in  this  instance  it  does  so  by  effectively 
frustrating  the  effort  to  beautify  war  or  make 
pretty  poetry  of  it.  For  the  uniformity  or  failure 
in  these  two  collections  is  nothing  short  of  aston- 
ishing. One  closes  them  with  the  feeling  that 
few  if  any  of  these  poets,  even  those  who  have 
made  names  for  themselves,  have  come  within  a 
thousand  miles  of  the  reality.  They  shout,  they 
exhort,  they  lament,  they  paean,  but  always  with 
a  curious  falseness  of  voice;  it  is  painfully  appar- 
ent that  they  have  failed  to  imagine,  or  more 
exactly,  to  see.  Their  verses  are  histrionic.  For 
a  glimpse  of  the  truth  one  must  turn  to  Miss 
Lowell's  "Bombardment,"  in  a  richly  imagined 
and  dramatic  prose  (which  Mr.  Charlton  M. 
Lewis  dismisses  in  his  preface  with  patronizing 
fatuity),  to  Rupert  Brooke's  Sonnets,  to  Alan 
Seeger's  "Champagne,"  or  to  some  of  the  work 
of  Mr.  Gibson  and  Mr.  de  la  Mare.  For  the 
rest,  one  alternates  between  Kiplingesque  narra- 
tives of  incident  and  sterile  odes.  What  is  perhaps 
the  finest  poem  of  the  war,  Mr.  Masefield's 
"August:  1914,"  is  in  neither  anthology,  nor  is 
Mr.  Fletcher's  "Poppies  of  the  Red  Year." 

Are  we  to  conclude  from  all  this  that  poetry 
cannot  be  made  of  war?  Not  necessarily.  What 
immediately  suggests  itself  is  that  as  war  is 
hideously  and  predominantly  real,  an  affair  of 
overwhelmingly  sinister  and  ugly  forces,  it  can 
only  be  embodied  successfully  (with  exceptions) 
in  an  art  which  is  realistic,  or  psycho-realistic. 
To  return  to  the  simile  with  which  this  review 
was  opened,  we  might  say  that  those  poets  who 
are  devotees  of  the  park  rather  than  of  the  slum 
will  almost  inevitably  fail  in  any  attempt  to  de- 
scribe war  in  terms  of  the  park.  And  to  succeed 
at  all  is  to  falsify,  to  report  the  desire  rather  than 
the  fact.  It  is  of  such  failures — adroitly  written 
and  interesting,  but  ephemeral  and  with  the  air  of 
hasty  marginal  notes — that  these  two  anthologies 
largely  consist.  Meanwhile,  we  await  with  inter- 
est the  return  of  the  poets  from  the  trenches.  It 
is  possibe  that  we  shall  then  learn  what  war  is: 
they  will  perhaps  tell  us  directly  and  simply  and 
subtly  what  a  human  being  really  thinks  and  feels 
in  such  a  fantastic  environment.  And  we  shall 
probably  be  surprised. 

Of  the  two  collections  Mr.  Clark's  is  the  more 
comprehensive  and  the  better  selected,  Mr. 
Wheeler's  the  less  militaristic  and  partisan. 

CONRAD  AIKEN. 


Applied  Psychology  on  Trial 

APPLIED   PSYCHOLOGY.     By    H.   L.   Hollingworth 
and  A.  T.  Poffenberger.     Appleton;  $2.25. 
EDUCATIONAL    PSYCHOLOGY.      By    Kate    Gordon. 
Holt;  $1.35. 

The  appearance  of  two  texts  in  applied  psychol- 
ogy, both  deserving  a  place  as  standard  manuals, 
offers  occasion  for  the  discussion  of  the  funda- 
mental position  of  this  candidate  for  scientific 
status.  Within  limitations,  the  value  of  such 
pursuit  is  secure;  but  the  determination  of  these 
limitations  is  the  issue  upon  which  psychologists 
are  likely  to  arrange  themselves  in  opposed  camps. 
The  most  unquestioned  field  is  that  of  the  psy- 
chology of  the  specialized  educational  processes. 
Reading,  writing,  drawing,  the  handling  of  num- 
bers and  quantities,  and  the  more  puzzling  case 
of  spelling,  have  a  psychology  of  their  own.  The 
expression  of  these  in  the  analysis  of  psychological 
relations,  and  the  precise  study  of  the  basis  of 
their  acquisition,  is  a  useful  pursuit.  They  are 
indispensable  mental  disciplines  directly  amenable 
to  exact  research.  Back  of  these  lie  the  more 
general  functions  of  memory  and  imagination, 
association  and  reasoning,  motor  skill  and  com- 
posite learning  by  experience;  and  still  further 
back,  the  general  laws  of  behavior,  and  the  ad- 
justment of  instincts  to  the  demands  of  the  en- 
vironment. The  problems  of  heredity  and  sex, 
of  work  and  rest,  of  play  and  stimulation,  of 
fatigue  and  efficiency,  stand  in  coordinate  impor- 
tance. The  vocational  applications  form  the  com- 
prehensive remainder  of  the  field :  the  psychology 
of  law  and  medicine,  of  workshop  and  market, 
of  the  executive  and  social  control  of  men.  The 
program  suggests  a  pemican  encyclopedia  or  a 
smattering  —  something  that  everyone  should 
know,  or  with  which  everyone  can  dispense,  be- 
cause he  should  acquire  what  he  needs  of  it 
otherwise. 

An  engineer  studies  his  physics  and  his  mathe- 
matics and  then  applies  them;  he  does  not 
substitute  an  applied  for  a  basic  pursuit.  The 
psychological  student  is  under  temptation  to  study 
the  application,  and  let  the  psychology  go.  He 
finds  that  his  applied  psychology  has  lifted 
selected  chapters  from  the  orthodox  science  and 
pointed  them  to  a  practical  use.  This  works 
fairly  well  for  the  simpler  principles  and  their 
simpler  applications,  as  in  a  boy's  book  of  enter- 
taining tricks  and  experiments  based  on  simple 
physical  principles.  But  the  project  of  applied 
psychology  is  inherently  ambitious,  and  it  extends 
to  all  the  complications  of  human  relations  and 


354 


THE    DIAL 


[April  1 1 


to  all  the  employments  of  the  hands  and  minds 
of  men.  The  psychological  engineer  advises  the 
advertiser  how  to  advertise;  the  executive  how 
to  judge,  organize,  and  manage  men ;  the  teacher 
of  whatever  subject  how  to  teach  (in  so  far  as 
the  professor  of  pedagogy  has  not  forestalled 
him) ;  and  everyone  how  to  work  and  play, 
learn  and  improve.  How  far  does  the  fact  that 
the  practitioner  of  medicine,  law,  teaching,  manu- 
facturing, trade,  industry,  and  the  many  unnamed 
and  unspecialized  businesses  of  life,  from  parent- 
hood to  "society"  (in  the  reporter's  sense),  exer- 
cises his  craft  on  the  basis  of  mental  powers  and 
relations — how  far  does  this  fact  give  the  psycho- 
logical student  the  authority  to  lay  down  the  law 
on  all  these  occupations? 

Psychology  clearly  stands  in  a  relation  apart, 
in  so  far  as  all  things  learned  and  done  are,  in 
one  aspect,  affairs  of  the  mind,  although,  in  an- 
other aspect,  they  are  technical  acquisitions.  The 
responsible  applied  psychologist  recognizes  this 
vital  distinction;  he  interprets  his  problem  not 
as  that  of  advice  or  replacement,  but  as  one  of 
seeking  and  intensive  study  of  processes  and  prin- 
ciples which  happen  to  have  a  special  application 
in  the  world  of  affairs.  He  seeks  the  quickening 
of  interest,  both  for  psychology  and  for  the  voca- 
tions, which  comes  from  recognizing  the  mental 
basis  of  the  pursuits  of  daily  life.  If  he  goes 
beyond  this  toward  a  promise  of  aid  to  practical 
success  by  a  knowledge  of  the  psychological  as- 
pects of  activities  that  can  be  learned  by  no  other 
art  than  the  art  of  their  practice,  he  enters  upon 
a  dubious  career. 

In  carrying  out  their  tasks,  Professor  Holling- 
worth  and  Dr.  Poffenberger  have  concentrated 
their  aims  upon  supplying  a  systematic  survey  of 
the  field  of  application.  They  base  this  upon  the 
interpretation  for  the  practical  life,  of  the  general 
laws  of  behavior  and  .the  specific  study  of  the 
typical  mental  processes.  The  task  is  well  done 
and  supplies  an  easy  approach  to  the  content  of 
the  new  discipline.  Miss  Gordon  proceeds  simi- 
larly for  the  educational  field  alone.  The  two 
volumes  overlap  in  their  treatment  of  the  indis- 
pensable factors  of  heredity,  sex,  environment, 
behavior,  and  the  basic  mental  procedures.  Miss 
Gordon  includes  a  more  detailed  treatment  of 
the  logical  processes.  Since  education  not  only 
instructs  but  proposes  to  teach  reasoning,  both 
texts  are  written  for  the  specific  purpose  of 
directing  instruction  in  courses  introducing  stu- 
dents to  the  applied  phases  of  psychology.  As  aids 
to  study  they  will  prove  efficient.  But,  like  all 


instructional  work,  their  value  depends  directly 
upon  the  judgment  and  competence  of  the  in- 
structor. In  this  respect,  these  texts  are  well 
sponsored. 

Doubtless  there  are  students  whose  interests 
are  primarily  and  legitimately  practical.  The 
open  question  is:  how  far  does  the  satisfaction  of 
that  interest,  in  the  detailed  terms  of  application, 
aid  or  interfere  with  the  acquisition  of  the  maxi- 
mum benefits  from  the  study,  and  the  maximum 
training  of  the  student  mind  in  psychological 
power?  The  temper  of  a  study  of  psychology  in 
which  psychological  interests  are  dominant,  and 
application  is  subsidiary  and  largely  for  illustra- 
tive purposes,  and  the  temper  of  an  applied  psy- 
chology in  which  application  is  central  and  the 
principles  appear  darkly  in  an  unaccented  back- 
ground, must  of  necessity  be  decidedly  different. 
A  student  becomes  scientific-minded  as  readily  by 
the  study  of  physics  as  of  chemistry,  of  geology  as 
of  biology,  although  the  contents  of  his  ideas  are 
markedly  different  in  the  several  pursuits.  But  his 
scientific-mindedness  would  have  a  very  different 
cast  if  it  were  shaped  by  the  workshop  or  the 
farm  and  not  by  the  laboratory.  Consequently 
applied  psychology  is  careful  to  give  the  student 
the  laboratory  spirit;  it  points  towards  applica- 
tion, but  it  utilizes  the  technique  that  has  come 
from  the  interest  in  principles  and  basic  analyses. 

Yet  with  all  this  conceded  and  well  main- 
tained, as  it  is  in  the  perspective  of  these  volumes, 
the  query  is  not  dismissed.  There  lurks  in  the 
discipline  the  danger  of  a  false  emphasis — the  risk 
of  a  hasty  plunge  into  application,  unequipped  by 
solid  achievement  of  comprehension.  The  details 
of  tests  of  proficiencies  loom  large ;  the  interpreta- 
tion of  what  they  mean  tends  to  be  slighted.  This 
is  particularly  unfortunate  for  the  student  of 
American  temper,  whose  habits  of  thought  need 
strengthening  in  the  very  direction  which  applica- 
tion is  prone  to  neglect.  This,  for  the  peda- 
gogical aspect.  For  the  more  serious  one  of  ap- 
preciation of  psychological  values  in  evidence,  in 
interpretation,  and  in  those  vital  conceptions  that 
determine  at  once  the  forward  steps  in  a  science 
and  the  range  and  grasp  of  the  psychologist's 
personal  hold,  the  criticism  is  yet  more  pointed. 
The  issue  emerges  jointly  in  the  handling  of 
method  and  conclusion.  Application  emphasizes 
the  definite  numerical  statement ;  in  its  confidence 
it  proceeds  to  substitute  what  is  measurable  for 
what  is  important.  There  is  an  analogy  in  the 
aesthetic  field.  When  machinery  saves  labor,  it 
is  an  aid  to  the  finer  effort  and  thus  to  aesthetics ; 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


355 


when  the  machine  dictates  the  design,  and  the 
designer  begins  to  think  in  terms  of  the  machine 
and  not  in  terms  of  the  principles  of  design,  the 
machine  is  or  may  become  an  insidious  power  for 
evil.  Applied  psychology  is  so  young  that  it  still 
has  this  issue  to  face. 

A  fair  illustration  is  that  of  the  consideration 
of  sex  differences,  which  are  rightly  placed  as 
matters  of  first  importance  by  all  the  chief  con- 
tributors to  the  movement  here  reviewed.  On 
the  basis  of  laboratory  tests,  which  show — with 
fair  equivalence  of  capacity  and  much  overlap- 
ping in  various  fields — that  in  all  respects  the 
powers  of  men  and  women  are  equal,  they  con- 
clude that  any  different  treatment  of  boys  and 
girls  is  due  to  tradition  and  prejudice,  and  that 
the  different  careers  of  men  and  women  are 
largely  the  result  of  imposed  license  and  disquali- 
fication. This  conclusion  is  absolutely  refuted  by 
history,  by  biological  and  social  science,  and  by 
discerning  analysis  in  every  field.  The  right 
conclusion,  of  course,  is  that  the  source  ,of  the 
significant  sex  differences  lies  outside  the  tests, 
and  also  that  the  tests  fail  to  bring  them  out — 
all  of  which  is  an  intelligible,  though  not  a  sim- 
ple, tale.  The  assumption  that  a  direct  practical 
attack  upon  the  problem  will  yield  a  solution  is 
a  rough-rider  procedure,  totally  unadjusted  to 
the  obviously  intricate  and  delicate  features  of 
the  situation.  This  remains  the  general  and 
deadly  charge  against  the  applied  spirit.  The 
sin  is  by  no  means  inherent  in  it.  Sin  is  not 
inevitable — only  temptation.  As  soon  as  applied 
psychology  accepts  the  responsibility  of  a  more 
adequate  analysis  of  the  problems  which  it  right- 
fully attacks,  and  as  soon  as  it  cultivates  the 
discerning  insight  which  recognizes  how  many 
problems  cannot  be  sampled  (under  the  crude 
assumption  that  the  whole  is  but  the  sum  of  its 
fractional  parts),  its  future  will  be  more  con- 
sistent with  the  authentic  source  of  its  procedures. 
If  it  insistently  affirms  that  the  psychology  of 
advertising  is  important  because  its  bills  are  large 
and  do  not  yield  to  accounting,  applied  psychol- 
ogy will  lose  perspective  and  invite  suspicion. 
If,  similarly,  it  concludes  that  men  and  women 
are  different  only  as  the  differences  appear  in 
such  parallel  columns  as  it  has  found  reason  to 
collect,  it  will  arouse  scientific  protest.  If  it 
presumes  to  dictate  to  the  practitioner  on  matters 
in  which  a  practical  sense  has  more  value  than 
acquaintance  with  the  uncertain  application  of 
an  uncertain  theory,  it  will  be  accused  of  im- 
pertinence. The  dariger  of  falling  between  two 


stools  is  due  to  the  circumstance  that  each  is 
already  occupied  by  a  rightful  claimant.  It  re- 
mains to  be  seen  whether  the  new  discipline  can 
find  a  third  stool  and  encamp  amicably  between 
the  theorist  and  the  practitioner. 

All  this  is  said  as  much  in  caution  as  in  criti- 
cism, as  much  in  appreciation  of  the  important 
service  which  applied  psychology  has  done — and 
which  is  attractively  presented  in  these  volumes — 
as  in  depreciation  of  certain  tendencies  which 
have  already  appeared.  The  irritating  applied 
psychologist,  like  the  yet  more  exasperating  poli- 
tician, is  the  one  who  assumes  that  anybody  who 
disagrees  with  him  does  so  in  ignorance  of  facts 
and  figures,  whereas  the  disagreement  may  well 
be  based  upon  certain  considerations  deeper  than 
facts  and  more  significant  than  figures.  The 
immediate  problem  of  the  new  discipline  is  to 
develop  in  its  practitioners  a  broader  appreciation 
of  what  lies  within  their  field,  and  a  more  catholic 
comprehension  of  what  by  nature  lies  beyond  it. 

JOSEPH  JASTROW. 


A  Long  ff^ait  in  Vain 

THE   LIFE   OF   JOHN   FISKE.     By   John    Spencer 
Clark.   2  vols.   Houghton  Mifflin;  $7.50. 

Something  more  is  required  to  make  a  notable 
biography  than  a  rich  collection  of  documents 
and  a  large  store  of  memories.  Of  this  fact  the 
recently  published  life  of  John  Fiske  is  an  irre- 
futable demonstration.  The  work  is  in  two 
volumes  from  the  pen  of  Fiske's  intimate  friend, 
John  Spencer  Clark.  It  is  a  record  not  only  of 
a  significant  life  but  of  a  significant  contest  in  the 
cultural  history  of  America.  Fiske's  part  in  the 
struggle  to  wrest  higher  education  from  the  con- 
trol of  theological  tyranny,  his  early  espousal  of 
the  theory  of  evolution,  and  his  long  battle  for 
what  he  believed  to  be  the  true  ethical  and  reli- 
gious interpretation  of  Darwinism,  connect  him 
with  episodes  of  historic  importance.  Should  the 
suspicion  which  appears  to  be  gaining  ground 
prove  to  be  correct,  should  it  come  to  be  recog- 
nized as  true  that  somewhere  near  the  turning 
of  the  present  century  a  new  philosophy  came 
into  existence,  a  philosophy  which  is  essentially 
the  voice  of  evolution,  and  that  this  thing  hap- 
pened in  America,  John  Fiske  would  have  to  be 
regarded  as  the  early  pioneer  of  this  extraordi- 
nary change.  For  this  reason  his  life  and  work, 
his  educational,  social,  and  religious  environment, 
the  magnificent  support  he  received  and  the  pet- 


356 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


tiness  of  the  opposition  he  overcame,  are  of  vital 
concern  to  Americans  jealous  for  the  higher  in- 
tellectual life  of  their  country.  The  more  pity 
therefore  that  this  long-awaited  biography  should 
prove  to  be  a  failure. 

These  are  not  pleasant  words  to  write,  but 
one  must  choose  between  writing  them  and  the 
guilt  of  silently  condoning  the  publication,  by 
an  old  and  distinguished  house,  of  a  performance 
so  amateur  and  inept.  The  more  eminent  the 
subject  of  the  memoir  and  the  more  distinguished 
the  publisher,  'the  greater  the  responsibility  of 
the  critic. 

The  reader  who  comes  to  this  biography  with 
the  hope  of  finding  a  living  portrayal  of  John 
Fiske  and  a  well  considered  estimate  of  his  place 
in  the  intellectual  life  of  the  latter  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  may  be  promised  a  hand- 
some disappointment.  Mr.  Clark  appears  to  be 
dominated  by  a  single  ideal — to  give  in  the  origi- 
nal chronological  order  as  many  of  the  details  of 
Fiske's  life,  big  and  little,  as  can  be  packed  into 
two  good-sized  volumes.  An  illustration  will  be 
the  best  criticism.  The  author  has  been  retailing 
various  incidents  in  Fiske's  life  covering  the  years 
1874-9:  the  death  of  his  grandmother;  his 
preparation,  in  the  absence  of  the  maids,  of  a 
luncheon  for  Mother  Brooks,  who  was  ill;  the 
removal  of  the  Fiskes  to  a  new  house,  built  for 
them  by  his  mother  and  step-father ;  the  visit  of 
Professor  and  Mrs.  Huxley  (a  rare  bit  of  nat- 
uralness) ;  and  so  on.  Quite  in  the  vein  not  only 
of  this  chapter  but  of  the  entire  biography  he 
says  [Vol.  II,  page  95]  : 

And  now  we  come  to  an  incident  in  the  social  life 
of  Fiske  which  has  left  an  interesting  memorial  behind 
it.  Among  his  neighbors  in  Cambridge  was  Christo- 
pher Pearse  Cranch — preacher,  painter,  and  poet. 
Cranch  was  a  man  of  fine  culture,  and  was  one  of 
the  small  circle  of  Transcendentalists  who  made  so 
much  stir  in  the  intellectual  life  of  New  England 
between  1830  and  1850.  .  . 

One  day  in  February,  1879  Cranch  called  upon 
Fiske  at  his  house,  22  Berkeley  Street,  Cambridge. 
Fiske  was  not  at  home;  and,  while  waiting  in  the 
library  for  Mrs.  Fiske  to  come  down,  Cranch's  feel- 
ings were  deeply  stirred  by  the  embodiments  of  human 
thought  with  which  he  was  surrounded.  Two  days 
after,  he  brought  to  Fiske  the  thoughts  which  came  to 
him  while  in  Fiske's  library,  expressed  in  the  follow- 
ing lines: 

The  reader  is  then  treated  to  a  poem  of  no 
special  merit  entitled  "In  a  Library,"  and  a 
double  page  insert  reproduces  the  verses  in  fac- 
simile! For  the  life  of  me  I  have  been  unable 
to  hit  upon  any  reason  why  the  author  should 
have  felt  it  necessary  to  make  anything  of  the 
incident,  save  that  he  had  the  manuscript  poem 


and  that  he  felt  obliged  to  say  something  nice 
about  Cranch.  Let  the  reader  be  reminded  that 
this  is  not  an  isolated  example.  It  is  strictly  typ- 
ical of  the  book.  The  work  makes  the  impres- 
sion of  being  an  unusual  approximation  to  what 
is  known  in  psychology  as  "total  recall."  One 
can  understand  of  course  how  admiration  of  a 
departed  friend  who  was  also  a  man  of  note 
might  tend  to  interfere  with  the  selection  and 
rejection  of  biographical  material.  But  one  may 
not  therefore  excuse  it,  since  without  such  dis- 
crimination first-rate  biography  is  impossible.  So 
too  of  another  feature  of  the  book.  One  can 
understand  why  an  author  who  is  by  temper 
a  sentimentalist  should  feel  moved  to  record 
numerous  little  family  intimacies  which,  while 
recalled  with  peculiar  satisfaction  by  those  im- 
mediately concerned,  have  little  significance  for 
those  who  fail  to  get  the  original  imaginative 
setting.  But  one  deplores  the  lack  of  taste  which 
does  not  sense  the  absence  of  such  setting  and 
consequently  does  nothing  to  supply  it.  Then, 
too,  how  can  a  man  write  an  effective  biography 
who  is  as  innocent  of  a  sense  of  humor  as  Mary 
Baker  G.  Eddy  herself? 

A  like  mechanicalness  is  characteristic  of  the 
author's  style.  It  is  formalistic,  wooden,  stilted, 
monotonous  to  a  degree  rarely  met  with  in  lite- 
rary attempts  outside  the  writings  of  college 
sophomores.  The  description  of  Fiske's  court- 
ship— a  theme  calling  for  imagination  and  deli- 
cacy instead  of  literalness  and  pomposity — is  a 
classic  of  its  kind.  No  one  should  read  it  unless 
he  knows  the  way  of  relief  through  mirth  or 
profanity.  And  how  wearisome  the  author's 
labors  to  establish  explicit  coherence  through 
continuous  prospective  and  retrospective  refer- 
ence, as  a  substitute  for  the  vital  coherence  to  be 
secured  only  through  the  organic  relations  of  the 
inner  movement  of  a  story.  Mr.  Clark  has 
adopted  as  good  literary  technique  the  method  of 
presentation  suggested  to  teachers  by  a  disillu- 
sioned professor:  First  tell  your  pupils  what  it 
is  you  are  going  to  tell  them.  Then  tell  it  to 
them.  Then  tell  them  what  it  was  you  just 
told  them.  This  for  an  example  (and  not  the 
worst  one  either) : 

And  now,  having  established  the  subject  of  this 
memoir  in  the  helplessness  of  his  infancy  in  the  Fiske 
family  at  Middletown,  and  having  put  in  order  his 
family  antecedents  which  have  revealed,  on  the^  pater- 
nal side,  the  sturdy,  free-thinking,  genial  qualities  of 
the  Quaker,  in  contrast,  on  the  maternal  side,  with  the 
strict,  religious  character  of  the  Puritan,  embodied  in 
the  attractive  personality  of  his  mother,  we  will  leave 
him  to  be  brought  through  the  critical  period  of  his 
infancy,  while  we  make  ourselves  acquainted  with 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


357 


some  of  the  physical  and  social  characteristics  of  Mid- 
dletown,  which  served  for  his  environment  during  the 
period  of  his  boyhood  and  his  youth. 

One  is  tempted  to  clinch  the  argument  by 
further  analysis  of  the  author's  style,  calling 
attention  to  monstrous  hyphenates  like  "soci- 
ologico-political,"  "philosophico-religious,"  "me- 
taphysico-theological,"  "atheistico-materialistic," 
and  other  irritating  idiosyncrasies  of  diction.  But 
perhaps  enough  has  been  said  to  indicate  the 
author's  literary  inadequacy.  I  cannot  refrain, 
however,  from  quoting  just  one  of  his  novel  sen- 
tences. This  one  occurs  in  the  narration  of 
Fiske's  visit  to  the  Pacific  coast,  a  trip  from  which 
he  returned  rich  in  pleasant  memories: 

He  took  with  him,  as  a  particularly  sweet  remem- 
brance, the  home  of  the  Reverend  T.  L.  Eliot  with 
his  accomplished  daughters,  where  in  the  intervals 
between  lectures  he  had  enjoyed  several  hours  of  rare 
intellectual  converse,  mingled  with  delightful  music. 
[Vol.  II,  page  367.] 

These  defects  of  literary  form  are  but  the 
superficial  and  more  immediate  manifestations  of 
something  which  goes  deeper.  In  the  only  sense 
that  counts  when  it  comes  to  writing  a  biog- 
raphy, the  author  has  not  known  Fiske.  He 
describes  from  the  outside.  He  only  half  under- 
stands. He  has  never  lost  himself  in  the  subject. 
His  delight  in  Fiske  is  unmistakable;  his  admira- 
tion unrestrained ;  his  work  clearly  one  long  trib- 
ute. For  all  that,  he  remains  a  spectator — 
perhaps  just  because  his  attitude  is  one  of  wor- 
ship rather  than  affection.  This  attitude  is 
clearly  seen  in  his  description  of  Fiske's  entrance 
upon  his  career  as  an  American  historian: 

Feeling  a  deep  interest  in  the  occasion,  I  took  a  seat 
where  I  could  observe  critically  both  the  speaker  and 
the  audience.  After  rising,  Fiske  paused  a  moment  to 
survey  his  audience;  and  when  he  had  attention  at 
full  focus  he  said,  in  clear  tones,  and  in  a  simple, 
conversational  way:  "The  voyage  of  Columbus  was 
in  many  respects  the  most  important  event  in  human 
history  since  the  birth  of  Christ."  He  then  paused  a 
bit.  The  momentary  effect  upon  the  audience — the 
attempt  to  grasp  its  significance — was  clearly  per- 
ceptible. Observe  the  immense  connotative  suggestive- 
ness  of  this  simple  sentence.  Brief,  sententious  as  it 
was,  it  threw  a  momentary  searchlight  over  the  whole 
period  of  Christian  history,  and  was  a  clear  intima- 
tion that  a  master  mind  had  come  to  give  a  philosophic 
interpretation  to  the  events  which  had  flowed  from 
the  memorable  voyage  of  Columbus  from  the  port  of 
Palos  on  the  3d  of  August,  1492. 

Fiske  is  not  only  great  but  sacred,  and  he  must 
never  be  allowed  to  do  or  say  anything  out  of 
character.  So  we  are  told  about  an  angelic  child, 
who  was  always  dutiful;  who  was  never  guilty 
of  a  blot  or  an  erasure  in  a  letter,  or  a  mark  of 
any  kind  in  a  book ;  who  always  knew  how  many 
volumes  he  possessed,  the  color  of  each  binding, 
and  the  exact  order  of  their  arrangement  on  his 


shelves;  whose  deportment  at  school  was  always 
perfect ;  and  whose  mental  precociousness  was  the 
outstanding  wonder  of  all  who  knew  him.  This 
is  interesting,  and  so  is  the  slight  reference  to  the 
hero's  schoolmates,  who  seem  to  have  judged  him 
by  standards  of  their  own,  and  whom  the 
author  calls  jealous  and  cowardly.  But  of  much 
greater  interest  would  have  been  a  critical  study 
of  the  effect  of  Fiske's  early  environment  upon 
his  personality  and  his  views.  He  was  brought 
up  by  adoring  grandparents..  He  was  gifted  with 
an  extraordinarily  keen,  agile  mind,  a  quite  unu- 
sual intellectual  curiosity,  and  a  remarkably  tena- 
cious memory.  What  was  the  effect  of  such  an 
environment  upon  such  an  equipment  ?  Here  was 
a  biographical  opportunity.  It  is  made  use  of 
to  give  us  a  catalogue  of  childhood  virtues  viewed 
from  the  angle  of  age. 

It  is  true  that  in  the  course  of  the  long  narra- 
tive there  is  an  occasional,  temporary  lapse  into 
something  resembling  real  biography.  But  on 
the  whole  the  model  followed  in  the  portrayal  of 
Fiske's  childhood  is  all  too  successfully  adhered 
to.  In  place  of  a  serious  attempt  to  analyze 
Fiske's  personality — to  arrive  at  the  sources  of 
his  power  and  of  his  weakness — in  place  of  a 
sober  estimate  of  the  nature  and  value  of  his 
contribution  to  the  life  of  the  interesting  period 
in  which  he  lived,  we  have  again  a  catalogue  of 
virtues.  We  are  told  over  and  over  of  the  orderly 
arrangement  in  Fiske's  mind  of  the  vast  stores 
of  knowledge  at  his  command;  we  are  assured 
again  and  again  of  his  lucid  style,  of  his  sim- 
plicity of  manner,  of  the  "brilliant  literary  and 
oratorical  success"  of  his  lectures;  we  are  referred 
to  many  an  incident  as  "a  further  revelation  of 
the  considerate  kindness,  the  deep  poetic  sensi- 
bility, and  the  profound  reverential  feeling  which 
were  constituent  elements  of  Fiske's  nature" — or 
words  to  that  effect. 

The  failure  of  the  author  to  grasp  and  reveal 
personality  is  mitigated  by  his  publication  of  let- 
ters to  and  from  Fiske  and  portions  of  the  latter's 
lively  and  graphic  diary.  With  these  to  draw 
upon  the  reader  can  find  material  to  block  out 
a  rough  portrait  and  even  to  fill  in  a  few  details 
with  confidence.  It  is  thus  sufficiently  evident 
that  he  was  a  man  of  tremendous  intellectual 
energy  and  great  personal  charm,  who  counted 
among  his  friends  a  considerable  number  of  the 
foremost  thinkers  of  the  English-speaking  world 
of  his  day.  It  is  clear  too  that  he  was  able  to 
move  critical  audiences,  both  here  and  in  Eng- 
land, to  the  highest  pitch  of  enthusiasm,  and  that 


358 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


something  about  him  enlisted  men  and  women 
of  means  in  his  projects.  Even  more  obvious  is 
the  fact  that  affection  for  Mrs.  Fiske  and  the 
children  was  his  dominant  passion  to  the  end 
of  life.  "Being  away  from  you,"  he  writes 
to  Mrs.  Fiske  from  the  midst  of  friends  in 
London,  "amounts  in  itself  to  a  serious  illness. 
The  agonies  I  have  suffered  since  I  landed  in 
England  are  such  as  no  words  can  ever  describe, 
and  it  goes  far  to  offset  the  good  effects  of  my 
seclusion.  Nay,  rather,  let  me  come  home  and 
work  as  in  the  old  days.  I  fear  that  this  awful 
homesickness  will  break  down  my  strength." 
And  at  last  he  was  compelled  to  leave  his  task 
unfinished  and  go  home.  One  recalls  Leslie 
Stephen's  remark  about  John  Stuart  Mill:  "A 
man  who  could  love  so  deeply  must  have  been 
lovable  himself." 

The  case  is  worse  for  the  reader  interested  in 
arriving  at  an  estimate  of  the  value  of  Fiske's 
historical  and  philosophical  work.  Here  the  biog- 
raphy is  of  practically  no  help.  Mr.  Clark  is 
more  concerned  for  Fiske's  personal  glory  than 
for  the  solid  success  of  the  movements  in  which 
he  was  engaged.  There  was  a  time  when  Fiske 
was  believed  to  be  delivering  great  messages.  He 
was  bringing  new  hope  to  people  harassed  by 
fears  of  the  religious  implications  of  the  theory 
of  evolution,  and  he  was  interpreting  American 
political  institutions  to  audiences  uplifted  by  his 
vision  and  thrilled  by  his  eloquence.  What  is 
the  state  of  affairs  today?  How  lasting  was  the 
marriage  between  religion  and  evolution  for 
which  Fiske  was  responsible?  Of  what  perma- 
nent value  was  his  historical  work?  One  wishes 
that  Mr.  Clark  had  thrown  some  light  on  these 
problems.  But  he  appears  quite  unconscious  of 
the  fatal  logical  weaknesses  inherent  in  Fiske's 
religion  of  evolution.  And  while  he  is  aware  of 
unfavorable  criticisms  of  the  historical  work,  he 
undertakes  no  examination  of  their  force.  Per- 
haps it  is  just  as  well.  For  in  the  one  instance 
where  he  attempts  adjudication — in  the  debate 
between  Fiske  and  William  James — he  quite 
misses  the  point,  and,  condescendingly  takes  James 
to  task  for  opposing  evolution  when  he  is  in  fact 
objecting  to  a  specific  speculative  development  of 
evolution. 

And  so  in  spite  of  our  long  wait  (the  book  is 
announced  by  the  publishers  as  the  long-awaited 
biography)  we  shall  be  compelled  to  wait  still 
longer  for  a  definitive  life  of  Fiske.  It  is  not 
likely  that  he  will  ever  be  recognized  as  one  of 
our  leading  philosophers,  but  in  the  field  of  his- 


tory he  seems  to  be  assured  a  high  place.  His 
historical  writings  have  always  been  widely  read, 
and  now  even  historical  scholarship,  which  a  few 
years  ago  was  severe  in  its  criticism,  has  changed 
to  mildly  qualified  praise.  And  no  one  can  tell 
how  far  this  reaction  may  go.  At  any  rate  it  still 
remains  to  be  determined  to  what  extent  Henry 
Irving  was  speaking  with  knowledge  and  judg- 
ment when  he  wrote  to  Mrs.  Fiske:  "He  was  a 
great  philosopher  and  a  great  historian.  The 
world  was  and  is  richer  for  his  work,  and  he 
has  left  a  blank  never  to  be  filled  in  the  hearts  of 
his  friends." 


M.  C.  OTTO. 


Clipped  ff^ings 


THE    HOUSE    OF    CONRAD.      By    Elias    Tobenkin. 
Stokes;  $1.50. 

Is  it  the  mission  of  America  to  break  down 
the  revolutionary  ardor  of  the  immigrant,  con- 
vert his  sons  to  a  sane  and  cautious  view  of 
working-class  progress,  and  reward  his  grand- 
children with  an  honest  homestead  in  the  West, 
wherewith  they  may  become  rich  through  their 
own  unaided  toil  ?  This  is  the  immigrant  process 
Mr.  Tobenkin  suggests  in  his  new  novel  of  the 
three  generations  of  the  "House  of  Conrad"  in 
the  New  World.  The  story  traces  the  slow  frus- 
tration of  the  dream  of  the  fiery  young  workman 
disciple  of  Lassalle  who  comes  to  New  York  in 
the  late  sixties.  The  young  German  socialist  is 
obsessed  with  the  idea  of  founding  a  "house" 
of  stalwart  sons  who  shall  liberate  the  workers 
of  the  land  of  the  free.  But  the  neighbors  soon 
turn  the  heir  apparent,  Ferdinand  Lassalle 
Conradi,  into  plain  Fred  Conrad,  and  to  his 
father's  chagrin  the  quiet  boy  grows  up  not  into 
the  flaming  leader  of  the  masses  but  into  an 
intelligent  conservative  labor  leader  of  his  bakers' 
unions — tepid  towards  the  socialist  dogmas, 
slightly  ashamed  of  his  father's  excitement  and 
incorrigible  foreign  accent.  He  marries  a  maiden 
from  Vermont,  and  his  two  children  emerge  in- 
distinguishably  "American."  The  jealousy  of 
rival  labor  leaders  brings  the  unfortunate  Fred 
to  prison;  his  wife  dies;  the  children  become 
waifs  and  are  taken  in  charge  by  the  authorities. 
Salvation  is  found  only  when  the  grandson,  Rob- 
ert, carrying  out  his  dead  father's  dream  of  a 
homestead  in  California,  rescues  his  sister  and 
brings  her  and  the  mellowed  old  grandfather  to 
his  new  ranch. 

In   this  more  ambitious  plot,   Mr.  Tobenkin 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


359 


leaves  little  doubt  that  the  gaucheries  of  his 
earlier  "Witte  Arrives"  were  not  so  much  mere 
symptoms  of  inexperience  as  of  a  very  limited 
imagination  about  American  life.  He  has  a  real 
sense  for  the  intense  idealism  of  the  socialist 
workers,  their  self-sacrifice,  and  the  heroic  strug- 
gles of  their  little  journals  and  groups.  He  has  a 
real  feeling  for  the  boy  Fred,  with  his  quiet  indus- 
try, his  sober  romance,  the  toil  in  the  bakery,  the 
little  politics  of  his  union.  But  the  moment  he  at- 
tempts to  bring  the  house  of  Conrad  into  con- 
tact with  the  American  native  world,  unreality 
shows  its  face.  Fred  must  be  given  a  strong 
Americanizing  influence.  He  must  meet  some- 
one who,  while  sympathizing  with  the  "under 
dog,"  teaches  the  boy  how  necessary  it  is  for 
these  immigrant  idealists  to  adapt  themselves  to 
American  ways.  Yet  is  it  plausible  that  this 
native  American  should  be  a  shrewd  New  Eng- 
lander,  "of  old  Revolutionary  stock,"  "graduate 
of  a  leading  college,"  once  a  teacher  but  now 
imperturbably  a  small  contractor  in  the  painting 
and  decorating  business,  and  the  uncle  of  the 
Vermont  maiden  who  no  sooner  is  in  New  York 
than  she  is  walking  in  the  park  with  the  young 
German  baker  apprentice?  A  good  novelist  can 
make  anything  seem  plausible:  Mr.  Tobenkin's 
natives  make  one  shudder.  What  are  we  to  do 
with  the  unhappy  Edward  Sumner  Channing,  of 
impeccable  Abolitionist  ancestry  and  of  the  even 
more  impeccable  Fifth  Avenue  present  ?  Do  Chan- 
nings,  when  they  are  unfortunate  in  their  do- 
mestic relations,  talk  that  way  about  socialism 
and  about  love?  Do  they  fall  in  love  with  girls 
like  Fred's  daughter,  who  has  come  out  of  a 
reformatory  to  be  a  companion  to  their  aristo- 
cratic sister?  And  if  they  do,  since  Ruth  is  an 
admirable  girl,  do  they  suddenly  jump  out  of 
windows  only  because  they  are  asked  if  their 
proud  sisters  would  want  girls  like  Ruth  for 
sisters-in-law  ?  Perhaps  they  do.  But  it  requires 
more  artistry  than  Mr.  Tobenkin  possesses  to 
make  it  plausible. 

The  entire  incident  of  Ruth  is  preposterous 
melodrama.  Are  such  resolute  and  rational  girls 
so  easily  terrorized  by  cheap  police  bullies  into 
fleeing  the  city,  without  a  word  to  the  neglected 
father,  for  whom  they  have  just  driven  their 
lover  to  his  death?  And  is  a  girl  of  sixteen,  so 
beautiful  and  intelligent,  so  resolute  and  rational 
as  this  daughter  of  Fred's,  immured  in  a  House 
of  Redemption  because  she  has  once  been  found 
with  a  neighbor's  little  boy  asleep  in  her  lap? 
Even  though  Mr.  Tobenkin  could  prove  that 


each  of  his  incidents  actually  happened,  his  novel 
would  still  be  riddled  with  untruth.  I  fear  that 
his  imagination,  as  soon  as  it  strays  out  of  the 
realm  of  what  is  pure  and  of  good  repute,  is 
exceedingly  limited.  This  ingenious  novel  gives 
the  author  a  certificate  of  spotless  moral  char- 
acter that  any  sinner  might  envy.  Since  the 
Sunday-school  books  that  we  used  to  read  in 
childhood  I  know  nothing  quite  equal  to  Mr. 
Tobenkin's  notions  of  the  seamy  side  of  life. 
Fred's  adventure  with  the  "widow,"  from  which 
dates  all  his  woe,  is  quite  characteristic.  An 
insistent  smugness,  a  note  of  the  young  and 
earnest  immigrant's  proving  to  the  wholesome 
and  earnest  native  American  how  very  whole- 
some and  earnest  he  can  be,  pervades  this  book. 
One  turns  with  relief  to  such  a  masterpiece  as 
"David  Levinsky,"  where  both  the  immigrant 
and  the  native  world  are  seen  veraciously,  with- 
out moral  bias.  And  Mr.  Cahan's  vigorous 
command  of  English  is  as  superior  to  Mr.  Toben- 
kin's feeble  style  as  is  his  American  vision  to 
Mr.  Tobenkin's  conception  of  puritans. 

But  what  concerns  us  most  is  the  impression 
of  clipped  wings  which  this  young  novelist  pro- 
duces. Evidently  he  had  the  serious  purpose  of 
illuminating  the  immigrant  process;  and  he  is 
important  therefore,  if  for  only  his  intention. 
Now  the  main  drama  of  the  American  immi- 
grant's life  lies  in  his  reaction  to  our  economic 
absolutism.  "The  House  of  Conrad"  is  almost 
a  cunning  evasion  of  that  capitalistic  issue.  Gott- 
fried, with  his  fiery  socialist  bitterness,  is  mel- 
lowed down,  one  might  say,  into  the  harmless 
manager  of  a  small  bookshop.  The  quiet  Fred 
goes  to  prison,  not  so  much  a  victim  of  the  em- 
ployers whom  he  is  fighting  as  of  his  own  com- 
rades, punishing  him  for  his  sexual  virtue.  The 
grandson  finds  liberation  in  that  most  inadequate, 
obsolete  social  institution,  the  individually  ap- 
propriated homestead  in  the  West.  Nowhere  a 
grappling  with  the  issue,  though  the  hero  springs 
straight  from  the  Lassallean  furnace!  Every- 
where the  suggestion  that  while  the  heart  of 
revolutionary  idealism  may  do  it  credit,  Ameri- 
can sober  sense  sees  that  its  head  is  weak!  For 
this  young  novelist  the  class  struggle  has  been 
blurred.  In  a  time  of  moral  adventure  it  is 
the  pedestrian  virtues  that  he  delicately  urges. 
Among  the  revolutionary  appeals,  his  idealism 
has  grown  tepid.  Whatever  America  may  have 
done  to  the  House  of  Conrad,  it  has  done  some- 
thing unfortunate  to  Mr.  Elias  Tobenkin. 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


360 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


BRIEFS  ox 


BOOKS 


HISTORY    OF    INDIA.     By    Captain    L.    J. 

Trotter.     Revised  and  brought  up  to  date 

by  W.  H.  Mutton.     Macmillan ;  $3.50. 

Not  since  the  soldier-scholar  of  the  old  East 
India  Company  days  put  the  finishing  touches  to 
his  history  in  1899,  has  the  text  been  revised  or 
reissued.  The  service  has  now  been  fittingly 
performed  by  Archdeacon  Hutton,  the  Oxford 
Reader  in  Indian  History.  It  was  in  Oxford 
that  the  old  soldier  began  and  ended  his  career. 
Histories  of  India  have  frequently  come  from 
the  hands  of  administrators  like  Hunter,  but 
rarely,  if  we  exclude  Colonel  James  Tod's  classic 
study  of  Rajputana,  have  they  come  from 
the  hands  of  a  soldier.  This  seems  only  natural 
when  we  consider  the  turmoil  and  anarchy,  due 
to  the  decline  of  the  famous  Mughal  empire, 
from  which  the  British  rescued  India.  '  How- 
ever, those  were  the  days  when  soldiers  readily 
and  efficiently  assumed  the  role  of  administra- 
tors. It  is  now  certain  that  we  have  seen  the 
last  of  this  interesting  type  in  Cromer  and 
Kitchener. 

But  the  foundation  for  India's  prosperity  and 
order  were  not  fully  laid  until  the  keeping  of 
the  new,  inchoate,  heterogeneous  empire  passed 
from  the  overtaxed  machinery  of  the  outworn 
Company  of  "merchant-adventurers"  into  that 
of  the  British  Parliament.  It  required  an  Ori- 
ental imagination  like  that  of  Disraeli  to  seize 
and  improve  upon  the  opportunity.  Thus  Vic- 
toria became  Empress  of  India  and  ruler  of  a 
new,  vast  empire  in  1877,  nineteen  years  after 
India  passed  into  the  hands  of  a  central  govern- 
ment in  London.  Captain  Trotter's  pages  deal 
largely  with  the  early  struggles  of  the  British 
in  contesting  the  French  and  Indian  adventurers 
that  laid  claims  to  the  deliquescent  dominions 
of  the  Mughal.  Incidentally,  Archdeacon  Hut- 
ton's  footnote  on  the  struggle  with  the  French 
in  southeastern  India  reveals  the  fact  that  a 
"Sergeant  Bernadotte,  the  future  King  of  Swe- 
den, was  taken  prisoner  by  the  English."  Trot- 
ter's survey  of  this  military  period  makes  swift 
and  entertaining  reading. 

Nowadays,  the  emphasis  is  rightly  placed  on 
the  economic  and  political  phases  in  history. 
Turning  over  Captain  Trotter's  pages  on  early 
Hindu  and  Muhammadan  institutions  and  his- 
tory, we  find  them  readable  and  enlightening, 
even  though  research  and  the  discoveries  of 
archaeology  have  uncovered  more  data  than  were 
available  at  the  time  of  his  writing.  For  such 
early  history  information  is  now  sought  in  schol- 
arly work  like  that  of  Vincent  Smith.  But  the 
American  reader  and  student  will  find  this  vol- 
ume sufficient  to  their  needs,  especially  at  this 
time  when  a  swift  survey  is  essential  to  our  keep- 


ing pace  with  the  recasting  of  our  world,  East 
and  West.  The  Black  Hole  of  Calcutta  is 
familiar  enough,  but  not  so  the  events  that  pre- 
ceded and  followed  that  epochal  incident.  What 
we  know  of  the  administration  of  Warren  Hast- 
ings is  still  obscured  by  Macaulay's  inaccurate 
rhetoric.  From  our  oldest  preparatory  school, 
Dummer  Academy  at  South  Byfield,  Massa- 
chusetts, came  the  American  general,  Sir  David 
Ochterlony,  whose  statue  greets  the  American 
tourist  in  Calcutta.  But  little  do  we  realize  that 
he  stopped  that  marauding  race  from  Nepal, 
known  today  as  the  Gurkhas,  who  furnished  the 
finest  soldiers  in  the  Indian  army;  or  that  he 
saved  Delhi  to  England  in  1804— -the  ancient 
capital,  whose  name  we  mispronounce  but  per- 
petuate in  five  states  in  this  country,  where  an 
American  Vicereine  entered  to  a  durbar  on  a 
state  elephant.  Inded,  no  more  fascinating  read- 
ing can  be  offered  than  this  brief  history  of 
India.  It  is  convenient  to  find  the  place-names 
and  their  spellings  standardized  and  provided 
with  diacritical  marks:  this  was  the  least  due 
our  country,  that  has  nurtured  Sanskrit  scholars 
like  Whitney,  Hopkins,  and  Lanman. 

DIDEROT'S  EARLY  PHILOSOPHICAL  WORKS. 

Translated  by  Margaret  Jourdain.     Open 

Court;  $1.25. 

It  is  a  commonplace  that  each  advance  in  sci- 
ence, each  change  in  economic  and  social  condi- 
tions, has  demanded  not  only  revised  conceptions 
of  God  but  radically  different  methods  for  estab- 
lishing the  fact  of  his  existence.  Diderot  lived 
in  one  of  these  transition  periods.  His  reaction 
against  the  traditional  religion  and  the  dogma- 
tism of  French  intellectual  vested  interests  is 
manifested  in  the  early  writings  which  Margaret 
Jourdain's  admirable  translation  now  makes  ac- 
cessible to  American  readers. 

The  "Philosophic  Thoughts"  are  primarily  a 
justification  of  the  skeptic's  position.  "What 
is  a  skeptic?  A  philosopher  who  has  questioned 
all  he  believes,  and  who  believes  what  a  legiti- 
mate use  of  his  reason  and  his  senses  has  proved 
to  him  to  be  true."  He  pleads  for  a  free  use 
of  reason  as  against  a  reliance  upon  superstition; 
for  demonstration  as  against  faith  in  miracles. 
"He  who  does  not  deliberately  embrace  the  faith 
in  which  he  has  been  bred  can  no  more  plume 
himself  on  being  a  Christian  or  a  Mussulman 
than  upon  not  being  born  blind  or  lame.  It  is 
his  luck,  not  his  merit."  In  common  with  Vol- 
taire, Diderot  was  impressed  with  the  argument 
from  design  for  the  existence  of  God.  In 
"Thought  XX"  he  presents  this  argument,  but 
since  within  three  years,  in  "The  Letter  on  the 
Blind,"  he  ostensibly  quotes  the  words  of  the 
blind  Saunderson  in  which  the  latter  applies  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


361 


principle  of  relativity  to  God  and  suggests  the 
theories  of  evolution  and  survival  of  the  fittest  as 
alternatives  to  special  creation,  it  is  probable 
that  even  in  1746  Diderot  doubted  the  effective- 
ness of  this  argument. 

"The  Letter  on  the  Blind"  and  "The  Letter 
on  the  Deaf  and  Dumb"  are  valuable  and  in- 
teresting because  of  Diderot's  thorough  utiliza- 
tion of  the  principle  of  relativity.  He  indicates 
the  dependence  of  morality,  as  well  as  intel- 
lectual conceptions,  upon  our  sense  organs.  "How 
different,"  he  asks,  "is  the  morality  of  the  blind 
from  ours?  How  different  would  that  of  a 
deaf  man  likewise  be  from  his?  And  to  one 
with  a  sense  more  than  we  have,  how  deficient 
would  our  morality  appear — to  say  nothing 
more?"  If  the  psychologist  tells  us  these  essays 
contain  much  crude  and  unwarranted  specula- 
tion, we  should  remember  that  Diderot  expresses 
his  keen  disappointment  with  his  inability  to  se- 
cure experimental  verification  for  his  theories. 
He  clearly  indicates  that  the  test  of  valid  specu- 
lation must  be  a  scientifically  controlled  experi- 
ment, and  he  proffers  suggestions  for  the  educa- 
tion of  the  blind  and  the  deaf  which  are  now 
in  operation. 

Americans  who  do  not  read  French  have  been 
excluded  too  long  from  direct  contact  with  the 
intellectual  life  of  eighteenth-century  France.  A 
reading  of  this  book  will  stimulate  a  desire  for 
direct  acquaintance  with  the  later  writings  of 
Diderot  and  his  fellow  Encyclopedists.  The 
desire,  however,  is  due  in  part  to  Margaret 
Jourdain's  excellent  translation,  which  makes  it 
possible  to  read  Diderot  with  no  thought  that 
the  original  was  penned  in  a  foreign  language. 

THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE  BRITISH  WEST 
INDIES,  1700-1763.  By  Frank  Wesley  Pit- 
man. Yale  University  Press;  $2.50. 
In  the  earlier  half  of  the  eighteenth  century 
the  imperial  interests  of  England  extended  chiefly 
to  four  important  parts  of  the  world :  the  Hudson 
Bay  country,  India,  the  North  American  colonies, 
and  the  West  Indies.  As  the  first  two  were,  so 
far  as  England  was  concerned,  the  exclusive  fields 
of  great  trading  companies,  they  produced  no 
difficult  administrative  complications.  Between 
the  West  Indies  and  the  Northern  colonies  there 
existed,  however,  a  conflict  of  interests  which  in 
a  large  measure  was  responsible  for  the  disruption 
of  the  British  empire  later  in  the  century.  The 
islands  of  the  West  Indies  were  sugar  colonies; 
while  the  dominions  on  the  mainland  produced 
lumber,  live  stock,  fish,  meat,  and  provisions  in 
other  forms.  It  was  the  presumption  at  West- 
minster that  these  products  could  be  disposed  of 
in  the  sugar  colonies;  but  the  islanders  were 
unable  to  consume  all  the  Northern  products,  nor 


were  they  able,  in  the  sale  of  sugar,  to  compete 
with  their  French  neighbors,  who  sold  their 
wares  at  a  considerably  cheaper  price.  To  force 
the  trade  of  the  mainland  to  the  English  West 
Indies  and  at  the  some  time  to  strike  a  blow  at 
French  commerce,  Parliament  passed  the  famous 
Molasses  Act  of  1733,  which  must  be  counted  as 
one  of  the  causes  that  led  to  the  American  revolt. 
The  history  of  this  act,  the  agitation  that  pre- 
ceded it,  and  the  futile  efforts  to  enforce  it  are 
to  American  readers  the  more  important  subjects 
treated  in  Dr.  Pitman's  work  on  the  British  West 
Indies.  The  author  also  discusses  in  detail  such 
matters  as  social  life,  the  labor  problem,  slavery 
and  the  slave  trade,  foreign  commerce,  and  eco- 
nomic arrangements.  His  work  further  includes 
a  number  of  carefully  prepared  statistical  appen- 
dices. It  is  elaborately  indexed  and  is  prefaced 
with  a  good  map  of  the  entire  Caribbean  region. 

THE  SPIRIT  OF  REVOLT  IN  OLD  FRENCH 

LITERATURE.      By    Mary    Morton   Wood. 

Columbia  University  Press;  $1.50. 

Dr.  Wood  draws  from  early  French  and  Pro- 
vengal  literature  typical  passages  which  show 
striving  toward  social  justice  and  freedom  of 
thought  in  the  much  abused  "dark  ages."  She 
endeavors  to  make  the  work  palatable  to  the  gen- 
eral reader  by  translating  all  her  citations  and 
by  using,  to  avoid  repetition,  less  than  one  fifti- 
eth of  the  matter  originally  collected.  She  com- 
ments on  the  character  of  the  various  authors 
and  the  conditions  under  which  they  wrote  when 
such  explanation  is  useful  in  fixing  the  exact 
bearing  of  their  attack,  but  otherwise  she  refrains 
from  interpretation  of  her  text,  for  fear  of  inject- 
ing twentieth  century  ideas  into  the  discussion. 
A  cardinal  defect  in  much  of -the  social  philoso- 
phy of  the  middle  ages  lies  in  the  "substitution 
of  charity  for  justice,"  or  "the  assumption  that 
privileged  individuals  have  the  right  to  bestow 
happiness  on  others.  So  the  moralists,  with  few 
exceptions,  urged  the  king  to  be  merciful  to  his 
subjects,  instead  of  inciting  the  people  to  hold 
their  kings  accountable  to  them."  But  courage 
of  expression  is  noted  everywhere,  and  the  right 
to  personal  conviction  occasionally  championed. 

The  first  and  strongest  chapter  deals  with  the 
revolt  against  political  and  economic  injustice. 
All  notes  are  sounded,  from  the  famous  personal 
laments  of  the  wretched  Rutebeuf  to  the  tragic 
picture  of  peasant  misery  drawn  by  the  high 
churchman  Etienne  de  Fougeres.  "It  is  this 
which  distresses  me  the  most,"  sings  Rutebeuf, 
"that  I  dare  not,  empty  handed,  knock  at  my 
own  door."  And  again:  "These  are  friends 
whom  the  wind  blows  away  and  the  wind  blew 
hard  before  my  door."  Etienne  de  Fougeres 
writes:  "If  he  [the  peasant]  has  a  fat  goose  or 


362 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


a  chicken  or  a  cake  of  white  flour,  he  intends 
it  all  for  his  lord.  He  never  tastes  a  good  mor- 
sel, bird  or  roast."  The  four  following  chapters 
deal  with  attacks  on  corruption  among  the 
clergy  or  on  church  discipline.  The  last  chap- 
ter is  entitled  "Protest  against  Sex  Discrimina- 
tion." Dr.  Wood  admits  that  this  protest  took 
a  "perverted  form"  in  that  it  was  occupied  almost 
exclusively  with  "discussion  of  female  depravity." 
Since  this  particular  protest  is  obviously  near  her 
heart,  she  could  have  greatly  strengthened  her 
argument  by  extending  her  study  to  include  the 
first  French  feminist,  Christine  de  Pisa.  Dr. 
Wood  apparently  admires  the  "Roman  de  la 
Rose,"  and  refuses  to  accept  the  violent  asper- 
sions of  Jean  de  Meung  as  reflecting  his  per- 
sonal opinion  of  women.  Her  case  is  weak  here. 
Indeed,  when  she  observes  that  Jean's  work  is 
a  "defense  of  marriage  against  celibacy,"  the 
reviewer  is  reminded  of  the  mite  once  contrib- 
uted to  academic  gaiety  by  an  undergraduate 
who,  on  being  asked  what  the  Rose  symbolized, 
replied  gravely,  "The  Heart  of  the  Maiden." 

THE  GREAT  PROBLEMS  OF  BRITISH  STATES- 
MANSHIP. By  J.  Ellis  Barker.  Dutton ;  $4. 
The  problems  of  British  statesmanship  which 
Mr.  Barker  considers  fall  into  two  general 
classes — foreign  and  domestic.  On  the  foreign 
side  he  discusses  questions  relating  to  Constan- 
tinople, Asiatic  Turkey,  Autria-Hungary,  Poland, 
and  an  "Anglo-American  reunion";  on  the 
domestic,  the  question  of  war  finance  as  related 
to  the  economic  future,  the  attainment  of  British 
industrial  supremacy,  and  the  reorganization  of 
government  on  the  lines  shown  by  the  present 
war  to  be  advantageous.  The  book's  title  is 
misleading.  Certain  problems  of  British  states- 
manship are  taken  up  at  some  length,  but  by  no 
means  all.  The  contents,  in  fact,  display  the 
heterogeneity  characteristic  of  books  made  up,  as 
the  present  one  is,  of  random  articles  published 
in  the  magazines.  All  of  Mr.  Barker's  chapters, 
however,  make  good  reading,  and  a  few  command 
thoughtful  attention.  Among  the  latter  are  two 
in  which  he  argues  that  the  present  war,  far  from 
impoverishing  Great  Britain,  may  greatly  enrich 
that  nation.  In  support  of  this  contention  he 
cites  the  experience  of  England  after  the  Na- 
poleonic wars,  and  of  the  United  States  after 
the  Civil  War.  He  finds  in  doubled  or  trebled 
taxation  a  powerful  stimulus  to  industrial  initia- 
tive and  to  the  development  of  latent  resources. 
He  estimates  British  manufacturing,  mining, 
transportaion,  and  agriculture  as  only  one  third 
as  productive  per  capita  prior  to  1914  as  Ameri- 
can. And  he  believes  that  the  war  will  force 
such  an  economic  reorganization,  largely  on 
American  lines,  as  will  bring  up  the  efficiency, 


and  hence  the  wealth-producing  power,  of  British 
industry,  trade,  and  agriculture  to  an  entirely 
new  level.  The  argument  is  interesting  and 
plausible,  although  the  effectiveness  of  it  is  les- 
sened by  assertions  that  are  palpably  extravagant. 
The  flat  statement,  for  example,  that  Great 
Britain  can  "treble  her  yearly  output,  her  yearly 
income,  and  her  national  wealth  by  Americaniz- 
ing her  industries"  is  absurd,  especially  when 
viewed  in  relation  to  the  enormous  depletion  of 
the  industrial  population  for  which  the  war  has 
already  been  responsible.  All  in  all,  however,  the 
author  has  established  his  point;  namely,  that 
however  great  the  economic  losses  suffered  since 
1914,  they  do  not  yet  even  approach  the  character 
of  an  irreparable  disaster. 

AMERICAN  PICTURES  AND  THEIR  PAINT- 
ERS. By  Lorinda  Munson  Bryant.  Lane;  $3. 
What  first  attracts  one  toward  Mrs.  Bryant's 
book  is  the  discrimination  manifested  in  the 
selection  of  the  illustrations,  which  form  a  series 
displaying  the  characteristic  phases  of  American 
painting  from  Colonial  times  to  the  present. 
These  examples  reveal  the  general  trend  and 
vigor  of  native  painting  in  oil.  Artists  differing 
widely  in  methods  and  aims  are  ranged  side  by 
side  in  amicable  historical  review.  Even  the 
much  despised  anecdotist  and  the  latest  of  the 
younger  radicals  are  not  denied  admission.  There 
is  much  biographical  detail  of  an  informing 
nature,  and  here  and  there  expositions  of  studio 
theory.  The  book  is  written,  however,  from  a 
popular  non-critical  point  of  view;  consequently 
there  is  little  or  no  discussion  of  the  various 
technical  methods  used  by  the  painters  in  obtain- 
ing their  effects.  Whether  intentionally  or  not, 
the  author  constantly  gives  the  impression  of  em- 
phasizing the  importance  of  subject  matter  in 
painting.  She  even  adds  a  rebellious  little  corol- 
lary to  one  of  Whistler's  pronouncements,  in 
which  he  glorifies  the  manner  at  the  expense  of 
the  matter.  One  sincerely  wishes  that  Mrs. 
Bryant  in  her  enthusiasm  for  nature,  both  inani- 
mate and  human,  had  focused  her  numerous 
descriptions  of  the  subject  matter  of  the  paintings. 
That  the  painter  has  chosen  to  paint  a  wintry 
landscape  under  certain  interesting  conditions  is 
surely  no  excuse  for  a  general  panegyric  on 
winter,  or  that  the  artist  has  selected  a  human 
being  or  several  human  beings  as  a  means  of 
expression  is  no  excuse  for  a  general  eulogy  of 
mankind.  In  the  family  circle  a  little  girl,  it  is 
true,  may  be  a  "darling,"  but  in  a  painting  that 
may  be  the  least  interesting  of  her  attributes.  If 
the  subject  is  a  man,  the  author  dilates  on  mascu- 
line character;  if  the  subject  is  a  woman,  and  a 
thin  one  at  that,  the  author  thinks  the  artist 
would  have  been  wiser  to  select  a  plumper  and 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


363 


rosier  model.  The  author  even  says  in  one  place 
that  each  brush  stroke  of  a  certain  artist  was  a 
"stroke  of  love."  Most  artists  will  confess  that 
their  own  brush  strokes  are  often  accompanied 
by  something  more  closely  resembling  profanity. 
Paint,  as  anyone  knows  who  has  worked  with  it, 
is  a  mulish  substance.  And,  furthermore,  our 
view  is  endorsed  by  famous  testimony,  for  we  all 
recall  that  historic  outcry  of  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds, 
"Damn  paint!"  Aside  from  these  minor  defects 
the  book  is  a  handj  and  valuable  compendium. 
It  contains  a  goodly  stock  of  information,  and 
one  is  readily  able,  by  means  of  it,  to  trace  the 
leading  tendencies  in  our  native  art. 

THE  NEW  GREEK  COMEDY.  By  Philippe  E. 
Legrand.  Translated  by  James  Loeb.  Put- 
nam's; $4.50. 

This  book,  which  in  the  original  French  is 
entitled  "Daos,"  has'  been  familiar  to  scholars 
since  1910  as  a  most  valuable  comprehensive 
study  of  Greek  New  Comedy.  Mr.  Loeb  has 
made  it  accessible  to  the  general  reader  in  some- 
what abridged  form,  and  there  is  a  brief  intro- 
duction by  that  brilliant  Hellenist,  the  late  John 
Williams  White.  Professor  Legrand  deals  with 
the  subject  in  the  competent  and  thorough  man- 
ner which  we  expect  of  the  French  critic;  he 
divides  his  work  into  three  main  sections,  which 
treat  of  the  subject  matter  of  New  Comedy,  the 
structure  of  the  plays,  and  their  purpose. 

Probably  the  most  interesting  pages  are  fur- 
nished by  the  sketch  of  the  dramatis  persona?  of 
New  Comedy,  of  the  strange  types  which  made 
up  the  stage  world  of  Menander  and  his  less 
famous  fellows,  and  which  were  so  meekly  bor- 
rowed by  Plautus  and  Terence.  Here  they  all 
are:  foreigners,  rustics,  sycophants  and  parasites, 
old  men  virtuous  or  lecherous — rich  or  poor, 
young  men  in  love,  courtesans  of  every  hue,  the 
pander  and  the  omnipresent  slave,  the  boasting 
soldier  and  the  misanthrope.  The  adventures 
of  such  characters  were  excellently  adapted  to 
amuse  the  Athenians,  now  that  the  Athenians 
could  no  longer  indulge  in  political  satire;  and 
the  career  of  New  Comedy  in  Rome,  and  on  the 
modern  stage  through  Moliere,  Goldoni,  Dryden, 
Shakespeare,  and  a  host  of  other  imitators,  is 
ample  proof  of  its  viability.  But  there  is  in  the 
original  comedies,  as  Legrand  points  out,  an 
undercurrent  of  piety  for  which  nothing  in  the 
modern  imitations  would  prepare  us;  we  find 
throughout  the  New  Comedy  a  tone  of  resigna- 
tion in  the  midst  of  the  fun,  and  a  belief  that  sal- 
vation is  an  individual  and  not  a  social  concern, 
which  serve  as  a  reminder  that  the  days  of  Chris- 
tianity were  coming.  Such  documents  are  too 
often  neglected  by  the  political  historian;  they 


should  serve  as  clues  to  the  general  conditions 
which  underlie  events.  In  this  sense  Legrand's 
book  is  a  contribution  to  history  as  well  as  to 
criticism. 

THE  STORY  OF  THE  SALONIKA  ARMY.    By 

G.  Ward  Price.    Clode ;  $2. 

Mr.  Price  deserved  a  better  sponsor  than  Lord 
Northcliffe,  for  he  has  written  a  really  admirable 
book,  entertaining  and  genuinely  informative. 
Liberal  readers  might  easily  be  frightened  away 
by  such  sweeping  statements  as  Lord  Northcliffe 
makes  in  his  encomiastic  introduction;  for  in- 
stance, that  "he  [Mr.  Price]  makes  clear  the 
chicanery  which  prevented  the  Greeks  from  fol- 
lowing their  natural  bent.  He  sweeps  aside,  once 
and  for  all,  the  hollow  pretense  of  Germany  that 
her  dastardly  action  in  Belgium  finds  a  parallel 
in  the  treatment  of  Greece  by  the  Allies."  This 
suggests  a  propaganda  book.  But  this  is  precisely 
the  kind  of  book  Mr.  Price  has  not  written.  He 
gives  comparatively  little  of  the  confused  diplo- 
matic background  which  both  preceded  and 
followed  the  landing  of  the  Allied  armies  at 
Salonika.  What  he  does  give  is  the  human  side 
of  the  difficulties  confronted  by  the  Allied  com- 
manders, the  human  side  of  the  struggle  on  the 
Macedonian  front,  and  the  humor  and  tragedy 
and  beauty  of  the  fighting  in  Albania  and  around 
Monastir.  For  example,  the  chapter  headed 
"Ourselves  and  the  Greeks:  Relations  at 
Salonika"  is  not  a  summing  up  of  the  evidence 
of  the  blue,  white,  red,  yellow,  and  black  books. 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  an  account  of  picturesque 
Salonika,  of  the  amusing  profiteering  at  "Floca's" 
(the  famous  restaurant  has  since  been  burned 
down),  of  the  adventures  of  the  Allied  military 
police  when  they  had  to  arrest  spies  in  the 
Turkish  quarter,  where  every  house  had  almost 
as  many  secret  doors  as  it  had  windows.  The 
congeries  of  races  at  Salonika  and  the  contrasts 
of  language,  costume,  and  manners  become  vivid 
and  intriguing  under  his  descriptions.  Yet  Mr. 
Price  does  not  wholly  neglect  the  larger  aspects 
of  the  whole  Balkan  situation.  He  gives  as  the 
final  justification  for  the  Macedonian  adventure 
not  so  much  the  desire  to  help  the  hard-pressed 
Serbians — although  that  generous  motive  had 
much  to  do  in  shaping  Allied  public  opinion  to 
assent — as  the  necessity  of  not  allowing  German 
prestige  to  have  it  all  its  own  way  in  the  Balkans. 
He  explains  the  natural  difficulties  of  terrain 
which  confronted  the  composite  Allied  armies. 
Yet  even  though  Mr.  Price  is  frank  to  admit 
that  the  expedition  really  came  weeks  too  late  to 
be  as  effective  as  it  ought  to  have  been,  from  his 
book  one  gets  the  final  impression  that  the  wonder 
is  not  that  the  Allies  have  done  so  little  in  Mace- 
donia, but  that  they  have  done  so  much. 


364 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


HORACE  WALPOLE'S  EPIGRAM  TO  THE  EFFECT 
that  life  is  a  tragedy  to  the  man  who  feels  and 
a  comedy  to  the  man  who  thinks,  contains  a  sug- 
gestion for  educators.  Bertrand  Russell,  who 
•  derives  as  much  aesthetic  satisfaction  from  the 
contemplation  of  a  logical  sequence  in  higher 
mathematics  as  a  classicist  from  the  niceties  of 
Attic  prose,  defines  the  scientific  outlook  as  the 
refusal  to  regard  our  own  desires,  tastes,  and 
interests  as  affording  any  key  to  the  under- 
standing of  the  world.  Yet  what  is  the.  final 
objection  brought  against  the  modernist  by  the 
defenders  of  Greek  and  Latin  in  our  schools,  if  it 
is  not  that  the  new  education  develops  a  cheap 
utilitarian  outlook  in  the  student?  In  brief,  the 
quarrels  in  the  field  of  education  seem  to  the 
outsider  to  make  use  of  subjects  only  as  an 
occasion  for  condemning  methods.  It  is  not 
science  in  itself  that  the  classicist  really  objects 
to,  any  more  than  it  is  pages  of  conjugations  of 
verbs  which  really  arouse  the  ire  of  the  modern- 
ist. It  is  the  fear  that  the  opposing  school  of 
pedagogy  has  not  the  power  to  evoke  in  the 
student  that  certain  impersonality  of  outlook, 
that  objectivity,  which  all  appear  to  agree  is  a 
man's  most  precious  cultural  possession.  It  is 
fear,  in  a  word,  that  the  other  fellow  does  not 
know  how  to  coax  from  youngsters  the  desire 
to  think.  For  although  we  are  long  since  too 
sophisticated  to  accept  Horace  Walpole's  naive 
distinction  between  thought  and  feeling,  the 
direction  and  emphasis  of  his  idea  finds  us  recep- 
tive. There  is  no  quarrel  with  the  contention 
that  the  life  of  reason  has  a  humor,  charm,  and 
passion  beside  which  the  satisfactions  of  a  life 
dominated  bv  desire  are  as  evanescent  as  steam. 


MR.  DURANT'S  PROVOCATIVE  LETTER  TO  THE 
DIAL  (printed  on  another  page)  brings  sharply 
to  attention  a  tragic,  although  neglected,  truth: 
that  while  American  newspapers  and  magazines 
and  official  spokesmen  for  public  opinion  are 
unanimous  in  their  support  of  the  United  States's 
war  policy,  in  his  advocacy  of  a  liberal  inter- 
national programme,  of  which  this  war  policy  is 
the  deliberate  and  conscious  expression,  President 
Wilson  stands  practically  alone.  The  irony  of 
this  is  that  already  President  Wilson  has  the 
support  of  the  most  powerful  force  in  British 
politics,  the  British  Labor  Party;  that  he  has  the 
support  of  the  common  people  of  France  and 
Italy;  and  that  even  in  Russia  the  earlier  sus- 
picions are  vanishing  before  his  courageous 
insistence — emphasized  again  in  his  Baltimore 
speech — that  as  far  as  America  is  concerned  an 
imperialistic  peace  which  sacrifices  the  fruits  of 


the  Russian  Revolution  will  not  be  tolerated. 
Yet  with  these  clear  evidences  of  a  growing 
world  leadership,  President  Wilson's  liberal  inter- 
national policy,  instead  of  being  warmly  sup- 
ported in  his  own  country  where  he  might  most 
hopefully  look  for  support,  is  the  object  of  covert 
hostility.  The  very  journals  which  give  voluble 
lip  service  to  President  Wilson  and  enthusiasti- 
cally welcome  any  increase  of  our  military 
strength,  often  slyly  insinuate  that  the  ideals  for 
which  all  our  sacrifices  are  freely  given  are  really 
Utopian  ideals.  In  brief,  far  too  many  of  our 
newspapers  seem  glad  of  the  chance  to  "stand 
behind  the  President"  just  as  long  as  it  gives  them 
opportunity  to  pull  their  own  militaristic  chest- 
nuts out  of  the  fire.  When  it  comes  to  a  genuine 
world  democracy  they  are  skeptical.  A  year  of 
war  has  revealed  their  motives  all  too  clearly: 
they  care  nothing  about  a  more  decent  inter- 
national system;  they  carp  only  about  making 
America  a  strong  military  nation. 

BUT     WHY     UNDER     THESE     CIRCUMSTANCES 

should  American  liberals  have  been  so  slow  in 
coming  to  the  enthusiastic  support  of  President 
Wilson's  international  programme?  Why,  indeed, 
are  they  still  unorganized  and  ineffective?  Be- 
cause a  year  ago  the  liberals  suspected — not 
President  Wilson  or  his  intentions — but  precisely 
those  reactionary  forces  which  today  stand  so 
shamelessly  revealed.  There  was  legitimate  sus- 
picion of  those  who  urged  the  country  to  "stand 
behind  the  President"  when  the  very  people  who 
urged  this  loudest  had  never  lifted  a  finger  to 
further  democracy  at  home.  What  liberals  ob- 
jected to  was  not  the  employment  of  military 
force — for  the  words  pacifist  and  liberal  are  not 
synonymous — but  to  the  purpose  for  which  that 
force  was  seemingly  to  be  used.  It  appeared 
that,  in  spite  of  all  President  Wilson  might  be 
able  to  do,  the  war  would  result  merely  in  a 
new  imperialistic  balance  of  power.  Certainly 
those  who  were  most  ruthless  in  condemning  the 
skeptical  for  their  "lack  of  patriotism"  did  every- 
thing they  could  to  increase  that  skepticism.  But 
there  is  no  longer  any  real  justification  for  doubt. 
In  the  last  year  President  Wilson  has  revealed, 
not  once  but  again  and  again,  that  he  really 
means  what  he  says,  that  he  purposes  to  fight 
for  a  new  international  system  based  on  justice 
and  fair  dealing.  He  is  gathering  to  his  support 
all  the  democratic  forces  of  the  world.  Liberals 
in  America  cannot  afford  to  continue  any  longer 
in  their  present  state  of  disorganization.  They 
must  present  a  united  front.  They  must  actively 
and  whole-heartedly  support  the  President  in  his 
war  programme,  if  they  expect  to  have  the  right 
to  speak  concerning  his  idealistic  programme. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


365 


As  Mr.  Durant  has  truly  said,  "they  have  noth- 
ing to  lose  but  their  isolation."  Certainly  those 
who  never  objected  to  the  use  of  military  force 
for  righteous  ends  have  now,  after  Brest-Litovsk, 
less  cause  than  ever  before  to  question  its  em- 
ployment. The  German  militarists  understand 
no  argument  except  force,  and  until  they  are 
defeated  or  until  they  are  thrown  from  power 
by  a  revolution,  there  can  be  no  clean  peace.  It 
is  obvious  that  the  very  ideals  of  President  Wil- 
son, which  look  forward  to  making  war  impos- 
sible, cannot  be  realized  without  active  support 
of  his  present  war  programme.  THE  DIAL,  for 
its  part,  has  never  faltered  from  active  and 
whole-hearted  support  of  the  President  in  his  war 
programme.  But  it  has  also,  as  a  liberal  journal, 
gladly  supported  the  President's  attempts  to 
create  a  more  tolerable  system  of  international 
relations  than  existed  in  July,  1914,  even  when 
such  support  has  been  maliciously  or  stupidly 
misconstrued.  And  as  a  liberal  journal,  it  will 
continue  that  support  in  the  future.  There  is  no 
longer  in  America  any  question  of  active  loyalty 
to  the  President's  war  programme,  except  among 
the  handful  of  the  embittered  extremists  or  the 
really  treacherous.  There  is  serious  question, 
however,  of  active  loyalty  to  the  President's  inter- 
national programme  which  he  hopes  to  make 
effective  as  a  result  of  this  war.  In  this  newer 
and  more  significant  sense,  in  this  unwavering 
support  of  the  ideals  and  plans  which  alone, 
according  to  President  Wilson  himself,  give  the 
war  meaning,  THE  DIAL  proudly  takes  its  place 
with  those  few  journals  which  sincerely  and 
honestly  "stand  behind  the  President." 


DEATH  DID  NOT  COME  TO  DEBUSSY  UNEX- 
pectedly.  He  had  long  known  that  he  was 
incurably  ill  with  cancer  and  that  his  tenure  of 
life  was  short ;  calmly  enough,  he  had  even  spoken 
about  it  to  his  friends.  Nor  can  we  say  that  death 
interrupted  his  work  and  deprived  us  of  some 
development  of  his  art  that  we  might  hopefully 
have  anticipated.  Doubtless  the  operas  his  pub- 
lishers have  been  vaguely  announcing  season  after 
season — "La  Legende  de  Tristan"  and  the  others 
— will  now  of  necessity  remain  sketches.  Yet  had 
Debussy  lived  another  quarter-century,  it  is  prob- 
able they  would  have  remained  sketches  still. 
Indeed,  had  he  actually  completed  them,  it  is 
likely  that  they  would  have  refined  very  little 
upon  the  quality  of  his  art.  For  he  had  long  since 
reached  the  climax  of  his  powers.  His  more 
recent  compositions — such  as  the  piano  preludes, 
the  music  to  d'Annunzio's  "Le  Martyre  de  Saint 
Sebastien,"  the  "Images"  for  orchestra — diaphan- 
ous, exquisitely  fashioned  works  though  they  are, 
add  no  cubit  to  his  artistic  stature.  They  reveal 


him  as  a  little  less  persuasive  than  in  his  earlier 
works.  For  all  their  fluidity  and  iridescence 
they  lack  the  warmth  and  passion  and  tenderness 
that  inform  so  beautifully  the  "Quartet,"  the 
"Nocturnes,"  and  "Pelleas."  During  the  last 
few  years,  in  fact,  Debussy's  style  became  com- 
paratively rigid.  The  poet  in  him,  the  blind  im- 
passioned being  moved  by  a  dark  inner  need,  had 
gradually  given  way  to  the  critic,  the  man  bril- 
liantly conscious  of  all  that  he  intends.  And 
toward  the  close  of  his  life  he  might  have  said, 
with  Rameau  his  master,  "My  taste  becomes 
purer  from  day  to  day,  but  my  genius  has  van- 
ished." 

IN   WHAT  DEGREE   IS  OUR   PRESS   RESPONSIBLE 

for  that  dismal  uniformity  in  American  life 
which  James  Bryce  discussed  in  a  famous  chap- 
ter? The  other  day  an  influential  paper  said 
editorially  of  a  local  non-conformist: 

It  is  not  disclosed  that  he  had  anything  to  gain  by 
expressing  himself.  His  egotism  seems  to  have  sug- 
gested to  him  that  he  was  alone  in  an  arcanum  of 
intelligence  and  that  he  ought  to  emerge  from  the 
mysteries  of  his  intellect  and  set  the  poor  boobs  right 
who  were  being  used  by  Capitalism  with  a  capital  C. 
When  egotism  suggests  such  isolation  to  the  possessor 
of  an  intellect  and  starts  him  on  such  a  mission  he 
becomes  an  awful  thing. 

Taste  aside,  this  is  a  curiously  frank  amendment 
of  the  theory  underlying  American  freedom  of 
conscience,  of  thought,  and  of  speech.  The  the- 
ory is  that  if  you  will  bring  your  ideas  to  the 
open  court  of  public  opinion,  it  will  circulate 
their  truths  and  let  fall  their  errors.  The 
amendment  is:  make  certain  that  your  ideas  con- 
form before  you  bring  them  in  (unless  you  have 
"something  to  gain  by  expressing"  yourself). 
Now  a  court  differs  from  a  mob  chiefly  in  its 
willingness  to  entertain  and  discriminate  conflict- 
ing ideas.  The  effect  of  the  amendment  is  to 
turn  the  court  of  public  opinion  into  a  mob  which 
will  insist  upon  conformity  or  silence.  That  way 
lies  something  even  more  sinister  than  a  stagnant 
uniformity — the  spirit  which  seeks  to  compel 
agreement  by  enforcing  the  gestures  of  agree- 
ment. To  this  futile  and  embittering  intolerance 
we  are  already  subject  enough.  The  average  man 
has  outgrown  the  notion  that  you  can  save  people 
by  herding  them  into  churches;  it  is  his  own 
aphorism  that  you  cannot  make  men  good  by  law ; 
but  daily  now  we  hear  of  his  attempts  to  make 
men  (and  latterly  women  as  well)  "loyal"  by 
forcing  them  to  kiss  the  flag,  on  penalty  of  a  duck- 
ing or  worse.  Loyalty,  of  course,  is  our  national 
desire;  but  the  mob  spirit,  encouraged  by  the 
emphasis  our  press  puts  upon  superficial  conform- 
ity, defeats  the  reality  of  loyalty  by  exacting  its 
shadow. 


366 


THE    DIAL 


[April  1 1 


COMMTTXICATIOX 


AMERICAN  LIBERALS  AND  THE  WAR 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL) 

This  is  a  changing  war.  A  year  ago  most  of  us 
saw  it  as  a  rather  interesting  contest  between  two 
imperialistic  systems  for  the  exclusive  domination  of 
the  world;  today  we  begin  to  see  it  as  a  vast  and 
vital  struggle  between  reactionary  forces  and  pro- 
gressive forces  everywhere  to  determine  whether 
any  imperialistic  system  is  to  survive  at  all.  What 
is  it  that  has  so  changed  the  focus  and  meaning  of 
the  war? 

Two  factors  chiefly:  first,  American  participation, 
under  the  guidance  of  a  President  whose  intelligence 
compels  him  to  liberalism;  second,  the  growth,  in 
every  European  country,  of  liberal  forces  standing 
on  the  power  of  labor  to  control  production  and 
morale,  and  strengthened  by  the  indispensable  sup- 
port of  the  American  government. 

When,  a  year  ago,  President  Wilson  professed 
himself  more  interested  in  the  democratic  pacifica- 
tion of  the  world  than  in  the  development  of  that 
baby  imperialism  which  flaunts  the  flag  in  Wall 
Street,  a  considerable  proportion  of  the  liberals  of 
this  country  immured  themselves  in  skeptical  isola- 
tion and  suspense.  But  the  last  year  has  brought 
them  comfort,  and  brought  them,  too,  a  problem; 
for  by  all  the  tokens  of  American  diplomacy  the 
President  has  meant  that  the  splendid  phrase  which 
he  coined  about  democracy  should  be  taken  at  its 
face  value,  as  the  reliable  issue  of  a  government 
prepared  to  sustain  that  value  with  all  the  resources 
at  its  command.  He  has  repeatedly  thrown  the 
weight  of  his  prestige  upon  the  side  of  the  liberal 
parties  in  Europe,  and  has  formulated  the  pro- 
grammes which  these  parties  have  been  glad  to 
second  and  sustain;  he  has  propounded  terms  of 
conciliation  so  obviously  reasonable  that  no  group 
in  any  country  has  dared  to  take  open  issue  with 
them;  he  has  announced  himself  as  unequivocally 
opposed  to  the  use  of  military  force  in  the  establish- 
ment of  trade-routes  or  spheres  of  economic  influ- 
ence; he  has  supported  radical  forces  everywhere 
so  far  as  they  did  not  impede  the  effective  participa- 
tion of  America  in  the  production  of  a  warless 
world;  he  has  taken  labor  into  his  counsels  with  a 
quite  unprecedented  fullness  and  candor,  and  has 
definitely  aligned  himself  against  that  industrial  au- 
tocracy which  threatens  to  make  American  democ- 
racy a  sham. 

And  with  what  result?  This,  that  the  word  has 
gone  forth  from  all  the  Vaticans  of  privilege  in 
America  to  the  purchasable  press  that  the  position 
of  the  President  in  international  diplomacy  must 
be  undermined  and  his  high  reputation  at  home  bit 
by  bit  destroyed. 

Already  the  printed  prostitutes  of  every  city  pro- 
claim that  the  President  has  failed:  that  he  has 
bungled  the  work  of  preparation;  that  he  has  not 
succeeded  in  stirring  up  revolution  in  Germany 
and  Austria,  or  in  guiding  it  in  Russia;  and  that 


his  outrageously  open  diplomacy  has  brought  dis- 
union into  the  aims  of  the  Allies.  It  is  forgotten 
now  (the  victims  of  American  journalism  are 
mostly  those  who  are  adepts  in  forgetting)  that 
the  transportation  of  men  and  munitions  depends 
on  the  building  of  ships,  this  on  the  spirited  co- 
operation of  the  workers,  and  this  on  the  intelligent 
decency  of  employers  (a  decency  that  is  decreasing 
under  cover  of  a  war  that  shunts  publicity  from 
domestic  affairs)  ;  it  is  forgotten  that  revolution 
failed  in  the  Central  Empires,  and  sank  into  innocu- 
ous isolation  in  Russia,  because  of  the  refusal  of 
certain  imperialistic  forces  to  cooperate  in  a  plan 
which  required  more  liberalism  of  aim,  and  threat- 
ened more  progress  towards  industrial  reconstruc- 
tion, than  these  forces  could  digest;  it  is  forgotten 
that  unity  never  existed  in  the  war  aims  of  the 
Allies,  and  can  be  secured  only  through  the  tran- 
sient disunion  necessarily  incident  to  the  demand  for 
a  democratic  revision.  All  this  must  be  forgotten 
now;  for  if  it  is  remembered  and  understood,  not 
all  the  printer's  ink  in  America  can  blacken  the 
President  or  make  the  world  safe  for  autocracy. 

Surely  this  situation  points  a  problem  for  Ameri- 
can liberals,  and  offers  them  their  chance.  What 
are  liberals  to  do?  To  wait  for  certainty  is  to 
court  futility;  to  stand  idly  by  is  to  lose  the  oppor- 
tunity of  cooperating  with  the  liberals  of  Europe 
in  their  uphill  effort  towards  a  democratic  peace 
and  the  gradual  demilitarization  of  the  western 
world.  Now  is  the  time  to  wrest  a  strategical 
point  from  the  forces  of  reaction — to  divert  patriot- 
ism from  unwitting  subservience  to  clever  conserv- 
atism into  such  support  of  the  President  as  will 
not  only  strengthen  him  against  imperialistic  attack, 
but  will  at  the  same  time  considerably  enhance  the 
power  and  prestige  of  liberal  ideas. 

This  may  involve  some  mental  reservation,  to  be 
sure;  but  participation  in  the  compromising  flux  of 
events  is  the  necessary  price  to  be  paid  for  partici- 
pation in  the  direction  and  determination  of  events. 
The  policy  of  a  government  is  always  in  the  end 
determined  by  the  source  from  which  it  derives  its 
strongest  support;  if  liberal  support  is  not  forth- 
coming fully,  the  President  will  have  to  lean  more 
upon  the  help,  and  towards  the  aims,  of  those  forces 
that  have  ruled  the  past  and  have  still  a  heavy 
hand  upon  the  future.  Clearly  the  strategy  of 
liberalism  in  the  present  conjuncture  of  events  is  to 
throw  whatever  influence  it  commands  upon  the 
side  of  President  Wilson,  offering  him  full  support 
both  in  the  prosecution  of  the  war  against  feudalism 
at  home  and  imperialism  abroad,  and  also  in  the 
pursuit  of  the  resolute  purpose  to  write  gradual 
disarmament  and  compulsory  international  arbitra- 
tion into  the  terms  of  peace. 

Let  the  liberals  of  America  unite.  They  have  a 
political  leadership  to  gain  under  which  perhaps  our 
total  economic  structure  may  be  rebuilt.  And  they 
have  nothing  to  lose  but  their  seclusion. 


New  'York  City. 


WILL  DURANT. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


367 


NOTES  AND 


THE  DIAL  announces  with  regret  the  resignation 
of  William  Aspenwall  Bradley  as  Contributing 
Editor.  Our  regret  is,  however,  tempered  by  the 
fact  that  Mr.  Bradley's  resignation  is  not  the  result 
of  any  decrease  in  interest.  He  has  accepted  a 
commission  in  the  Sanitary  Corps  of  the  United 
States  Army,  and  for  some  time  to  come  other 
than  literary  or  journalistic  duties  will  fully  en- 
gage him.  THE  DIAL  wishes  Mr.  Bradley  good 
fortune  in  his  present  task. 

With  this  issue  of  THE  DIAL,  Robert  Dell  as- 
sumes the  duties  of  Contributing  Editor.  Mr.  Dell 
has  long  been  a  Paris  correspondent  for  English 
newspapers,  particularly  for  the  "Manchester 
Guardian,"  and  for  many  weeks  past  has  been 
THE  DIAL'S  special  correspondent  on  literary  and 
political  affairs  in  France.  He  has  always  tried  to 
foster  and  make  more  friendly  and  secure  Anglo- 
French  and  Franco-American  relations,  for — as  he 
explains  in  his  letter  in  this  issue — he  believes  that 
it  is  through  France  that  America  can  best  get  in 
touch  with  Europe. 

Helen  Marot,  who  discusses  industrial  educa- 
tion in  this  issue,  was  a  member  of  the  Committee 
on  Industrial  Relations  and  was  for  seven  years 
Secretary  of  the  New  York  Woman's  Trade 
Union  League.  She  is  the  author  of  a  book  en- 
titled "American  Labor  Unions"  and  of  several 
magazine  articles  dealing  with  industry  and  educa- 
tion. 

Helen  Hoyt,  a  former  resident  of  Chicago,  now 
lives  in  Appleton,  Wisconsin.  Many  of  her  poems 
have  appeared  in  "The  Century,"  "The  Poetry 
Journal,"  "Poetry,"  "The  Independent,"  and  other 
magazines. 


D.  Appleton  &  Co.  have  announced  the  fifteenth 
edition  of  Dr.  G.  Stanley  Hall's  "Adolescence." 

The  John  Lane  Co.  are  publishing  "Just  Behind 
the  Front  in  France,"  by  Noble  Foster  Hoggson. 

The  Century  Co.  announces  for  early  issue  "Run- 
away Russia,"  by  Florence  Harper. 

Ambassador  Gerard's  book  "My  Four  Years  in 
Germany"  (George  H.  Dor  an  Co.)  has  been  filmed. 
It  was  shown  in  New  York  last  month. 

D.  C.  Heath  &  Co.  are  the  publishers  of  an  illus- 
trated book  of  dialogues  in  everyday  French,  with 
vocabularies,  "At  West  Point,"  by  Maj.  C.  F.  Mar- 
tin and  Maj.  G.  M.  Russell. 

Small,  Maynard  &  Co.  announce  "Merry  An- 
drew," by  F.  Roney  Weir,  a  novel,  and  for  April 
20  "Shellproof  Mack:  An  American's  Fighting 
Story,"  by  Arthur  Mack. 

The  third  volume  in  Professor  Wilfred  P.  Mus- 
tard's studies  in  the  Renaissance  pastoral,  the 
"Eclogues"  of  Faustus  Andrelinus  and  Joannes 
Arnolletus,  has  been  issued  by  the  Johns  Hopkins 
Press. 

The  "Columbia  Alumni  News"  reports  that  dur- 
ing 1917  Columbia  graduates  published  326  works, 
representing  300  authors,  the  titles  ranging  from 
"Half  Hours  with  the  Idiot"  to  "New  York  as  an 
Eighteenth  Century  Municipality." 


The  University  of  Chicago  Press  has  lately  put 
out  an  illustrated  report  of  the  Quarter-Centen- 
nial Celebration  of  the  University,  by  David  Allan 
Robertson.  Photographs,  speeches,  academic  rec- 
ords, and  so  on  are  included  in  this  commemorative 
volume  of  the  1916  festival. 

Dr.  William  Miller  Collier,  who  succeeds  Rear 
Admiral  Charles  H.  Stockton  as  President  of 
George  Washington  University,  in  Washington, 
D.  C.,  is  the  author  of  "Bankruptcy"  and  "Civil 
Service  Law"  (Matthew  Bender  &  Co.),  as  well 
as  of  several  non-legal  volumes. 

March  29  Robert  M.  McBride  &  Co.  published: 
"Nothing  of  Importance,"  by  Bernard  Adams,  an 
account  of  life  in  a  quiet  sector;  "Captain  Gault," 
by  William  Hope  Hodgson;  "Everyday  Law,"  by 
F.  H.  Bacon,  a  popular  guide  to  law  for  the  busi- 
ness man;  and  a  "wartime"  edition  of  G.  I.  Far- 
rington's  "Home  Poultry  Book." 

As  American  agents  for  the  Cambridge  University 
Press  the  Putnams  anounce:  "Social  Life  in 
Britain  from  the  Conquest  to  the  Reformation," 
compiled  by  G.  G.  Coulton;  "Grace  and  Person- 
ality," by  John  Omar;  "The  Book  of  the  Prophet 
Isaiah,  Chapters  XL-LXVI,"  in  the  Revised  Ver- 
sion, with  introduction  and  notes  by  Rev.  J.  Skinner; 
and  "The  Historical  Register  of  the  University  of 
Cambridge,"  a  supplement  to  the  Calendar  down  to 
1910,  edited  by  J.  R.  Tanner. 

Two  series  published  by  the  Page  Co.  are  de- 
signed for  supplementary  reading  in  schools:  "The 
Little  Cousin  Series"  and  "The  Little  Cousins  of 
Long  Ago  Series."  The  former  now  comprises 
fifty  volumes,  of  which  the  latest  is  "Our  Little 
Roumanian  Cousin."  "Our  Little  Frankish  Cousin 
of  Long  Ago,"  by  Evaleen  Stein,  has  recently  been 
added  to  the  latter  series,  and  "Our  Little 
Pompeiian  Cousin  of  Long  Ago"  is  in  preparation. 
Both  series  are  illustrated. 

Among  the  April  Houghton  Mifflin  issues  is  a 
printing  of  John  Pory's  letter  to  Lord  Southampton 
describing  the  Plymouth  colony,  which  he  visited  in 
1622.  The  letter  is  from  a  manuscript  in  the  John 
Carter  Brown  Library  in  Providence.  Unpublished 
contemporary  accounts  of  English  colonization  in 
New  England  and  the  Bermudas  have  been  added 
to  it,  and  the  whole  has  been  edited  by  Champlin 
Burrage,  former  librarian  of  the  John  Carter 
Brown  Library.  The  edition,  which  contains  maps 
and  facsimiles,  is  limited  to  365  copies. 

Among  the  recent  Dutton  books  is  "Shakespeare 
and  Chapman,"  by  T.  M.  Robertson,  who  dis- 
cusses the  latter's  contributions  to  some  of  the 
composite  Shakespearean  plays;  "The  Language 
Student's  Manual,"  by  William  R.  Patterson,  an 
exposition  of  fundamental  similarities  and  differences 
between  several  languages;  and  "The  Problem  of 
the  Soul:  A  Tract  for  Teachers,"  by  Edmond 
Holmes,  an  attempt  to  determine  what  limits  there 
are  to  the  transforming  influence  of  education.  "The 
Book  of  Municipal  House  Cleaning,"  by  William 
P.  Capes,  Director  of  the  Bureau  of  Municipal 
Information  at  Albany,  assisted  by  Mrs.  Jean  Car- 
penter, is  announced  as  forthcoming. 


368 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


Selective  Spring  Educational  List 

The  following  is  a  selected  list  of  the  more 
important  spring  issues  and  announcements  of 
educational  books,  volumes  dealing  with  woman 
and  the  home,  and  works  of  reference.  With  a 
few  exceptions,  new  editions,  reprints  of  standard 
literature,  and  juvenile  books  not  primarily  in- 
structive have  been  omitted.  Military  treatises 
and  other  books  of  first  interest  to  men  in 
uniform  are  included  under  "Handbooks  and 
Manuals";  medical  works  are  included  under 
"Reference."  The  list  has  been  compiled  from 
data  submitted  by  the  publishers. 


EDUCATION 

The  Prussian  Elementary  Schools,  by  Thomas  Alex- 
ander.— Supervised  Study,  by  Mabel  Simpson,  edited 
by  Alfred  Hall-Quest. — Schools  with  a  Perfect 
Score:  A  Method  of  Making  Democracy  Safe,  by 
George  W.  Gerwig. — The  Melodic  Method  in 
School  Music,  by  David  C.  Taylor. — Modern  Eu- 
ropean Civilization,  by  Roscoe  Lewis  Ashley. — 
The  Development  of  Japan,  by  Kenneth  Scott 
Latourette. — Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Science,  by 
Wayne  P.  Smith  and  Edmund  Gale  Jewett. — Prin- 
ciples of  Chemistry,  by  Joel  H.  Hildebrand. — Plane 
and  Spherical  Trigonometry,  by  Leonard  M. 
Passano. — Merchandising,  by  Archer  Wall  Douglas. 
— Yarn  and  Cloth-Making,  by  Mary  L.  Kissell. — 
Effective  Farming,  by  H.  O.  Sampson. — Butter,  by 
E.  S.  Guthrie  —  The  Book  of  Cheese,  by  Charles 
Thorn. — Good  English,  by  Henry  S.  Canby  and 
John  B.  Opdycke. — A  Foundation  Course  in  Spanish, 
by  Leon  Sinagnan. — Personal  Efficiency,  by  Robert 
Grimshaw,  $1.50.  (The  Macmillan  Co.) 

The  Problem  of  the  Soul :  A  Tract  for  Teachers,  by 
Edmond  G.  A.  Holmes,  $1. — Language  Students' 
Manual,  by  William  R.  Patterson. — First  Steps  in 
Russian,  by  J.  Solomonoff,  illus.,  $1. — Russian  Verbs 
Made  Easy,  by  Stephen  J.  Lett,  $1. — Russian 
Proverbs  and  Their  English  Equivalents,  by  Louis 
Segal,  50  cts. — A  School  Grammar  of  Modern 
French,  by  G.  H.  Clarke  and  J.  Murray,  $1.50.— A 
French  Primer,  by  W.  E.  M.  Llewellyn,  edited  by 
Walter  Ripman,  35  cts. — La  France:  French  Life 
and  Ways,  by  G.  Guibillon,  edited  by  Walter  Rip- 
man, illus.,  $1. — A  Rapid  French  Course,  by 
Randall  Williams  and  Walter  Ripman,  90  cts.— 
Hints  on  Teaching  German,  by  Walter  Ripman, 
50  cts. — New  First  German  Book,  by  Walter  Rip- 
man, 80  cts. — Twenty-Two  Goblins,  translated 
from  the  Sanskrit,  by  Arthur  W.  Ryder,  $3.  (E. 
P.  Dutton  &  Co.) 

The  Undergraduate  and  His  College,  by  Frederick  P. 
Keppel,  $1.60. — Higher  Education  and  Business 
Standards,  by  Willard  E.  Hotchkiss,  $1. — Principles 
of  Secondary  Education,  by  Alexander  Inglis,  $2.75. 
— Healthful  Schools:  How  to  Build,  Equip  and 
Maintain  Them,  by  May  Ayres,  Jesse  F.  Williams, 
and  Thomas  D.  Wood. — History  in  the  Elementary 
Grades,  by  Calvin  Noyes  Kendall  and  Florence 
Stryker,  75  cts. — The  Use  of  the  Kindergarten 
Gifts,  by  Grace  Fulmer,  $1.30. — Modern  and  Con- 
temporary European  History,  by  J.  Salwyn  Schapiro. 
— Greek  Leaders,  by  Leslie  White  Hopkinson,  intro- 
duction by  William  Scott  Ferguson. — Speech  Defects 
in  School  Children  and  How  to  Treat  Them,  by 
Walter  B.  Swift,  75  cts.  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.) 


Fifty  Years  of  American  Education,  by  Ernest  Carroll 
Moore,  80  cts. — Our  Schools  in  War  Time — and 
After,  by  Arthur  D.  Dean,  illus.,  $1.25.— School  Effi- 
ciency: A  Manual  of  Modern  School  Management, 
by  Henry  Eastman  Bennett,  illus.,  $1.25.— Begin- 
nings of  Modern  Europe,  by  Ephraim  Emerton, 
maps,  $1.80. — -Methods  and  Materials  of  Literary 
Criticism:  Lyric,  Epic,  and  Allied  Forms  of  Poetry, 
by  Charles  Mills  Gayley  and  Benjamin  O.  Kurtz. — 
A  Concise  English  Grammar,  by  George  Lyman 
Kittredge  and  Frank  Edgar  Farley. — Espana  Pinto- 
resca,  by  Carolina  Marcial  Dorado,  illus.,  96  cts. 
(Ginn  &  Co.) 

The  Cambridge  History  of  American  Literature, 
edited  by  William  Peterfield  Trent,  John  Erskine, 
Stuart  Pratt  Sherman,  and  Carl  Van  Doren,  3  vols., 
$3.50  per  vol. — The  Loeb  Classical  Library,  edited 
by  E.  Capps,  T.  E.  Page,  and  W.  H.  D.  Rouse: 
Greek  Anthology,  Vol.  Ill;  Plautus,  Vol.  II.;  Plu- 
tarch, Vol.  V;  Dio's  Roman  History,  Vol.  VI,  $1.50 
per  vol. — A  Manual  of  Qualitative  Chemical 
Analysis,  by  Joshua  R.  Morton,  $1.25.  (G.  P.  Put- 
nam's Sons.) 

Source  Problems  in  American  History,  by  Andrew  C. 
McLaughlin,  $1.50. — One  Hundred  Masterpieces  of 
Music,  by  Romaine  Collender,  illustrated  by  refer- 
ences to  music  rolls,  $1.30. — From  Appomattox  to 
Germany,  by  Percy  Keese  Fitzhugh,  illus.,  $2. — 
Strange  Stories  of  the  Great  River,  by  Johnston 
Grosvenor,  illus.,  $1.— The  Bubble  Book,  by  Ralph 
Mayhew  and  Burges  Johnson,  with  phonograph 
records,  illus.,  $1.  (Harper  &  Brothers.) 

A  Manual  of  the  Art  of  Fiction,  by  Clayton  Hamilton, 
introduction  by  Brander  Matthews,  $1.50. — Educa- 
tion for  Life:  The  Story  of  Hampton  Institute,  by 
Francis  G.  Peabody,  illus.,  $1.50. — The  Ransom  of 
Red  Chief,  and  Other  O.  Henry  Stories  for  Boys, 
selected  by  F.  K.  Mathiews,  illus.,  $1.35—  Chil- 
dren's Second  Book  of  Patriotic  Stories:  Spirit  of 
'61,  by  Asa  Don  Dickinson  and  Helen  Winslow 
Dickinson,  illus.,  $1.25.  (Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.) 

The  Early  English  Customs  System,  by  Norman  Scott 
Brien  Gras,  $3.50. — The  State  Tax  Commission,  by 
Harley  Leist  Lutz,  $2.75. — Trade  and  Navigation 
between  Spain  and  the  Indies  in  the  Time  of  the 
Hapsburgs,  by  Clarence  Henry  Haring,  $2.25. — The 
Position  of  Foreign  Corporations  in  American  Con- 
stitutional Law,  by  Gerard  Carl  Henderson. — Eng- 
lish Pageantry:  An  Historical  Outline,  by  Robert 
Withingt6n,  illus. — Harvard  Studies  in  Classical 
Philology,  Vol.  XXIX:  Joseph  Scaliger's  Estimate 
of  Greek  and  Latin  Authors,  by  George  Washing- 
ton Robinson ;  Imperial  Coronation  Ceremonies,  by 
Arthur  Edward  Romilly  Boak;  Plato's  View  of 
Poetry,  by  William  Chase  Greene,  boards,  $1.50. — 
The  Gospel  Manuscripts  of  the  General  Theological 
Seminary,  by  Charles  Carroll  Edmunds  and  William 
Henry  Paine  Hatch.  (Harvard  University  Press.) 
The  Quarter-Centennial  Celebration  of  the  University 
of  Chicago,  1916,  by  David  A.  Robertson,  illus., 
$1.50. — Scientific  Method  in  the  Reconstruction  of 
Ninth  Grade  Mathematics,  by  Harold  O.  Rugg, 
paper,  $1. — The  Dramatization  of  Bible  Stories,  by 
Elizabeth  E.  Miller,  $1.— The  Greek  Theater  and 
Its  Drama,  by  Roy  C.  Flickinger,  $3.— The  Third 
and  Fourth  Generation:  An  Introduction  to 
Heredity,  by  Elliot  R.  Downing,  illus.,  $1.50.— Photo- 
graphic Investigations  of  Faint  Nebulas,  by  Edwin 
P.  Hubble,  $1.  (University  of  Chicago  Press.) 
A  Russian  Grammar,  by  John  Dyneley  Prince,  $2.25. — 
The  Yemenite  Manuscript  of  Pesahim  in  the  Library 
of  Columbia  University,  by  Julius  J.  Price,  $2. — 
French  Terminologies  in  the  Making,  by  Harvey  ]. 
Swann,  $1.75. — The  Dream  in  Homer  and  Greek 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


369 


Tragedy,  by  William  Stuart  Messer,  $1.25. — Meta- 
physics of  the  Supernatural  as  illustrated  by 
Descartes,  by  Lina  Kahn,  $1. — Idea  and  Essence  in 
the  Philosophies  of  Hobbes  and  Spinoza,  by  Albert 
G.  A.  Balz,  $1.  (Columbia  University  Press.) 

Egyptological  Researches,  by  W.  Max  Muller,  Vol. 
Ill,  The  National  Uprising  against  the  Ptolemaic 
Dynasty  according  to  the  Two  Bilingual  Inscrip- 
tions of  Philae. — History  of  the  Theory  of  Numbers, 
by  L.  E.  Dickson,  Vol.  I,  Divisibility  and  Primality. 
— The  Fall  of  Princes,  by  John  Lydgate,  edited  by 
Henry  Bergen.  (Carnegie  Institution.) 

A  Vedic  Reader  for  Students,  by  A.  A.  Macdonell, 
$3.40. — Primer  of  Kanuri  Grammar,  by  A.  von 
Duisburg,  translated  and  revised  by  P.  A.  Benton, 
$2.40.— Holinshed's  Chronicles:  Richard  II,  1398- 
1400,  and  Henry  V,  edited  by  R.  S.  Wallace  and 
Alma  Hansen,  $1.  (Oxford  University  Press.) 

The  Tragedy  of  Tragedies,  by  Henry  Fielding, 
edited  by  James  T.  Hillhouse,  illus.,  $2.50.— The 
Yale  Shakespeare:  Macbeth,  edited  by  Charlton 
M.  Lewis ;  The  Tempest,  edited  by  Chauncey  Brew- 
ster  Tinker,  50  cts.  each.  (Yale  University  Press.) 

The  Yana  Indians,  by  T.  T.  Waterman,  illus.,  75  cts. — 
Yahi  Archery,  by  Saxton  T.  Pope,  illus.,  75  cts.— The 
Language  of  the  Salinan  Indians,  by  J.  Alden 
Mason,  75  cts.  (University  of  California  Press.) 

The  Eclogues  of  Faustus  Andrelinus  and  Joannes 
Arnolletus,  edited  by  Wilfred  P.  Mustard,  $1.50. 
(The  Johns  Hopkins  Press.) 

The  Mental  Survey,  by  Rudolph  Pintner,  $2.— The 
Science  and  Practice  of  Photography,  by  John  R. 
Roebuck,  illus.,  $2. — Sewing  and  Textiles,  by  Annabel 
Turner,  illus.,  $1.75.— The  Study  of  Fabrics,  by 
Annabel  Turner,  illus.,  $1.75. — The  Writing  and 
Reading  of  Verse,  by  Charles  E.  Andrews. — A 
First  Book  in  Spanish,  by  W.  F.  Giese,  $1.50. — A 
First  Book  in  French,  by  Charles  A.  Downer,  $1.50. 
(D.  Appleton  &  Co.) 

The  Training  and  Rewards  of  the  Physician,  by 
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mann,  illus. — Nineteenth  Century  Letters,  edited  by 
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Famous  Pictures  of  Real  Animals,  by  Lorinda  M. 
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Physical  Chemistry  of  the  Proteins,  by  T.  Brailsford 
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Effective  English,  by  James  C.  Fernald,  $1.50. — 
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Creative  Criticism 


Essays  on  the  Unity  of 
Genius   and    Taste 

By  J.  E.  SPINGARN 

Major,  311th  Infantry 

AN  attempt  to  define  criticism  anew,  in  the 
face  of  the  new  ideals  and   literature  of 
our  day.     Attacked   by   all   the  critics  of 
the  conservative  school ;  quoted  with  enthusiasm 
by  the  young  hero  of  Eden   Phillpotts's  novel, 
The  Joy    of   Youth,   and   by   all   modernists   in 
England    and   America.     Contents:    "The   New 
Criticism,"    "Dramatic   Criticism   and   the   The- 
atre,"   "Prose    and    Verse,"    "Creative    Connois- 
seurship,"   "A  Note  on  Genius  and  Taste." 

ENGLISH  COMMENT 

1f  "In  the  face  of  new  realities  his  enthusiasm  is  so 
keen  and  clear-sighted  that  we  wish  indeed  he  had 
written  a  larger  book." — London  Times. 

If  "Has  kindled  in  me  such  a  flame  of  indignation 
that  I  cannot  bank  it  down ;  it  is  difficult  to  speak 
with  patience  of  such  sophistry." — WILLIAM  ARCHER 
in  London  Daily  News. 

If  "The  'new  critic's'  point  of  view  is  most  inter- 
esting."— JOHN  GALSWORTHY. 

1f  "Eloquent  championship  of  some  vital  ideas  about 
art." — Manchester  Guardian. 

If  "A  critic  of  a  very  high  order." — London  Academy. 

1f  "Has  excited  a  good  deal  of  attention  in  the  literary 
world." — WM.  POEL  in  The  New  Weekly. 

If  "Richly  endowed  reflection  of  a  brighter  phase  of 
American  culture." — Edinburgh  Scotsman. 

AMERICAN  COMMENT 

If  "An  extraordinarily  brilliant  example  of  dialectical 
writing  and  of  irony  and  humor  in  the  service  of 
clear,  sound  thought ;  one  of  the  ablest  of  our 
American  critics." — The  Dial,  Chicago. 

Tf  "The  most  sweepingly  iconoclastic  utterance  of  its 
kind  I  have  ever  seen." — RICHARD  BURTON  in  The 
Bellman. 

If  "Affirmations  repugnant  to  the  most  elementary 
common  sense ;  not  much  is  left  of  the  values  of 
civilized  life  when  he  has  finished  enumerating 
the  things  that  must  be  thrown  overboard." — PROF. 
IRVING  BABBITT  in  The  Nation. 

If  "I  quite  agree  with  that  brilliant  disciple  of  Bene- 
detto Croce,  J.  E.  Spingarn." — AMY  LOWELL'S  Ten- 
dencies in  Modern  American  Poetry. 

If  "He  delights  to  play  havoc  with  the  theories  of 
the  tedious  old  women  who  hold  the  chairs  of 
literature  in  some  of  our  American  Universities." — 
Reedy's  Mirror,  St.  Louis. 

If  "The  most  valuable  contribution  to  this  subject 
made  in  America  in  recent  years." — JESSIE  B. 
RITTENHOUSE  in  The  Bookman. 


For  sale  at  all  bookshops,  $1.20  net 

Henry  Holt  &  Co.,  New  York 


370 


THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


Outlines  of  European 
History 

By  JAMES  H.  ROBINSON,  Columbia  Univer- 
sity, JAMES  H.  BREASTED,  The  Univer- 
sity of  Chicago,  and  CHARLES  A. 
BEARD,  Columbia  University 

An  unequaled  two-year  course  in  general  his- 
tory for  high  schools.  Emphasis  upon  changes 
in  conditions  and  institutions,  a  study  of  great 
historical  events  taken  in  relation  to  the  eco- 
nomic and  social  movements  which  they  reveal, 
the  elimination  of  unimportant  details,  the  vivid 
narrative  style,  the  many  illustrations,  some  in 
color,  with  their  detailed  legends — these  are  a 
few  of  the  outstanding  features. 

Part  I.  (Ancient  and  medieval  history)  730 
pages,  illustrated,  $1.50. 

Part  II.  (Modern  history — from  about  1600 
A.  D.)  555  pages,  illustrated,  $1.50. 

Our  Schools  in  War  Time 
and  After 

By  ARTHUR  D.  DEAN,  Teachers  College,  Co- 
lumbia University 

A  book  of  practical  suggestions  by  which  the 
schools  may  make  use  of  the  patriotic  enthusiasm 
now  sweeping  the  country.  335  pages,  $1.25. 

Food  Problems 

By  A.  N.  FARMER  and  JANET  R.  HUNTING- 
TON 

Common-sense  problems  in  arithmetic  that 
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education,  teachers,  and  schools,  carriage  extra. 

Fifty  Years  of  American 
Education 

By  ERNEST  CARROLL  MOORE,  formerly  of 
Harvard  University 

A  sketch  of  the  progress  of  education  in  the 
United  States  from  1867  to  1917.  96  pages,  $0.80. 

South  America 

(Geographical  and  Industrial  Studies) 

By  NELLIE  B.  ALLEN,  State  Normal  School, 
Fitchburg,  Mass. 

A  readable  portrayal  for  children  of  the 
national  life  of  the  various  countries  of  South 
America.  413  pages,  amply  illustrated,  $0.80. 

GINN  AND  COMPANY 

Boston          New  York          Chicago          London 


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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


371 


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The  Oxford  Stamp 

AND   OTHER   ESSAYS 

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American  Oxonian  by  FRANK  AYDELOTTE,  Pro- 
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OXFORD 

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THE    DIAL 


[April  11 


FOR  THINKING  PEOPLE 

FIFTY  YEARS  OF  ASSOCIATION  WORK  AMONG 
YOUNG  WOMEN.    By  Elizabeth  Wilson 

A  history  of  the  growth  and  development  of  the 
Y.  W.  C.  A.  movement  in  the  United  States  with 
an  illuminating  presentation  of  the  background 
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to  meet  international  demands  in  the  present 
crisis.  Ulus.  Svo.  Cloth,  Net,  $1.31;  Lib. 
Edn.,  Net,  $1.60. 

THE  YOUNG  WOMAN  CITIZEN.     By  Mary  Austin 
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I2mo.     Cloth,  Net,  $1.00 

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HEALTH  AND  THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 
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IF  you  want  to  understand  the  I.  W.  W.  from  the  his- 
torical point  of  view  read  Andr6  Tridon's  concise 
presentation, 

THE  NEW  UNIONISM 

"A  CLEAR  exposition  of  the  philosophy  and  practice  of  syndi- 
calism, its  history  and  its  present  status  all  over  the  world.  His 
account  might  be  looked  at  as  a  valuable  handbook,  supplement- 
ing the  works  of  Simkhovitch,  Spargo,  John  Graham  Brooks,  and 
other  writers,  who  do  not  apply  so  thoroughly  the  doctrine  to 
the  concrete  experience  of  the  agitation  that  is  daily  taking 
place."  —Boston  Transcript. 

[Jl.OOj 

IF  you  want  to  understand  syndicalism  as  it  is  rooted 
in  philosophy,  examine  Georges  Sorel's  classic, 


"IT  is  doubtful  if  any  book  can  be  named  that  is  better  calcu- 
lated to  state  the  spirit  and  method  of  revolution  than  this  special 
volume  by  Georges  Sorel.  The  Introduction  alone  will  con- 
vince any  reader  that  this  study  is  not  to  be  skipped  by  one  who 
would  know  the  most  penetrating  observations  upon  the  various 
anarchisms  of  the  hour."  —  American  Economic  Review. 

[82.25] 

IF  you  want  the  Socialist  reaction  to  the  revolutionary 
labor  movements  see  John  Spargo's  statement, 

SYNDICALISM,  INDUSTRIAL 
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vised by  Alexander  Klemin,  illus.,  $1.25.  (Moffat, 
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illus.,  $2.50. — How  to  Keep  Fit  in  Camp  and  Trench, 
by  Col.  Charles  Lynch  and  Maj.  James  G.  Gum- 
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Complete  U.  S.  Infantry  Guide,  arranged  by  Maj. 
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Outline  of  Neurology,  by  C.  Judson  Herrick  and 
Elizabeth  C.  Crosby,  $1.  (W.  B.  Saunders  Co.) 

The  Farm  Tractor:  Its  Mechanism,  Use,  Care,  and 
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How  to  Breathe  Right,  by  Edward  Lanlow.  (Edward 
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Ice-Breakers:  Games  and  Stunts  for  Large  and  Small 
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Wallace,  illus.,  $1.50.  (Standard  Publishing  Co.) 

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REFERENCE 

Encyclopedia  Medica,  new  second  edition,  edited  by 
J.  W.  Ballantyne,  15  vols.,  Vols.  I-V,  illus.,  $6,  per 
vol.  in  sets  by  subscription. — Human  physiology,  by 
Luigi  Luciani,  translated  by  Frances  A.  Welby, 
edited  by  Gordon  M.  Holmes,  preface  by  J.  N. 
Langley,  5  vols.,  illus.,  $5.25  per  vol.— Typhoid 
Fever:  Considered  as  a  Problem  of  Scientific  Medi- 
cine, by  Frederick  P.  Gay,  $2.50.— An  Atlas  of  the 
Dissection  of  the  Cow,  by  Grant  Sherman  Hopkins, 
illus.  (The  Macmillan  Co.) 

Periodic  Orbits,  by  F.  R.  Moulton  and  Collaborators. 
— An  Atlas  of  the  Milky  Way,  by  E.  E.  Barnard. — 
The  Cactaceae:  Descriptions  and  Illustrations  of 
Plants  of  the  Cactus  Family,  by  N.  L.  Britton  and 
J.  N.  Rose,  Vol.  I.  (Carnegie  Institution.) 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


373 


Slavic  Europe:  A  Selected  Bibliography  in  the  West- 
ern European  Languages,  Comprising  History,  Lan- 
guages, and  Literature,  by  Robert  Joseph  Kerner. — 
Treaties:  A  Bibliography  of  Collections  of  Treaties 
and  Related  Material,  by  Denys  Peter  Myers. — A 
Bibliography  of  Municipal  Utility  Regulation  and 
Municipal  Ownership,  by  Don  Lorenzo  Stevens. — 
Handbook  of  Red-Figured  Vases,  by  Joseph  Clark 
Hoppin,  illus. — Attic  Red-Figured  Vases  in  American 
Museums,  by  J.  D.  Beazley,  illus.  (Harvard  Uni- 
versity Press.) 

Catalogue  of  the  Hemiptera  of  America  North  of 
Mexico,  by  Edward  P.  Van  Duzee,  $5.50. — A  Synop- 
sis of  the  Bats  of  California,  by  Hilda  Wood  Grin- 
nell,  illus.,  paper,  $2. — Abscission  of  Flowers  and 
Fruits  in  Solanaceas,  With  Special  Reference  to 
Nicotiana,  by  John  N.  Kendall,  illus.,  85  cts.  (Uni- 
versity of  California  Press.) 

Larger  English-Irish  Dictionary,  by  T.  O'Neill  Lane, 
$7.50. — CasselPs  French-English  and  English-French 
Dictionary,  edited  by  James  Boielle,  $1.50. — Fifteen 
Thousand  Useful  Phrases,  by  Grenville  Kleiser, 
$1.60.  (Funk  &  Wagnalls  Co.) 

The  Standard  Index  to  Short  Stories,  1900-1914,  by 
Francis  J.  Hannigan,  $10.00. — Sayings  That  Never 
Grow  Old,  by  Marshall  Brown,  $1.  (Small,  May- 
nard  &  Co.)  . 

The  Dramatic  Records  of  Sir  Henry  Herbert,  Master 
of  the  Revels,  1623-1673,  edited  by  Joseph  Quincy 
Adams,  Jr.,  illus.,  $2.50.  (Yale  University  Press.) 

A  Sumero-Babylonian  Sign  List,  by  Samuel  A.  B. 
Mercer,  $6.  (Columbia  University  Press.) 

A  Lithuanian  Etymological  Index,  by  H.  H.  Bender. 
(Princeton  University  Press.) 

The  American  Year  Book,  edited  by  Francis  G.  Wick- 
ware,  $3.  (D.  Appleton  &  Co.) 

Sign  Talk,  by  Ernest  Thompson  Seton,  illus.,  $3. 
(Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.) 

Tube  Teeth  and  Porcelain  Rods,  by  John  Girdwood, 
illus.,  $5.  (Longmans,  Green  &  Co.) 

Masonic  Bookplates,  by  Winward  Prescott,  illus.,  $1. 
(Four  Seas  Co.) 

New  English-Italian  and  Italian-English  Dictionary, 
by  F.  Millhouse  and  F.  Bracciforti,  $4.50.  (Peter 
Reilly.) 

The  Mythology  of  All  Races:  Egyptian,  Indo-Chinese, 
by  W.  Max  Miiller  and  Sir  James  George  Scott; 
Celtic,  Slavic,  by  Canon  John  A.  MacCulloch  and 
Jan  Machal,  illus.,  $6.  each.  (Marshall,  Jones  &  Co.) 

The  Therapy  of  Surgical  Diseases,  by  James  Peter 
Warbasse,  3  yols.,  illus. — History  of  Phytopathology, 
by  Herbert  Hice  Whetzel,  illus. — Obstetrics,  by  Bar- 
ton Cooke  Hirst,  illus.,  $5. — Diseases  of  the  Male 
Urethra,  by  Irving  S.  Koll,  illus.  (W.  B.  Saun- 
ders  Co.) 

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The  Woman  Voter's  Manual,  by  S.  E.  Forman  and 
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man Catt,  $1.— The  A.  B.  C.  of  Voting:  A  Hand- 
book on  Government  and  Politics  for  the  Women 
of  New  York  State,  by  Marion  B.  Cothren,  intro- 
duction by  Governor  Charles  S.  Whitman,  60  cts» 
(The  Century  Co.) 

Caroline  King's  Cook  Book,  illus.,  $1.50. — The  Economy 
Cook  Book,  by  Marion  Harris  Neil,  illus.,  $1.50. — 
Economy  in  Food,  by  Mabel  T.  Wellman,  40  cts. 
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Everyday  Foods  in  War  Time,  by  Mary  Swartz  Rose, 
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Two  New  Fosdick 
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Impression — 


THE  CHALLENGE  OF  THE 
-PRESENT  CRISIS- 

Boards,  SOc 
By  HARRY  EMERSON  FOSDICK 

3O  Thousand  Copies  Sold  in  a  Few  Month* 
Its  5th  Edition  Now  on  Press 

IN  THIS  FEARLESS  analysis  of  the  value  of 
force  and  its  limitations,  the  place  of  militarism 
in  a  Christian  civilization,  and  other  funda- 
mental elements  in  the  present  situation  which 
constitute  a  challenge  to  Christian  churches  and 
individuals,  the  author  proves  afresh  his  power 
to  ^interpret  the  current  thoughts  of  men  and  to 
guide  them  to  higher  levels. 
"FOSDICK'S  'The  Challenge  of  the  Present 
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"THE  MEANING  OF 
FAITH" 


By  HARRY  EMERSON  FOSDICK 

Author  of  "The  Meaning  of  Prayer,  "  Etc. 

"An  Everyday  Life  Book" 

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Food  and  Freedom,  by  Mabel  Dulon  Purdy,  illus.,  $1. 
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IJIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 


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THE   AVAR. 

Men  in  "War.  By  Andreas  Latzko.  Boni  &  Lire- 
right.  $1.50. 

The  Winning  of  the  War.  By  Roland  G.  Usher. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  382  pages.  Harper  &  Bros.  $2. 

Germany  at  Bay.  By  Major  Haldane  Macfall. 
With  an  introduction  by  Field  Marshal  Viscount 
French.  Illustrated,  8vo,  304  pages.  George  H. 
Doran  Co.  $1.50. 

Out  There.  By  Charles  W.  Whitehair.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  249  pages.  D.  Appleton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

Outwitting  the  Hun.  By  Lieut.  Pat  O'Brien.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  284  pages.  Harper  &  Bros.  $1.50. 

A  "Temporary  Gentleman"  in  France.  Home  letters 
from  an  officer  at  the  front.  With  introductory 
chapters  by  Capt.  A.  J.  Dawson.  12mo,  263 
pages.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.  $1.50. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


375 


To  Bagdad  With  the  British.     By  Arthur  Tillotson 

Clark.     Illustrated,   12mo,   295  pages.     D.  Apple- 
ton  &  Co.     $1.50. 

Donald  Thompson  in  Russia.  By  Donald  C.  Thomp- 
son. Illustrated,  8vo,  353  pages.  The  Century 

Co.      $2. 
Glorious  Exploits  of  the  Air.     By  Edgar  Middleton. 

Illustrated,  12mo,  256  pages.     D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

$1.35. 
The  Glory  of  the  Trenches.     By  Coningsby  Dawson. 

With  frontispiece,   12mo,   141   pages.     John  Lane 

Co.     $1. 
The    Father    of    a     Soldier.       By     W.     J.     Dawson. 

12mo,   164   pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1. 
letters  to  the  Mother  of  a  Soldier.    By  Richardson 

Wright.     12mo,  135   pages.     Frederick  A.   Stokes 

Co.      $1. 
America   After   the  War.     By   an   American   Jurist. 

12mo,  208  pages.     The  Century  Co.     $1. 
Lloyd   George  and   the  "War.     By    "An   Independent 

Liberal."     12mo,    159   pages.      The   Macmillan    Co. 

Paper.     80  cts. 
The    Trial     of     Sir    Roger     Casement.       Edited     by 

George    H.    Knott.      Illustrated,    8vo,    304    pages. 

The  Cromarty  Law  Book  Co.,  Philadelphia. 
I<*ull  Text  of  the  Secret  Treaties.     (As  Revealed   at 

Petrograd.)    4to,    15    pages.     New   York   Evening 

Post.     Paper.     10   cts. 
Field  Artillery  Officer's  Notes.     Compiled   by   Capt. 

Wm.  H.  Caldwell.     Under  the  direction  of  Lieut. 

Col.  Robert  M.  Danford.     12mo,  77  pages.     E.  P. 

Dutton   &  Co,     $1.50. 
Manual  of  Military  Map  Making  and  Reading.     By 

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MacElroy.     Illustrated,  16mo,  122  pages.     D.  Ap- 
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'Manual    of    Physical    Training.      As    issued    by    the 

War  Department   for   use    in   the  United    States 

Army.       Illustrated,    16mo,    207    pages.       George 

Sully  &  Co.     73  cts. 
How   to    Keep    Fit    in    Camp    and    Trench.      By   Col. 

Charles   Lynch    and   Major   James   G.   Gumming. 

16mo,  72  pages.    P.  Blakiston's  Son  &  Co.     30  cts. 

FICTION. 

Old  People  and  Things  That  Pass.  By  Louis  Cou- 
perus.  Translated  by  Alexander  Teixeira  de 
Mattos.  12mo,  388  pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 
$1.50. 

Five  Tales.  By  John  Galsworthy.  12mo,  380 
pages.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  $1.50. 

Nine  Humorous  Tales.  By  Anton  Chekhov.  Trans- 
lated by  Isaac  Goldberg  and  Henry  T.  Schnitt- 
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An  Autumn  Sowing.  By  E.  F.  Benson.  12mo,  336 
pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co.  $1.35. 

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The*Best  People.  By  Anne  Warwick.  12mo,  345 
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Miss  Amerikanka.  By  Olive  Gilbreath.  Illustrated, 
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The  "Wings  of  Youth.  By  Elizabeth  Jordan.  With 
frontispiece,  12mo,  320  pages.  Harper  &  Bros. 
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The  Flower  of  the  Chapdelaines.  By  Goerge  W. 
Cable.  With  frontispiece,  12mo,  •  339  pages. 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  $1.35. 

The  Happy  Garret.  The  Recollections  of  Hebe  Hill. 
Edited  by  V.  Goldie.  12mo,  314  pages.  E.  P. 
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Before  me,  a  notary  public  in  and  for  the  state  and  county 
aforesaid,  personally  appeared  Martyn  Johnson,  who,  having 
been  duly  sworn  according  to  law,  deposes  and  says  that  he 
is  the  publisher  of  THE  DIAL  and  that  the  following  is,  to 
the  best  of  his  knowledge  and  belief,  a  true  statement  _of 
the  ownership,  management  (and  if  a  daily  paper,  the  cir- 
culation), etc.,  of  the  aforesaid  publication  for  the  date 
shown  in  the  above  caption,  required  by  the  Act  of  August 
24,  1912,  embodied  in  section  443,  Postal  Laws  and  Regula- 
tions, printed  on  the  reverse  of  this  form,  to  wit : 

1.  That  the  names  and  addresses  of  the  publisher,  editor, 
managing    editor,    and    business    managers    are:      Publisher, 
Martyn    Johnson,    Chicago ;    editor,    George    Bernard    Donlin, 
South   Pasadena,   Calif. ;  managing   editor,   Martyn    Johnson, 
Chicago ;    business    manager,    Martyn    Johnson,    Chicago. 

2.  That    the    owners    are    (give    names    and    addresses    of 
individual  owners,  or,  if  a  corporation,  give  its  name  and  the 
names    and   addresses    of   stockholders    owning    or   holding  _  1 
per  cent  or  more  of  the  total  amount  of  stock)  :    The   Dial 
Publishing  Company.     Martyn  Johnson,  Chicago  ;  Willard  C. 
Kitchel,    Chicago ;    Laird    Bell,    Chicago ;    Bruce    D.    Smith, 
Chicago;  Mary   Aldis,   Chicago;   Susan   F.  Hibbard,   Chicago, 
and  Mary   L.    Snow,    Dearborn,   Mich. 

3.  That    the    known    bondholders,    mortgagees,    and    other 
security   holders   owning  or   holding   1   per   cent  or  more   of 
total    amount   of   bonds,    mortgages,    or    other   securities    are 
(if  there  are  none,  so  state)  :    None. 

4.  That  the  two  paragraphs  next  above,  giving  the  names 
of   the   owners,    stockholders,    and   security    holders,    if    any, 
contain  not  only  the  list  of  stockholders  and  security  holders 
as  they  appear  upon  the  books  of  the  company  but  also,  in 
cases  where  the  stockholder  or  security  holder  appears  upon 
the  books  of  the  company  as  trustees   or  in   any  other  fidu- 
ciary  relation,   the    name   of   the   person   or   corporation    for 
whom   such   trustee   is   acting,   is    given ;   also   that   the  said 
two   paragraphs   contain   statements   embracing   affiant's   full 
knowledge    and    belief   as    to    the    circumstances    and    condi- 
tions under  which  stockholders   and  security  holders   who  do 
not  appear  upon  the  books  of  the  company  as  trustees,  hold 
stock  and  securities  in  a  capacity  other  than  that  of  a  bona 


ties  than  as  so  stated  by  him. 

5.  That  the  average  number  of  copies  of  each  issue  of 
this  publication  sold  or  distributed,  through  the  mails  or 
otherwise,  to  paid  subscribers  during  the  six  months  pre- 
ceding the  date  shown  above  is  (this  information  is  re- 
quired from  daily  publications  only). 

MARTYN  JOHNSON. 

Sworn  to  and  subscribed  before  me  this  25th  day  of 
March,  1918. 

WILLARD  C.  KITCHEL. 

(My  commission  expires  January  20,  1920.) 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


379 


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THE    DIAL 


[April  11,  1918 


The  Soul  it  Russian  Revolution 


By  MOISSAYE  J.    OLGIN 

This  is  the  story  of  what  lay  behind  Russia's  Revolution  told  by  a  Russian  journalist 
of  note  who  has  been  connected  with  the  revolutionary  movements  for  the  past  seventeen 
years.  In  these  days  of  Russian  breakdown  and  •  chaos,  Mr.  Olgin's  book  gives  the 
clearest  available  basis  for  judging  what  may  come  eventually  from  the  forces  within 
the  stricken  country.  In  the  few  months  since  its  publication,  it  has  taken  its  place 
among  the  authoritative  and  standards  works  on  Russia.  Illustrated,  $2.50  net. 


Topography  and 
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By  DOUGLAS  W.  JOHNSON 

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campaigns  and  prepares  the  reader  for 
a  fuller  understanding  of  future  cam- 
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Alsace-Lorraine  Un- 
der German  Rule 

By  CHARLES  DOWNER  HAZEN 

Author  of  "Europe  Since  1815." 

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On  Contemporary 
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By  STUART  P.  SHERMAN 

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Our  Revolution 

By  LEON  TROTZKY 

Essays  on  Working  Class  and  Inter- 
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Professor  Latimer's  Progress 

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The  sentimental  journey  of  a  middle-aged  American  scholar  upon  whose  soul  the 
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THE  DIAL 


Fortnightly  Journal  of 

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CHICAGO,  APRIL  25,  1918  *5tcts-  a  copv- 

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IN  THIS  ISSUE 

The  Passing  of  National  Frontiers 

By  THORSTEIN  VEBLEN 

A  Gossip  on  James  Branch  Gabell 

By  WILSON  FOLLETT 


<_»  •»  Captain  R.HiJ^m- 

Knyvett 

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"OVER  THERE"  WITH  THE  AUSTRALIANS 

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AN  INTRODUCTION  ABOUT  SCOUTS 
AUSTRALIA — Human  Snow  Balls — Training  Camp  Life. 
EGYPT — Land  of  Sand  and  Sweat — Picketing  in  Cairo. 
GALLIPOLI— Holding  on  and  Nibbling— The  Evacuation. 

WESTERNfFRONT— Nights  In  No-Mans  Land— Spy  Hunting— The 
Army's  Pair  of  Eyes — Baupame  and  "a  Blighty." 

HOSPITAL   LIFE— In  France— London— The  Hospital  Ship— Using 
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MEDITATIONS— The  Right  Infantry  Weapons— Psychology  of  Fear 
— Keeping  Faith  with  the  Dead. 

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382                                                         THE    DIAL                                               [April  25 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


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FRONT  LINES 

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THE  REAL  COLONEL  HOUSE 

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FRONTIERS  OF  FREEDOM 

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THE.DIAL 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  765 


APRIL  25,   1918 


CONTENTS 


THE  PASSING  OF  NATIONAL  FRONTIERS  Thor stein  Feblen  .     .     .387 

ANTIQUATED  YOUTH Kenneth  Macgowan  .     .  390 

A  GOSSIP  ON  JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL  .  Wilson  Follett ....  392 

FOR  THE  YOUNG  MEN  DEAD    .    Verse  Florence  Kiper  Frank    .  396 

OUR  LONDON  LETTER  .     .  '  .     .     .     .  Edward  Shanks     .     .     .  396 

THE  VOICE  OF  REASON     .     .     .     .     .  Harold  Stearns     .     .     .  399 

LITERARY  CLAPTRAP James  Weber  Linn   .     .401 

A  Swiss  VIEW  OF  WILLIAM  JAMES  .     .  H.  M.  Kallen  .     .     .     .401 

A  SCHOLARLY  VAGABOND Myron  R.  Williams  .     .  402 

THE  DETERIORATION  OF  POETS  .     .     .     Conrad  Aiken 403 

THE  BREVITY  SCHOOL  IN  FICTION  .     .  Randolph  Bourne  .    ..     .  405 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 407 

Japanese  Art  Motives. — A  History  of  the  Pacific  Northwest. — The  Quest  of  El 
Dorado. — Poems  of  War  and  Peace. — Italian  Rhapsody,  and  Other  Poems  of 
Italy. — Pawns  of  War. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 410 

BRIEFER  MENTION .     .412 

NOTES  AND  NEWS ( 414 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS .416 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor  HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 

Contributing  Editors 

CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACCOWAN 

ROBERT  DELL  HENRY  B.  FULLER  CLARENCE  BRITTEN 

THE  DIAL  (founded  in  1880  by  Francis  F.  Browne)  is  published  fortnightly,  twenty-four  times 
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Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
March  3,  1879.  Copyright,  1918,  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Inc. 

Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
Secretary-Treasurer,  at  608  South  Dearborn  Street,  Chicago. 


386 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25,  1918 


NEW  MACMILLAN    BOOKS 

New  Books  on  Topics  of  the  Day 

HISTORY  OF  LABOR  IN 

THE  END  OF  THE  WAR 

THE  UNITED  STATES 

By!  Walter  E.  Weyl 

By  John  R.  Commons 

The  relation  of  this  war  to  the  history  of  Amer- 

With  collaborators,    John   B.   Andrews,   Helen    L. 

ican   thought    and   action,    forecasting   our   future 

Sumner,   H.   E.    Hoagland,    Selig   Perlman,    David 

policy.                                                       Ready  in  April 

J.  Saposs,   £.  B.  Mittelman,  and  an  introduction 

by  Henry  W.  Farnam.    A  complete  authentic  his- 
tory of  labor  in  the  United  States  based  on  orig- 

WHAT IS  NATIONAL  HONOR? 

inal  sources.     2  vols.                                               $6.60 

By  Leo  Perla  with  an  introduction  by 

WAR  TIME  CONTROL  OF 

Norman  Angell 

INDUSTRY 

The  first  analysis  of  the  psychological,  ethical  and 

*  1  ^  J-X  ^J  *~J  m  »»  » 

By  Howard  L.  Gray 

political  background  of  "national  honor." 
Ready  in   April 

The  English  experience  and  its  lesson  to  America. 

$1.75 

WAKE  UP  AMERICA 

EVERYDAY  FOODS  IN 

By  Mark  Sullivan 

WAR  TIME 

How    we   have    failed    in    our   ship    building   pro- 

By Mary  Swartz  Rose 

gram,    and    what    must    be    done    to    remedy    the 
situation.                                    Ready  April  23.     $0.60 

What  to  eat  in  order  to  save  wheat,  meat,  sugar, 

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"THE  DARK  PEOPLE": 
RUSSIA'S  CRISIS. 

CO-OPERATION  :    THE  HOPE 
OF  THE  CONSUMER 

By  Ernest  Poole 

By  Emerson  P.  Harris 

A  wholly  remarkable  and  informing  volume  touch- 
ing on  almost  every  phase  of  the  Russian  situa- 
tion, written   out  of  Mr.  Poole's  own  experiences 

The   Failure   of   Middlemanism,    Reasons    and   the 
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Outlook  are  the  titles  of  the  parts  into  which  this 

in  Russia.                                                       Illus.     $1.50 

new  work   is  divided.                                              $2.00 

THROUGH  WAR  TO  PEACE 

By  Albert  G.  Keller 

WHERE  DO  YOU  STAND? 

"Evolution  Against   Kultur"  —  a  discussion  of  the 
war  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  societal  theory. 

By  Hermann  Hagedorn 

$1.25 

An  appeal  to  Americans  of  German  origin.      $0.60 

Important  New  Novels  and'  Poems 

THE  MARTIAL  ADVENTURES 

THE  BOARDMAN  FAMILY 

OF  HENRY  AND  ME 

By  Mary  S.  Watts 

By  William  Allen  White 

The  story  of  a  girl's  escape  from  the  smug  gen- 
tility of  her  environment  and  her  development  as 

The  high  spirited  narrative  of  the  adventures  _of 

a  democrat   and   humane   individual.                  $1.50 

two  Americans  in  the  war  zone  —  full  of  deep  in- 

sight and  colored  by  delightful  humor. 
Illus.     $1.50 

TOWARD  THE  GULF 

THE  HIGH  ROMANCE 

By  Michael  Williams 

By  Edgar  Lee  Masters 

The   successor   to    "Spoon    River   Anthology"  —  an- 
other series  of  fearlessly  true  and  beautiful  poems 

"A     spiritual     autobiography"  —  the     story     of     a 

revealing  American   life  as  few  books  have  done. 

writer's  inner  life  and  development.                 $1.60 

$1.50 

THE  FLYING  TEUTON 

FLOOD  TIDE 

By  Alice  Brown 

By  Daniel  Chase 

A  book  of  remarkable  stories  from  the  author  of 
"The  Prisoner"   and  "Bromley  Neighborhood." 

$1.50 

The   story   of  the   effect    of   a  successful  business 
career  on  the  life   of  man   who  at  the  start  was 
essentially   a  student   and  dreamer.                    $1.50 

MASHI  AND  OTHER  STORIES 

By  Sir  Rabindranath  Tagore 

LOVER'S  GIFT  AND  CROSSING 

By  Sir  Rabindranath  Tagore 

New  tales  of  the  magical  East.                          $1.60 

Sir  Rabindranath's   latest  poems.                        $1.25 

REINCARNATIONS 

By  James  Stephens 

A   new  book  of  poems  by  the  author  of  "Insur- 

STEPHEN'S LAST  CHANCE 

By  Margaret  Ashmnm 

rection"   and   "The   Hill   of  Vision." 

The  story  of  Montana  ranch  life  for  boys. 

Ready  April  19 

Illus.     $1.25 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY,  Publishers,  New  York 

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THTDIAL 

Si  jFortntff&tty  Journal  ot  Criticism  and  2Dtecu00ion  of  Eiterature  and 


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The  Passing  of  National  Frontiers 


It  is  to  be  accepted  as  a  major  premise, 
underlying  any  argument  or  speculation 
that  bears  on  current  events  or  on  the 
calculable  future,  that  the  peoples  of 
Christendom  are  now  coming  to  face  a 
revolutionary  situation.  "It  is  a  condition, 
not  a  theory,  that  confronts  us."  This  will 
hold  true  with  equal  cogency  for  inter- 
national relations  and  for  the  domestic 
affairs  of  any  one  of  the  civilized  countries. 
It  means  not  necessarily  that  a  radical 
change  of  base  in  the  existing  law  and 
order  is  expedient  or  desired,  but  only  that 
circumstances  have  been  falling  into  such 
shape  that  a  radical  change  of  base  can  be 
avoided,  if  at  all,  only  at  the  cost  of  a  hard- 
handed  and  sustained  reactionary  policy. 
Indeed,  it  may  be  an  open  question  whether 
any  concerted  scheme  of  reactionary 
measures  will  suffice  to  maintain  or  to  re- 
establish the  passing  status  quo.  It  takes 
the  form  of  a  question  as  to  whether 
the  Old  Order  can  be  rehabilitated,  not 
whether  it  will  stand  over  by  its  own 
inertia.  And  it  is,  perhaps,  still  more  of 
an  open  question  what  would  be  the  nature 
and  dimensions  of  those  departures  from 
the  holding  ground  of  the  Old  Order  which 
the  new  conditions  of  life  insist  on. 

But  the  situation  is  of  a  revolutionary 
character,  in  the  sense  that  those  under- 
lying principles  of  human  intercourse  on 
which  the  Old  Order  rests  are  no  longer 
consonant  with  the  circumstances  which 
now  condition  this  intercourse.  The  spirit- 
ual ground  on  which  rights  and  duties  have 
been  resting  has  shifted,  beyond  recall. 
What  has  been  accepted  hitherto  as  funda- 
mentally right  and  good  is  no  longer 
securely  right  and  good  in  human  inter- 
course as  it  must  necessarily  run  under  the 
altered  circumstances  of  today  and  tomor- 
row. The  question,  in  substance,  is  not  as 
to  whether  the  scheme  is  to  be  revised,  but 
only  ^  as  to  the  scope  and  method  of  its 
revision,  which  may  take  the  direction  of 


a  rehabilitation  of  the  passing  order,  or  a 
drift  to  new  ground  and  a  New  Order. 

The  principles  of  right  and  honest  living 
are  of  the  nature  of  habit,  and  like  other 
habits  of  thought  these  principles  change 
in  response  to  the  circumstances  which 
condition  habituation.  But  they  change 
tardily;  they  are  tenacious  and  refractory; 
and  anything  like  a  deliberate  shifting  to 
new  ground  in  such  a  matter  will  come  to 
pass  only  after  the  old  position  has  become 
patently  untenable,  and  after  the  discipline 
exercised  by  the  new  conditions  of  life 
has  had  time  to  bend  the  spiritual  attitude 
of  the  community  into  a  new  bias  that  will 
be  consonant  with  the  new  conditions.  At 
such  a  juncture  a  critical  situation  will  arise. 
So  today  a  critical  situation  has  arisen, 
precipitated  and  emphasized  by  the  exper- 
ience of  the  war,  which  has  served  to 
demonstrate  that  the  received  scheme  of 
use  and  wont,  of  law  and  order  and  equity, 
is  not  competent  to  meet  the  exigencies  of 
the  present. 

In  the  last  resort,  these  changes  of  cir- 
cumstance that  have  so  been  going  forward 
and  have  put  the  received  scheme  of  law 
and  order  out  of  joint  are  changes  of  a 
technological  kind,  changes  that  affect  the 
state  of  the  industrial  arts  and  take  effect 
through  the  processes  of  industry.  One 
thing  and  another  in  the  institutional  heri- 
tage has  so  been  outworn,  or  out-lived; 
and  among  these  is  the  received  conception 
of  the  place  and  value  of  nationalities. 

The  modern  industrial  system  is  world- 
wide, and  the  modern  technological  knowl- 
edge is  no  respecter  of  national  frontiers. 
The  best  efforts  of  legislators,  police,  and 
business  men,  bent  on  confining  the  knowl- 
edge and  use  of  the  modern  industrial  arts 
within  national  frontiers,  has  been  able  to 
accomplish  nothing  more  to  the  point  than 
a  partial  and  transient  restriction  on  minor 
details.  Such  success  as  these  endeavors  in 
restraint  of  technological  knowledge  have 


388 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


met  with  has  effected  nothing  better  than 
a  slight  retardation  of  the  advance  and  dif- 
fusion of  such  knowledge  among  the 
civilized  nations.  Quite  patently,  these 
measures  in  restraint  of  industrial  knowl- 
edge and  practice  have  been  detrimental 
to  all  the  peoples  concerned,  in  that  they 
have  lowered  the  aggregate  industrial 
efficiency  of  the  peoples  concerned,  without 
increasing  the  efficiency,  wealth,  or  well- 
being  of  any  one  of  them.  Also  quite 
patently,  these  endeavors  in  restraint  of 
industry  have  not  successfully  prevented 
the  modern  industrial  system  from  reach- 
ing across  the  national  frontiers  in  all  direc- 
tions, for  materials  and  for  information 
and  experience.  Indeed,  so  far  as  regards 
the  industrial  work  of  the  modern  peoples, 
as  distinct  from  the  commercial  traffic  of 
their  business  men,  it  is  plain  that  the 
national  frontiers  are  serving  no  better  pur- 
pose than  a  moderately  effectual  obstruc- 
tion. In  this  respect,  the  national  frontiers, 
and  all  that  system  of  discrimination  and 
jealousy  to  which  the  frontiers  give  defi- 
nition and  emphasis,  are  worse  than  use- 
less; although  circumstances  which  the 
commercialized  statesmen  are  unable  to 
control  have  made  the  frontiers  a  less  ef- 
fectual bar  to  intercourse  than  would  suit 
the  designs  of  national  statecraft. 

The  case  stands  somewhat  different  as 
regards  that  commercial  traffic  that  makes 
use  of  the  modern  industrial  system.  Busi- 
ness enterprise  is  a  pursuit  of  private  gain. 
Not  infrequently  one  business  concern  will 
gain  at  the  cost  of  another.  Enterprising 
business  concerns  habitually  seek  their  own 
advantage  at  the  cost  of  their  rivals  in  the 
pursuit  of  gain;  and  a  disadvantage  im- 
posed on  a  rival  concern  or  on  a  competing 
line  of  business  enterprise  constitutes  a 
competitive  advantage.  Hindrance  of  a 
competitor  is  an  advantage  gained.  Busi- 
ness enterprise  is  competitive,  even  where 
given  business  men  may  work  in  collusion 
for  the  time  being  with  a  view  to  gains 
that  are  presently  to  be  divided.  And 
success  in  business  is  always  finally  a  matter 
of  private  gain,  frequently  at  the  cost  of 
some  one  else.  Business  enterprise  is 
competitive. 

But  the  like  is  not  the  case  with  indus- 
trial efficiency.  And  the  material  interest 


of  the  community  centres  on  industrial  ef- 
ficiency, on  the  uninterrupted  production 
of  goods  at  the  lowest  practicable  cost  in 
terms  of  material  and  man  power.  The 
productive  efficiency  of  any  one  industrial 
plant  or  industrial  process  is  in  no  degree 
enhanced  by  the  inefficiency  of  any  other 
plant  or  process  comprised  in  the  industrial 
system ;  nor  does  any  productive  advantage 
come  to  the  one  from  a  disadvantage 
imposed  on  another.  The  industrial  proc- 
ess at  large  is  of  a  cooperative  nature,  in 
no  degree  competitive — and  it  is  on  the 
productive  efficiency  of  the  industrial 
process  at  large  that  the  community's 
material  interest  centres.  But  while  busi- 
ness enterprise  gets  its  gains  from  industry, 
the  gains  which  it  gets  are  got  in  compe- 
tition with  rivals;  and  so  it  becomes  the 
aim  of  competitive  business  concerns  to 
hinder  the  productive  efficiency  of  those 
industrial  units  that  are  controlled  by  their 
rivals.  Hence  what  has  been  called  "capi- 
talistic sabotage."  All  this,  of  course, 
is  the  merest  commonplace  of  economic 
science. 

At  this  point  the  national  frontiers  come 
into  the  scheme  of  economic  life,  with  the 
jealousies  and  discrimination  which  the 
frontiers  mark  and  embody.  The  front- 
iers, and  that  obstruction  to  traffic  and 
intercourse  in  which  the  frontiers  take 
effect,  may  serve  a  gainful  purpose  for  the 
business  concerns  within  the  frontiers  by 
imposing  disadvantages  on  those  outside, 
the  result  being  a  lowered  efficiency  of 
industry  on  both  sides  of  the  frontier.  In 
short,  so  far  as  concerns  their  place  and 
value  in  modern  economic  life,  the  national 
frontiers  are  a  means  of  capitalistic  sabot- 
age; and  indeed  that  is  all  they  are  good 
for  in  this  connection.  All  this,  again,  is 
also  a  commonplace  of  economic  science. 

In  past  time,  before  modern  industry  had 
taken  on  its  modern  character  and  taken 
to  the  use  of  a  wide  range  of  diversified 
materials  and  products  drawn  from  all 
over  the  habitable  world — in  the  past  the 
obstruction  to  industry,  and  therefore  to 
material  well-being,  involved  in  the  use  of 
the  frontiers  as  a  means  of  sabotage  was 
of  relatively  slight  consequence.  In  the 
state  of  the  industrial  arts  as  it  prevailed 
in  that  past  era,  the  industrial  processes 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


389 


ran  on  a  smaller  scale  and  made  relatively 
little  use  of  materials  drawn  from  abroad. 
The  mischief  worked  by  sabotage  at  the 
frontiers  was  consequently  also  relatively 
slight;  and  it  is  commonly  believed  that 
other,  incidental  gains  of  a  national  charac- 
ter would  accrue  from  so  obstructing 
traffic  at  the  frontiers,  in  the  way  of 
national  self-sufficiency  and  warlike  prep- 
aration. These  presumed  gains  in  point 
of  "preparedness,"  it  has  been  presumed, 
would  outweigh  the  relatively  slight  eco- 
nomic mischief  involved  in  the  practice  of 
national  sabotage  by  the  obstructive  use 
of  the  frontiers,  under  the  old  system 
of  small-scale  and  home-bred  industry. 

Latterly  this  state  of  things,  which  once 
served  in  its  degree  to  minimize  the  eco- 
nomic mischief  of  the  national  frontiers, 
has  become  obsolete.  As  things  stand 
now,  no  civilized  country's  industrial 
system  will  work  in  isolation.  Not  only 
will  it  not  work  at  a  high  efficiency  if  it  is 
effectually  confined  within  the  national 
frontiers,  but  it  will  not  work  at  all.  The 
modern  state  of  the  industrial  arts  will 
not  tolerate  that  degree  of  isolation  on 
the  part  of  any  country,  even  in  case  of 
so  large  and  diversified  a  country  as  the 
United  States.  The  great  war  has  demon- 
strated all  that.  Of  course,  it  may  be 
conceived  to  be  conceivable  that  a  modern 
civilized  community  should  take  thought 
and  deliberately  forgo  the  use  of  this 
modern  state  of  the  industrial  arts  which 
demands  a  draft  on  all  the  outlying 
regions  of  the  earth  for  resources  neces- 
sary to  its  carrying-on;  and  so  should 
return  to  the  archaic  scheme  of  economic 
life  that  prevailed  in  the  days  before  the 
Industrial  Revolution;  and  so  would  be 
able  to  carry  on  its  industrial  life  in  a 
passable  state  of  isolation,  such  as  still 
floats  before  the  vision  of  the  commercial- 
ized statesmen.  But  all  that  line  of 
fantastic  speculation  can  have  only  a 
speculative  interest.  In  point  of  practical 
fact,  the  nations  of  Christendom  are  here 
together,  and  they  live  and  move  and  have 
their  being  within  this  modern  state  of  the 
industrial  arts,  which  binds  them  all  in  an 
endless  web  of  give  and  take  across  all 
national  frontiers  and  in  spite  of  all  the 


well-devised  obstructive  measures  of  the 
commercialized  statesmen. 

As  an  industrial  unit,  the  Nation  is  out 
of  date.  This  will  have  to  be  the  point  of 
departure  for  the  incoming  New  Order. 
And  the  New  Order  will  take  effect  only 
so  far  and  so  soon  as  men  are  content 
to  make  up  their  account  with  this  change 
of  base  that  is  enforced  by  the  new  com- 
plexion of  the  material  circumstances 
which  condition  human  intercourse.  Life 
and  material  well-being  are  bound  up  with 
the  effectual  working  of  the  industrial 
system;  and  the  industrial  system  is  of  an 
international  character — or  it  should  per- 
haps rather  be  said  that  it  is  of  a  cosmo- 
politan character,  under  an  order  of  things 
in  which  the  nation  has  no  place  or  value. 

But  it  is  otherwise  with  the  business  men 
and  their  vested  interests.  Such  business 
concerns  as  come  into  competition  with 
other  business  concerns  domiciled  beyond 
the  national  frontiers  have  an  interest  in 
the  national  frontiers  as  a  means  of 
obstructing  competition  from  beyond.  For 
the  purpose  of  private  gains,  to  accrue 
to  certain  business  concerns  within  the 
country,  the  national  frontiers,  and  the 
spirit  of  national  jealousy,  are  valuable  as 
a  contrivance  for  the  restraint  of  trade ;  or, 
as  the  modern  phrasing  would  make  it, 
these  things  are  made  use  of  as  a  means 
of  sabotage,  to  limit  competition  and  pre- 
vent an  unprofitably  large  output  of 
merchantable  goods  being  put  on  the 
market — unprofitable,  that  is,  to  the  vested 
interests  already  referred  to,  though  ad- 
vantageous to  the  community  at  large. 

Conversely,  vested  interests  engaged  in 
the  pursuit  of  private  gain  in  foreign  parts, 
in  the  way  of  foreign  investments,  foreign 
concessions,  export  trade,  and  the  like,  also 
find  the  national  establishment  serviceable 
in  enforcing  claims  and  in  procuring  a 
profitably  benevolent  consideration  of  their 
craving  for  gain  on  the  part  of  those 
foreign  nations  into  whose  jurisdiction 
their  quest  of  profits  is  driving  them.  At 
this  point,  again,  the  community  at  large, 
the  common  men  of  the  nation,  have  no 
material  interest  in  furthering  the  advan- 
tage of  the  vested  interests  by  use  of  the 
national  power;  quite  the  contrary  in  fact, 
inasmuch  as  the  whole  matter  resolves 


390 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


itself  into  a  use  of  the  nation's  powers  and 
prestige  for  the  pecuniary  benefit  of  certain 
vested  interests  which  happen  to  be  domi- 
ciled within  the  national  frontiers.  All  this, 
again,  is  a  commonplace  of  economic 
science. 

The  conclusion  is  equally  simple  and 
obvious.  As  regards  the  modern  industrial 
system,  the  production  and  distribution  of 
goods  for  common  use,  the  national  estab- 
lishment and  its  frontiers  and  jurisdiction 
serve  substantially  no  other  purpose  than 
obstruction,  retardation,  and  a  lessened 
efficiency.  As  regards  the  commercial  and 
financial  considerations  to  be  taken  care  of 


by  the  national  establishment,  they  are  a 
matter  of  special  benefits  designed  to 
accrue  to  the  vested  interests  at  the  cost 
of  the  common  man.  So  that  the  question 
of  retaining  or  discarding  the  national 
establishment  and  its  frontiers,  in  all  that 
touches  the  community's  economic  rela- 
tions with  foreign  parts,  becomes  in  effect 
a  detail  of  that  prospective  contest  between 
the  vested  interests  and  the  common  man 
out  of  which  the  New  Order  is  to  emerge, 
in  case  the  outcome  of  the  struggle  turns 
in  favor  of  the  common  man. 


THORSTEIN  VEBLEN. 


Antiquated  Youth 


About  five  years  ago.  a  certain  young 
dramatic  critic  was  dreadfully  shocked  by 
being  asked  if,  after  all,  "Sumurun"  wasn't 
the  sort  of  thing  that  the  theatre  really 
ought  to  do  instead  of  tackling  social 
problems.  At  that  time  the  critic  was 
superintending  the  reformation  of  the 
world  and  his  wife  through  the  agency  of 
a  few  choice  spirits  and  artist-philosophers 
like  Augustus  Thomas,  William  C.  de 
Mille,  George  Broadhurst,  and  Charles 
Klein,  with  occasional  assistance  from  the 
(printed)  plays  of  Henrik  Ibsen  and 
George  Bernard  Shaw.  And  it  only  in- 
creased the  critic's  distress  to  realize  that 
he  was  getting  more  spiritual  sustenance 
out  of  the  Reinhardt  picture-play  of  pas- 
sion and  knockabout  cruelty  than  he  could 
draw  from  that  defense  of  woman's  integ- 
rity, "Bought  and  Paid  For,"  that  expose 
of  corrupt  politics,  "The  Woman,"  and 
that  arraignment  of  Wall  Street  finance, 
"The  Gamblers,"  all  rolled  into  one.  In 
the  end,  however,  the  young  critic  put 
the  doubt  from  him.  Of  course,  Klein 
was  just  a  bit  crude  as  a  manufacturer  of 
dramas  of  discussion.  Wait  till  a  few  of 
our  really  distinguished  fiction-writers 
tried  their  hands  at  it,  and  the  younger 
generation  came  along. 

Since  then  a  great  many  critics  have 
estimated  and  reestimated  the  number  of 
gallons  of  water  that  have  passed  under 
their  favorite  metaphorical  bridge,  and 
since  then  we  have  had  a  rather  disturb- 


ing series  of  events  in  middle  Europe  to 
make  us  think  a  little  less  or  a  little  more 
about  the  theatre.  Finally  have  come  the 
distinguished  writer  of  fiction  to  ask  us 
"Why  Marry?"  and  a  specimen  of  the 
younger  generation  of  England  to  tell  us 
about  "Youth" — all  just  in  time  to  be 
compared  with  a  revival  of  twenty-five- 
years-old  "Mrs.  Warren's  Profession." 
And  what  a  terrible  bore  it  all  is ! — these 
plays  of  Messrs.  Jesse  Lynch  Williams 
and  Miles  Malleson. 

Of  course  this  is  all  very  inconsistent 
and  unfair.  It  is  critical  suicide  to  applaud 
the  polemic  poppycock  of  "The  Woman" 
and  sneer  at  "Why  Marry?" — to  salute 
chastely  the  maidenly  maunderings  of  "A 
Man's  World"  and  yawn  at  "Youth." 
"Why  Marry?"  is  clever.  "Youth"  is 
pitifully  sincere.  "Why  Marry?"  has 
style.  There  is  impassioned  writing  in 
"Youth,"  and  real  humor.  Yet  both  of 
them  end  by  being  deeply  and  thoroughly 
and  boringly  unsatisfying. 

To  put  it  as  crudely  as  a  thesis-play,  a 
lot  of  us  are  tired  of  these  modern  dramas, 
just  as  we  are  tired  of  modern  life.  It  is 
all  a  mess  of  grubbing  and  grabbing  and 
blunder  and  compromise,  with  no  passion 
and  no  blazing  faith  to  light  a  path  across. 
Sometimes  it  almost  seems  as  if  the  world 
itself  had  become  suddenly  aware  of  the 
stink  and  boredom  of  this  era  and  had 
conceived  the  perverse  solution  of  com- 
mitting terrestrial  suicide.  Perhaps  we 


1918] 


391 


are  retreating  into  the  theatre  of  beauty 
just  to  escape  the  confusion  of  today's 
terrible  immolation.  But  I  think  we  should 
gladly,  however  mistakenly,  stick  to  our 
guns  if  there  were  anything  worth  shoot- 
ing at.  What  is  the  use  of  pottering 
round  with  luke-warm  heresies  and  half- 
baked  iconoclasms  that  can't  keep  pace  with 
the  shifting  society  that  they  flatter  them- 
selves they  are  reforming?  No,  the  old 
world  is  dead  and  no  one  knows  the  dif- 
ference— which  is  as  sober  and  as  sensible 
an  explanation  as  any  for  the  sudden 
futility  of  plays  like  "Why  Marry?"  and 
"Youth,"  and  for  the  solemnity  with  which 
some  of  us  accept  them  as  works  of  art 
and  the  absurd  vigor  which  others  bestow 
on  their  regurgitation. 

Yet  even  without  the  war  I  think  we 
should  be  tired  of  these  things.  We  are 
tired  of  talk.  We  are  tired  of  talk  that 
everyone  accepts  and  nobody  acts  on.  We 
are  tired  of  talk  that  nobody  accepts  and 
everyone  acts  on.  We  are  even  tired  of 
talk  that  nobody  accepts  and  nobody  acts 
on — except,  perhaps,  the  angels  and  a  few 
Bolsheviki. 

When  you  go  to  one  of  Mary  Shaw's 
periodic  revivals  of  "Mrs.  Warren's  Pro- 
fession," such  as  she  is  now  giving  in  New 
York  with  the  aid  of  the  Washington 
Square  Players,  you  remember  that  Shaw 
wrote  it  just  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago, 
and  you  are  ready  to  display  at  least  a 
little  antiquarian  curiosity  over  passages 
like  Sir  George  Croft's  defense  of  his 
partnership  with  Mrs.  Warren : 

Why  the  devil  shouldn't  I  invest  my  money 
that  way?  I  take  the  interest  on  my  capital  like 
other  people:  I  hope  you  don't  think  I  dirty  my 
own  hands  with  the  work.  Come:  you  wouldn't 
refuse  the  acquaintance  of  my  mother's  cousin,  the 
Duke  of  Belgravia,  because  some  of  the  rents  he 
gets  are  earned  in  queer  ways.  You  wouldn't  cut 
the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  I  suppose,  because 
the  Ecclesiastical  Commissioners  have  a  few  publi- 
cans and  sinners  among  their  tenants?  Do  you 
remember  your  Crofts  Scholarship  at  Newnham? 
Well,  that  was  founded  by  my  brother  the  M.  P. 
He  gets  his  twenty-two  per  cent  out  of  a  factory 
with  600  girls  in  it,  and  not  one  of  them  getting 
enough  to  live  on.  How  d'ye  suppose  most  of  them 
manage?  Ask  your  mother.  And  do  you  expect 
me  to  turn  back  on  thirty-five  per  cent  when  all 
the  rest  are  pocketing  what  they  can,  like  sensible 
men? 

It  is  no  easier  to  be  moved  when  Mr. 


Jesse  Lynch  Williams  assures  the  twentieth 
century  through  "Why  Marry?"  that  cer- 
tain people  are  wrong  in  thinking  that  sex 
is  evil,  or  that  work  is  rewarded  in 
inverse  ratio  to  its  usefulness  to  society. 
It  is  even  a  bit  difficult  to  credit  Mr.  Wil- 
liams with  cleverness  when  he  urges  a 
defender  of  the  wedding  ring  as  "only  a 
symbol,"  not  to  "insult  the  woman  you  love 
— even  symbolically."  And  when,  in  the 
face  of  the  conductor ettes,  he  expects  us  to 
worry  about  a  young  lady  who  bemoans 
the  fact  that  she  is  "following  the  only  pro- 
fession you've  allowed  me  to  learn — mar- 
riage," even  the  most  stalwart  pillar  of 
playhouse  progress  must  crack  under  the 
strain. 

Likewise  Mr.  Miles  Malleson,  author 
of  "Youth,"  which  preceded  "Mrs.  War- 
ren" at  the  Comedy.  He  is  more  in  the 
good  old  artist-philosopher  strain  than 
Mr.  Williams.  He  has  hold  of  his  prob- 
lem. He  isn't  swinging  it  in  circles  round 
his  head  like  a  dead  cat  on  a  string.  And 
he  writes  with  enthusiasm,  even  beauty. 
Yet  the  interesting  psychological  fact  re- 
mains that  it  is  a  bit  hard  to  get  excited 
over  things  like : 

A  wife  is  terribly  often  a  married-lady-in-a 
drawing-room,  worn  out  doing  nothing — or  a 
married-woman-in-a-kitchen,  worn  out  doing  too 
much;  according  to  the  income  of  her  owner.  .  . 
Why  do  you  suppose  men  wink  so  pleasantly  at 
one  another  over  their  own  little  love  affairs,  and 
can't  find  words  bad  enough  for  the  woman  who 
loves  outside  her  wedding  ring?  ...  A  wife  is 
the  last  word  in  private  property  .  .  .  and  that 
is  always  a  curse.  .  .  When  the  sky  is  privately 
owned,  some  large  firm  will  charge  to  view  the 
sunset! 

We  might  as  well  admit  that  as  talk  this 
is  "old  hat" — like  everything  else  we  hear 
in  "plays  with  a  purpose."  If  it  were 
carried  out  in  action — either  in  the  theatre 
or  in  life — it  would  be  a  little  better.  Both 
plays  might,  indeed,  have  carried  us  back 
to  some  of  the  fascination  of  "A  Doll's 
House,"  if  the  playwrights  could  have  seen 
their  themes  through  with  half  the  resolute 
enthusiasm  that  they  bestowed  on  digging 
up  their  talk.  For  if  both  plays  are  full 
of  "old  hat"  sentiments,  they  are  both 
written  on  a  thoroughly  "new  hat"  sub- 
ject. They  both  wonder  if  marriage — in 
the  legal  sense — is  good  for  young  people. 
But  "Why  Marry?"  never  gets  any  nearer 


392 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


a  reason  than  the  false  supposition  that 
it  is  impossible  for  a  couple  of  young 
scientists  to  marry  when,  one  can  earn 
$2000  a  year  and  the  other  $900,  and 
bewilderingly  and  amusingly  chases  its  tail 
round  that  supposition;  while  "Youth" 
forgets  some  excellent  doubts  that  it  raises 
of  a  young  man's  ability  to  pick  a  per- 
manent mate  when  flushed  with  youth's 
passional  curiosity,  and  backs  its  two 
culprits  off  in  a  couple  of  corners  to  wait 
a  few  weeks  while  the  young  man  makes 
up  a  mind  which,  according  to  the  first  two 
acts,  he  has  been  consistently  and  rightly 
unable  to  make  up  because  of  the  very 
essence  of  the  problem. 

After  all,  can  this  talky-talky  business  be 
"good  theatre"  in  any  but  three  ways:  if 
it  is  as  thoroughgoing  as  "Getting  Mar- 
ried"— absolutely  artificial  in  its  elimina- 
tion of  emotional  violence;  if  it  is  so 
handled  by  an  impossible  master-drama- 
tist— which  Ibsen  is  every  now  and  then — 
that  the  perfection  of  the  product  alone 
fascinates;  or  if  somebody  chucks  all  the 
talk  overboard  and  tells  us  our  modern 
"problem  story"  in  the  plain  terms  of 
inarticulate  human  beings  and  their  ac- 
tions? A  man  named  Mclntyre  once  did 


it  in  a  week's-run  failure  called  "Steve," 
and  Mr.  Cohan  may  do  it  one  of  these 
days. 

I  am  naturally  tempted  to  end  with  the 
announcement  that  only  such  an  eventual- 
ity will  save  the  theatre  from  "Sumurun" 
and  Mr.  Gordon  Craig.  But  it  happens 
that  the  theatre  is  rapidly  getting  old 
enough  to  be  all  things  to  all  men.  There 
was  a  day  when  a  poem  was  an  epic,  and 
another  when  a  book  was  only  a  book — 
when  Homer  cast  lyrics  under  the  striding 
feet  of  war,  and  Bunyan  thought  he  was 
writing  some  sort  of  theological  tome  when 
he  was  making  the  first  English  novel. 
The  theatre  is  still  a  little  in  that  mood. 
But  it  is  no  great  effort  to  imagine  that 
when  the  Great  Peace  has  shaken  us  up 
a  dozen  times  as  thoroughly  as  the  Great 
War  has  yet  done,  our  plays  may  be  as 
full  of  the  fine  thrilling  variety  of  life  as 
our  prose  and  poetry  today.  Then  those 
of  us  who  want  Theda  Bara  and  Charlie 
Chaplin  wed  in  the  guise  of  "Sumurun," 
and  those  of  us  who  like  to  worry  about 
Youth,  will  all  be  satisfied.  But  it  is  also 
safe  to  say  that  Youth  will  sing  a  rather 
different  tune. 

KENNETH  MACGOWAN. 


*A  Gossip  on  James  Branch  Cabell 


One  of  the  prerogatives  of  genius,  as 
distinguished  from  eminent  ability  or  even 
positive  greatness,  is  the  entire  impunity 
with  which  it  refuses  to  live  "in  character." 
Everything  that  living  in  character  has  de- 
manded of  Mr.  Cabell  as  a  man,  he  has 
done  in  his  books  as  an  author — and  there 
only.  There  could  be  no  more  clinching 
objection  to  some  widely  trusted  fashions 
.of  deducing  an  author's  works  from  his 
life  and  then  turning  about  to  deduce  his 
life  from  his  works.  At  the  same  time 
there  could  be  no  more  clinching  demon- 
stration that  an  author's  works  are  the 
quintessence  of  his  reality,  reducing  his  life 
and  all  else  to  flat  irrelevance.  The  real- 
ity of  Mr.  Cabell  is  jongleur,  trickster — 
"Toy-Maker,"  as  he  has  it  in  the  title  of  a 
poem.  The  creator  of  Nicolas  de  Caen 
and  of  Horvendile,  refusing  to  play  his 
part  out  in  life,  has  no  license  in  aesthetics 
to  live  at  all.  He  should  write  unhandi- 


capped  by  existence,  and  make  his  name  a 
legend,  so  that  those  who  dispute  whether 
his  tales  are  true  must  also  dispute  whether 
their  author  ever  lived.  He  should  be  an 
Ossian  without  any  Macpherson  to  embar- 
rass his  aesthetic  consistency,  a  jongleur 
without  a  genealogist  tagging  at  his  heels. 
Time  would  fail  me  to  set  down  in  any 
detail  the  respects  in  which  Mr.  Cabell  is 
the  most  resourceful  jongleur  of  his  trade. 
But  at  least  I  may  signify  how  some  of  the 
most  dexterous  of  his  contrivances  involve 
the  name  of  Nicolas  de  Caen.  Collecting 
1905  the  seven  tales  of  "The  Line  of 


in 


•NOVELS  AND  TALES  :  The  Eagle's  Shadow,  1904 ;  The  Line 
of  Love.  1905;  Gallantry,  1907;  The  Cords  of  Vanity,  1908; 
Chivalry,  1909;  The  Soul  of  Melicent,  1913;  The  Rivet  in 
Grandfather's  Neck,  1915;  The  Certain  Hour,  1916;  The 
Cream  of  the  Jest,  1917. 

VERSE:    From  the  Hidden  Way,  1916. 

GENEALOGY:  Branchiana,  1907;  Branch  of  Abingdon,  1911; 
The  Majors  and  Their  Marriages,  1916. 

For  access  to  much  interesting  material  by  and  about  Mr. 
Cabell,  including  two  books  now  out  of  print,  I  make  grate- 
ful acknowledgment  to  Mr.  Guy  Holt  of  Robert  M.  McBride 
&  Co.,  Mr.  Cabell's  publishers. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


393 


Love,"  Mr.  Cabell  invented  Nicolas  out- 
right as  the  probable  author  of  the  first 
tale,  "Adhelmar  at  Puysange."  The  orig- 
inal manuscript,  "Les  Aventures  d' Adhel- 
mar de  Nointel,"  exists  "in  an  out-of-the- 
way  corner  of  the  library  at  Allonby 
Shaw" — the  library,  presumably,  of  the 
family  of  that  Stephen  Allonby,  later 
Marquis  of  Falmouth,  who  may  be  met  as 
hero  of  the  seventh  tale.  Nicolas  de  Caen, 
to  whom  this  manuscript  is  attributed, 
"though  on  no  very  conclusive  evidence," 
is  "better  known  as  a  lyric  poet  and  satirist 
(circa  1450)."  In  the  epilogue  to  "The 
Line  of  Love"  it  is  noted  that  "Nicolas  de 
Caen  as  yet  lacks  an  English  editor  for  his 
'Roman  de  Lusignan'  and  his  curious 
'Dizain  des  Reines' — those  not  unhand- 
some pieces,  latterly  included  and  anno- 
tated in  the  'Bibliotheca  Abscondita.'  ' 
Finding  Nicolas  accepted  at  his  face  value, 
Mr.  Cabell  subsequently  evolved  the  books 
to  fit  this  hinted  promise :  the  "Dizain  des 
Reines"  is  Mr.  Cabell's  "Chivalry";  and 
the  "Roman  de  Lusignan,"  for  which  "our 
sole  authority  .  .  .  must  continue  to 
be  the  fragmentary  MS.  No.  503  in  the 
Allonbian  Collection,"  is  "The  Soul  of 
Melicent."  It  is  interesting  to  note  that 
the  poem  "A  son  Livret,"  which  ends 
Nicolas's  epilogue  to  "Chivalry,"  is  also 
the  first  piece  in  Mr.  Cabell's  volume  of 
verses,  "From  the  Hidden  Way" ;  which 
detail  is  one  among  a  thousand  hints  of 
the  elvish  magic  whereby  this  author 
makes  all  his  books  conspire  together  to 
evoke  in  you  a  dreamlike  and  excited  won- 
der how  it  happens  that  you  have  read 
them  before.  "From  the  Hidden  Way" 
contains  also  many  another  "adaptation" 
from  Nicolas,  as  well  as  from  his  com- 
peers Raimbaut  de  Vaqueiras,  Antoine 
Riczi,  Theodore  Passerat,  and  several 
more,  all  of  whose  existences  are  estab- 
lished in  a  preface  which  contains  some  of 
Mr.  Cabell's  most  admirable  fine  fooling. 
Few  there  have  been  to  question  the  his- 
toricity of  these  singers  so  little  "likely 
ever  to  cut  a  dash  in  popular  romance." 
Mr.  Cabell  is  rumored  on  impressive  au- 
thority to  prize  a  letter  from  Caen,  where 
a  committee  organizing  to  honor  their 
"distinguished  ex-townsman"  with  a  me- 
morial of  some  sort  could  find  nothing 
about  him  in  the  Bibliotheque  Nationale. 


And  many  a  reviewer — including  the  one 
most  redoubtable  arbiter  elegantiarum 
among  poetic  cults,  an  industrious  antholo- 
gist who  presides,  a  sort  of  professional 
omniscience,  over  the  chaos  of  the  newer 
modes — intimated  his  own  casual  familiar- 
ity with  the  "originals"  of  the  verses  in 
"From  the  Hidden  Way,"  heedless  quite 
of  the  prefatory  admonition:  "Vous  enten- 
dez  bien  joncherie?"  Mr.  Cabell  must 
have  done,  first  and  last,  a  deal  of  chuck- 
ling over  such  evidences  of  his  ambidex- 
terity. 

But  I  think  his  greatest  debt  to  Nicolas 
de  Caen  is  that  worthy's  suggestion  of  the 
"dizain."  For  it  seems  to  me  that  we  must 
seek  Mr.  Cabell's  richest  deposits  in  the 
four  volumes  which  work  out  that  sugges- 
tion :  in  "Gallantry"  his  "Dizain  des  Fetes 
Galantes,"  in  "Chivalry"  his  "Dizain  des 
Reines,"  in  "The  Certain  Hour"  his 
"Dizain  des  Poetes,"  and  in  "The  Line  of 
Love,"  which  would  be  his  "Dizain  des 
Manages"  if  he  had  only  thought  then  of 
"the  decimal  system  of  composition." 
These  four,  together  with  "The  Soul  of 
Melicent,"  are  purest  distillate  of  Cabell. 
In  the  title  of  the  one  dizain  of  tales 
casually  ascribed  to  Nicolas  lies  the  germ 
of  Mr.  Cabell's  quintessential  product — 
the  sequence  of  stories  unified,  not  by  re- 
peating the  persons,  nor  yet  by  enclosing 
the  episodes  in  one  frame  of  place  or 
period,  but  by  making  them  illustrational 
of  a  common  motif,  a  common  acceptance 
of  life.  "The  Line  of  Love"  is  a  geneal- 
ogy of  pairs  of  lovers  tricked  by  fate  into 
each  others'  arms  without  the  romantic 
prerequisite  of  a  passion  shared;  "Chiv- 
alry" is  a  sequence  of  studies  of  the  code 
whose  root  is  "the  assumption  .  .  . 
that  a  gentleman  will  serve  his  God,  his 
honor,  and  his  lady  without  any  reserva- 
tion"; "Gallantry"  presents  in  ten  "come- 
dies" that  Chesterfieldian  attitude  whose 
secret  was  "to  accept  the  pleasures  of  life 
leisurely  and  its  inconveniences  with  a 
shrug" ;  and  "The  Certain  Hour"  is  a  ten- 
fold embodiment  of  the  imaginative  art- 
ist's temperament  in  its  characteristic 
dilemma  of  art  against  human  love.  These 
tales  have  individually,  I  like  to  repeat 
from  an  earlier  comment,  the  vibrancy  and 
the  quick  vision  of  the  best  dramatic  mono- 
logues of  Browning;  and  for  that  we  make 


394 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


acknowledgment  to  the  author  alone.  But 
for  the  shapely  continuity  of  the  volumes 
that  contain  them  I  think  Mr.  Cabell  owes 
something  to  that  creature  of  his  own  de- 
vising, Messire  Nicolas  de  Caen. 

This  extension  of  jonglerie  from  the 
materials  into  the  whole  shape  and  super- 
structure of  Mr.  Cabell's  art  is  proof 
enough  that  the  starting-point  for  appre- 
ciation is  at  his  inestimable  gift  for  hocus- 
pocus.  But  this  extension  is  not  the  end. 
He  no  sooner  perpetrates  the  jest  than  he 
makes  a  philosophy  of  it.  His  little  world 
in  which  the  artist  is  a  jester  at  the  expense 
of  the  gullible  is  only  one  convolution  of 
the  greater  cosmos  in  which  life  is  an  in- 
scrutable jester  at  the  expense  of  us  all, 
including  the  artist  himself.  "Heine  was 
right;  there  is  an  Aristophanes  in  heaven," 
Robert  Etheridge  Townsend  is  overheard 
to  murmur  on  more  than  one  ironic  con- 
tretemps in  "The  Cords  of  Vanity";  and 
it  is  but  a  minor  point  in  the  consistency  of 
a  universe  framed  on  the  jesting  principle 
that  there  should  also  be  an  Aristophanes 
in  Virginia.  Mr.  Cabell  moves,  and  is  our 
guide,  in  a  world  of  "supernal  double-deal- 
ing." "All  available  analogues,"  reflected 
Felix  Kennaston  in  "The  Cream  of  the 
Jest,"  "went  to  show  that  nothing  in  nature 
dealt  with  its  inferiors  candidly";  and 
"everywhere  .  .  .  men  had  labored 
blindly,  at  flat  odds  with  rationality,  and 
had  achieved  everything  of  note  by  acci- 
dent." 

It  is  this  same  Kennaston,  lately  redi- 
vivus  in  "The  Cream  of  the  Jest,"  more 
than  a  decade  after  his  first  appearance  in 
"The  Eagle's  Shadow,"  who  makes  this 
philosophy  explicit.  We  meet  Kennaston 
in  the  midst  of  a  medieval  tale  which  he 
has  himself  written,  playing  in  a  dream  the 
part  of  one  of  his  own  characters,  yet  re- 
membering his  twentieth-century  identity 
and  vainly  trying  to  persuade  the  others 
that  they  are  but  puppets  of  his  making  and 
that  he  alone  is  real.  To  them  he  is  only 
the  half-insane  clerk  Horvendile,  and  in 
despair  at  their  incredulity  he  is  driven  to 
reflect:  "It  may  be  that  I,  too,  am  only  a 
figment  of  some  greater  dream,  in  just  such 
case  as  yours,  and  that  I,  too,  cannot  under- 
stand. It  may  be  the  very  cream  of  the 
jest  that  my  country  is  no  more  real  than 
Storisende.  How  could  I  judge  if  I,  too, 


were  a  puppet?"  All  that  happens  to  him 
happens  "haphazardly  ...  in  some 
three  pounds  of  fibrous  matter  tucked  in- 
side his  skull";  what,  then,  is  to  certify  his 
touch  with  any  objective  reality  at  all? 

Kennaston,  awake  and  sane  in  the  twen- 
tieth century,  publishes  his  tale,  achieves 
some  eminence,  a  fortune,  social  position, 
a  wife  whom  he  is  fond  of.  But  life  con- 
tinues to  mock  him.  He  finds  half  of  a 
broken  metal  disc  covered  with  strange 
hieroglyphics,  a  talisman  with  which  "the 
Wardens  of  Earth  unbar  strange  win- 
dows." Hypnotized  by  its  glitter,  he 
escapes  more  and  more  gladly  out  of  his 
hum-drum  existence  of  a  prospering  and 
respectable  citizen  into  a  world  of 
queerly  inconsecutive  dream-episodes — in- 
cidentally, they  bear  a  distorted  resem- 
blance to  certain  of  Mr.  Cabell's  earlier 
tales — in  which  he  rejoins  for  fleeting  mo- 
ments the  ageless  woman  Ettarre.  These 
parentheses  rapidly  become  the  real  con- 
"text  of  his  life,  and  all  the  rest  mere  inter- 
lude; and  in  the  gaps  he  wonders  "how 
this  dull  fellow  seated  here  in  this  lux- 
urious room"  can  actually  be  Felix  Ken- 
naston. Yet  even  in  his  dreams  life 
mocked  him;  for  if  he  touched  Ettarre 
"the  dream  ended,  and  the  universe 
seemed  to  fold  about  him,  just  as  a  hand 
closes."  And,  crowning  mockery,  it  trans- 
pires that  his  "talisman"  is  but  a  meaning- 
less fragment  of  the  cover  of  a  cold  cream 
jar.  "Many  thousand  husbands  may  find 
at  will  among  their  wives'  possessions  just 
such  a  talisman  as  Kennaston  had  discov- 
ered." Also,  they  may  find  in  their  wives, 
the  story  hints,  just  such  glimpses  of 
Ettarre  the  ageless  woman  as  Kennaston 
saw  in  Kathleen  on  the  occasion  of  his  dis- 
covering the  other  half  of  the  disc  on  her 
dressing-table.  For  the  upshot  of  the 
whole  matter  is  that  Kennaston  is  every 
man,  and  Ettarre  the  ageless  woman  of 
every  man's  worship,  wholly  seen  o-f  no 
man  save  in  dreams,  yet  obscurely  prisoned 
in  the  flesh  of  every  woman  born. 

Succinctly,  then,  Cabell  is  the  comedist 
of  those  two  beings  who  wear  the  flesh  of 
every  body — of  the  idealist  lover  and  the 
earth-bound  respectable  citizen  who  ten- 
ant the  same  clay.  All  his  tales  are  in 
some  sort  "the  song  of  the  double-soul,  dis- 
tortedly  two  in  one." 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


395 


Thus  two  by  two  we  wrangle  and  blunder  about 

the  earth, 
And  that  body  we  share  we  may  not  spare;  but  the 

gods  have  need  of  mirth. 

It  is  the  secret  idealist  in  each  of  us  that 
mainly  interests  Mr.  Cabell;  for,  he  seems 
everywhere  to  be  saying,  it  is  only  the  one 
best  part  of  us  which  is  real  at  all.  The 
gods  have  their  jest  by  yoking  us  unequally 
with  ourselves;  but  there  is  for  every  man 
one  way  to  cheat  the  jest  of  half  its  point, 
if  only  he  can  find  the  way. 

And  what,  ultimately,  is  Mr.  Cabell's 
sense  of  this  way  to  high  individual  ad- 
venture ?  It  is  wholly  characteristic  of  him 
that  whatever  guidance  he  offers  is  the 
guidance  of  an  artist,  never  of  a  moralist. 
His  one  inclusive  and  continuous  interest  is 
in  the  artistic  or  poetizing  temper — a  nar- 
row enough  interest  in  seeming,  when  so 
phrased,  but  expanded  by  his  tacit  defini- 
tion until  it  is  not  only  the  centre,  but  also 
the  circumference,  of  everything.  The 
duality  of  his  world  is  essentially  that  of 
the  artistic  against  the  mediocre;  for  the 
essential  part  of  every  being,  the  one  part 
that  can  turn  the  single  life  from  a  sorry 
jest  into  a  brave  spectacle,  is  the  poetic. 
The  artist  in  each  man  requires  that  he 
give  up  every  cherished  thing  for  the  sake 
of  one  thing  cherished  most.  Under  this 
tyranny  the  lover,  the  fighter,  the  chival- 
rous gentleman,  the  quixotic  fool,  the  art- 
ist in  words,  all  sacrifice  everything  to  their 
own  kinds  of  self-completion ;  for  self-com- 
pletion is  the  law,  and  attainment  of  it  the 
only  success.  Mr.  Cabell's  ideal  of  success 
is  to  reach  the  consummation  of  this  some- 
thing central  in  one's  self,  and  incidentally 
to  miss  everything  else  that  one  might  have 
had.  His  ideal  of  heroism  is  to  sacrifice 
all  for  one's  own  kind  of  perfection  and 
then  fail  to  gain  even  that,  for  this  is  the 
one  kind  of  failure  that  has  moral  dignity 
enough  to  be  tragic. 

He  is  at  heart,  then,  a  prophet  of  that 
austere  aesthetic  doctrine,  the  single-mind- 
edness  of  the  artist.  He  has  made  up  his 
mind,  it  seems,  to  the  tragic  disparity  which 
condemns  the  perfect  writer  to  be  a 
wretched  bungler  at  the  art  of  living,  the 
perfect  lover  a  fool  in  relation  to  all  affairs 
save  those  of  the  heart,  and  the  man  of 
executive  might  always  "more  or  less  men- 
tally deficient."  To  be  perfectly  one- 
self means  to  miss  being  everybody  else. 


Whence  Mr.  Cabell's  two  recurrent  char- 
acters: the  artist  lover  who  is  an  inferior 
citizen,  and  the  writing  artist  who  is  an  in- 
ferior lover.  His  tales  are  populated  with 
lovers  who  must  say  with  Antoine  Riczi : 

"Love  leads  us,  and  through  the  sunlight  of  the 
world  he  leads  us,  and  through  the  filth  of  it  Love 
leads  us,  but  always  in  the  end,  if  we  but  follow 
without  swerving,  he  leads  upward.  Yet,  O  God 
upon  the  Cross!  Thou  that  in  the  article  of  death 
didst  pardon  Dysmas!  as  what  maimed  warriors 
of  life,  as  what  bemired  travellers  in  muddied 
byways,  must  we  presently  come  to  Thee!" 

And  the  tales  are  filled  too  with  those  of 
whom  "life  claims  nothing  very  insistently 
save  that  they  write  perfectly  of  beautiful 
happenings."  These,  and  the  ageless 
woman  by  whichever  name  known,  make 
up  his  trinity.  His  lovers  are  great  enough 
artists  to  find  the  ageless  woman  in  the 
human  mistress;  his  writers  are  great 
enough  artists  to  break  faith  with  the 
human  mistress  because  they  can  find  the 
ageless  woman  only  in  dreams.  His  great- 
est lovers  are  various  sorts  of  fools, 
outlaws,  and  failures  generally;  and  his 
writing  men,  from  Shakespeare  and  Villon 
to  Robert  Etheridge  Townsend  and  John 
Charteris  and  Kennaston,  are  irresponsible 
hedonists  in  love. 

It  is  said  of  Mr.  Cabell  in  a  high  quarter 
that  "he  has  done  quite  the  most  distin- 
guished romance-writing  —  except  Miss 
Johnston's  very  best  —  published  in  this 
country  during  the  last  twenty-five  years." 
To  my  mind  this  is  a  little  like  saying  that 
Mrs.  Wharton  has  written  quite  the  most 
distinguished  realistic  novels — except  Mr. 
Winston  Churchill's  very  best.  Mr.  Cabell 
has  doubtless  made  up  his  mind  to  be 
praised  often  by  the  faint  damnation  of 
critics  who  think  him  almost  as  great  as 
his  inferiors,  such  as  Miss  Johnston  and 
Mr.  Hewlett;  but  one  wonders  with  what 
equanimity  he  hears  himself  dismissed  as 
an  innocent  romancer  who,  tired  of  his 
trade,  has  made  a  few  excursions  into  real- 
ism, as  in  "The  Cords  of  Vanity"  and 
"The  Rivet  in  Grandfather's  Neck." 
Under  whatever  trappings  of  period,  cir- 
cumstance, or  code,  his  work  is  one  in  pur- 
pose and  in  meaning — and  the  meaning  is 
as  realistic  in  "The  Soul  of  Melicent"  as 
in  "The  Rivet."  All  his  work  alike  is 
expression  of  a  duality  which  is  in  essence 
realistic — the  duality,  not  of  the  world  and 


396 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


the  individual,  but  of  the  individual  within 
himself.  Always,  even  in  his  one  vapidly 
frivolous  book,  "The  Eagle's  Shadow,"  he 
has  written  of  "the  thing  one  cannot  do  for 
the  reason  that  one  is  constituted  as  one 
is,"  which  is  "the  real  rivet  in  grandfath- 
er's neck  and  everybody  else's."  Mr. 
Cabell  is  a  romancer  only  by  the  most 
superficial  of  all  the  distinctions  that  can 
be  drawn.  Basically,  he  is  a  realist  without 
the  astigmatism  of  the  localist  and  the 
modernist,  and  without  their  expert  and 
industrious  provision  for  a  quick  oblivion. 
He  is  the  realist  of  the  realities  which 
have  nothing  to  say  to  fashion  and  change, 
and  his  momentary  function  among  us  is  to 
reconstitute  that  higher  realism  which  is 
the  only  true  romance.  That  he  should 
have  got  himself  accepted  to  right  and  left 
as  "only  the  idle  singer  of  an  empty  day" 
is  perhaps  the  cream  of  his  own  prolonged 
and  elaborate  personal  jest.  So  at  least  we 
may  agree  to  call  it — unless  it  should  pres- 
ently transpire  that  his  three  goodly  vol- 
umes of  genealogy  are  his  sole  essays  in 
fiction,  and  his  tales  true  pages  of  authentic 
history.  This  impish  inversion,  cunningly 
planned  for  the  subtler  fun  of  watching  the 
clever  folk  go  wrong  because  of  their  clev- 
erness and  the  stupid  folk  go  right  because 
of  their  stupidity,  would  be  less  Mr. 
Cabell's  self-contradiction  than  his  Aristo- 
phanic  crown.  WILSON  FOLLETT. 


Our  London  Letter 


For  the  Young  Men  Dead 

Give  them  the  Spring  again  some  other  place! 
Though  they  are  dead,  now  let  them  have  a  birth 
In  Spring — the  languor  of  the  earth, 
The  sharp  delight  of  apple-trees,  or  a  face. 
Let  them  on  moorlands  by  a  blue  sea  race 
The  tumbling  little  breezes,  yapping  mirth. 
Give  them  the  light,  the  breathing,  and  the  girth 
Of  a  Spring  day  that  is  enough  of  space. 

They  are  so  young,  I  don't  think  they  decay     , 
Quickly,  as  those  perhaps  more  worn  with  life, 
Nor  do  they  take  quiescence  as  their  lot. 
They  wake,  they  stir,  they  are  leaping,  they're  at 

play 
At  young  men's  games,  wrestling,   putting  the 

shot, 
And  the  fields  of  heaven  are  noisy  with  clean 

FLORENCE  KIPER  FRANK. 


It  was  not  of  course  to  be  supposed  that  Mr. 
Edmund  Gosse's  charming  and  vivacious,  if 
sometimes  over  reticent,  portrait  of  Swin- 
burne would  remain  forever  unchallenged.  The 
counterblast  has  come,  whence  it  might  have 
been  expected,  from  two  members  of  the  Watts- 
Dunton  circle,  in  a  volume  entitled  "The  Letters 
of  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  with  Some 
Personal  Recollections,"  by  Thomas  Hake  and 
Arthur  Compton-Rickett  (John  Murray,  Lon- 
don, 10/6).  It  may  be  said  at  once  that  the 
counterblast  takes  a  singularly  gentle  and  court- 
eous form  and  that  there  is  no  trace  of  any 
desire  on  the  part  of  the  authors  to  begin  one 
of  those  gigantic  literary  quarrels  which  Swin- 
burne himself  found  so  pleasant.  They  only 
remark  in  their  introduction  that  Mr.  Gosse  is 
not  altogether  fair  in  his  account  of  Swin- 
burne's later  life,  and  they  protest  against  his 
estimate  of  Watts-Dunton's  influence.  In  the 
body  of  their  book  they  certainly  endeavor  to 
present  Swinburne's  years  of  retirement  at  the 
Pines  in  as  cheerful  a  light  as  possible;  but  they 
are  far  from  being  quarrelsome  and,  except  in 
one  very  slight  instance,  they  do  not  contradict 
Mr.  Gosse  in  matters  of  fact.  From  this  point  of 
view  the  book  is  a  model  of  restraint  and  literary 
good  manners.  It  is  even — I  am  bound  to  con- 
fess, remembering  the  leanings  of  its  subject — 
a  little  disappointing. 

But  taken  as  a  whole  it  cannot  be  compared 
with  Mr.  Gosse's  study;  nor  is  it  very  good 
regarded  by  itself,  without  any  comparison.  The 
title  is  somewhat  misleading.  Only  a  com- 
paratively small  number  of  letters  are  quoted 
and  the  book  does  not  cover  the  whole  of  Swin- 
burne's life  or  even,  with  any  sort  of  complete- 
ness, any  one  period  of  his  life.  It  looks  very 
much,  in  fact,  as  though  the  authors  had  at  their 
disposal  a  quite  fortuitously  selected  heap  of 
letters,  out  of  which  they  made  as  good  a  book 
as  they  could.  They  do  not  seem  to  have  made 
any  use  of  Mr.  T.  J.  Wise's  privately  printed 
collection,  and  it  is  obvious  that  before  we  can 
fully  judge  Swinburne  as  a  letter-writer  we  must 
wait  for  the  volume  which  Mr.  Gosse  has  an- 
nounced. 

But  such  letters  as  are  given  here  are  extremely 
interesting  and  whet  one's  appetite  for  a  larger 
and  fuller  book.  Swinburne  is  not  likely  to  be 
placed  in  the  very  first  rank  of  letter-writers — 
for  just  the  same  reason  that  keeps  him  out  of  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


397 


first  rank  of  poets.  He  was  far  too  much 
interested  in  literature  and  far  too  little  interested 
in  life.  It  may  be  objected  that  nearly  all  the 
most  entertaining  letter-writers  write  a  good  deal 
about  literature  and  that  some  of  the  best 
letters  in  the  world  are  bookish  letters.  But 
Swinburne's  curse  was  that  he  completely  con- 
fused literature  and  life.  He  looked  at  life 
through  literature,  and  when  he  was  confronted 
with  a  new  fact  or  a  new  personality  he  promptly 
made  up  some  more  literature  through  which  to 
regard  it.  All  his  passions,  his  republicanism, 
his  enthusiasm  for  Italy — a  country  he  hardly 
knew — were  self-hypnotisms  based  on  poetical 
conventions.  This  unfortunate  characteristic 
makes  many  of  his  letters  as  unreal  as  much  of  his 
poetry;  but  they  are  still  readable  and  good, 
and  they  are  always  extremely  like  their  author. 
Some  of  the  best  are  those  in  which  Swinburne, 
in  a  mixture  of  ecstasy,  humility,  and  critical 
precision,  advises  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  on  the 
changes  to  be  made  in  the  proof-sheets  of  his 
forthcoming  volume  of  poems.  The  opinions  are 
sometimes  characteristically  extravagant,  as  when 
he  says: 

Of  the  sonnets  gathered  up  together  in  the  book,  I 
can  only  say  I  am  always  in  an  equal  wonder  at 
their  overrunning  wealth  of  thought  and  phrase, 
clothed  and  set  in  such  absolutely  impeccable  and 
inevitable  perfection  of  expressive  form. 

Swinburne's  likes  and  dislikes  were  generally 
pretty  irrational;  and  when  he  liked  a  thing  he 
had  as  a  rule  only  a  rich,  but  never  a  very  pre- 
cise or  enlightening,  vocabulary  of  praise.  When 
he  disliked,  or  liked  only  faintly  or  reluctantly, 
he  was  often  much  closer  in  his  expression.  Thus, 
in  the  same  letter,  he  defines  the  faults  of  Morris's 
"Earthly  Paradise"  very  clearly: 

I  have  just  received  Topsy's  book:  the  Oudrun 
story  is  excellently  told,  I  can  see,  and  of  keen 
interest,  but  I  find  generally  no  change  in  the  trailing 
style  of  work.  His  Muse  is  like  Homer's  Trojan 
women;  she  drags  her  robes  as  she  walks.  I  really 
think  any  Muse  (when  she  is  neither  resting  or  flying) 
ought  to  tighten  her  girdle,  tuck  up  her  skirts,  and  step 
out.  It  is  better  than  Tennyson's  short-winded  and 
artificial  concision — but  there  is  such  a  thing  as  swift 
and  spontaneous  strife.  Top's  is  spontaneous  and 
slow;  and,  especially,  my  ear  hungers  for  more  force 
and  variety  of  sound  in  the  verse.  It  looks  as  if  he 
purposely  avoided  all  strenuous  emotion  or  strength 
of  music  in  thought  and  word;  and  so,  when  set  by 
other  work  as  good,  his  work  seems  hardly  done  in 
thorough  earnest. 

This  is  sound  and  illuminating;  and  perhaps  the 
best  that  can  be  said  of  these  letters  is  that  they 
give  the  ardency  and  occasional  good  sense  of 


Swinburne's  literary  criticism  without,  as  a  rule, 
the  luxuriant  verbiage  and  high-pitched  super- 
latives of  his  set  essays.  If  they  are  to  be  taken 
as  pieces  of  self-revelation  there  is  nothing  in  them 
so  pathetic  or  so  enlightening  as  this,  in  a  letter 
to  Watts-Dunton : 

Chatto  has  not  sent  a  single  weekly  newspaper  to 
order;  they  should  all  have  been  here  by  nine  this 
morning.  On  second  thoughts,  to  prevent  any  con- 
fusion of  my  own  with  my  mother's  account,  I  shall 
not  order  the  "Pall  Mall"  of  the  people  who  supply 
her  with  journals,  but  order  it  straight  from  the 
office,  subscribing  for  three  or  six  months.  Will  you 
kindly  draw  up  and  forward  me  a  proper  business- 
like order  to  that  effect,  and  let  me  know  if,  and  how 
much,  I  ought  to  pay  in  advance,  a  task  which  you, 
perhaps,  would  undertake  for  me,  and  I  could  send 
you  a  cheque  for  the  amount  as  soon  as  you  can 
get  and  send  me  a  cheque  book? 

This  heart-rending  paragraph  raises  at  once,  in 
a  most  uncompromising  form,  the  question 
whether  Swinburne  was  right  in  submitting 
himself  to  the  protection  and  guardianship  of 
Watts-Dunton. 

And,  personally,  I  have  no  hestitation  what- 
ever in  replying  that  the  authors  of  this  book 
are  right  and  that  Mr.  Gosse,  with  all  his 
sympathy  and  brilliance,  is  wrong.  The  ques- 
tion was  whether  the  amazing  and  magnificent 
youthful  Swinburne,  whose  incredibly  dissolute 
habits  we  are  all  so  afraid  of  mentioning,  should 
dissolve  altogether  or  should  consent  to  an  order- 
ing of  his  life  that  would  prolong  it  but  would 
certainly  rob  it  of  all  its  magnificence.  There 
seems  to  have  been  no  alternative  between  a 
somewhat  tamed  and  faded  poet  and  a  dead,  or 
at  the  very  best  an  insane,  poet.  I  do  not  think 
the  faded  poet  who  lived  at  the  Pines  was  really 
of  very  much  interest  to  the  world;  but  then 
neither  would  a  poet  dead  or  mad  have  been. 
Mr.  Gosse,  I  fancy,  is  led  astray  by  his  feeling 
for  composition.  That 'long  and  terrible  anti- 
climax offends  his  artistic  instincts,  and  a  Swin- 
burne either  dying  horribly  or  shut  up  in  a  mad- 
house would  have  made  a  much  more  effective 
close  to  the  story.  I  do  not  mean  that  Mr. 
Gosse  has  thought  all  this  out  so  brutally,  or 
even  consciously  at  all;  but  I  think  these  must 
be  the  sub-conscious  considerations  which  have 
affected  his  judgment.  Of  course  some  other 
person  might  have  been  found  for  the  job  of 
guardian.  Watts-Dunton  was  an  excessively  dull 
novelist  and  poet,  and  a  critic  more  magisterial 
than  sympathetic;  but,  after  all,  Swinburne 
probably  wanted  to  live  and  retain  his  reason. 
Watts-Dunton  managed  that  for  him  in  a  very 


398 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


effective  way  and  may  be  forgiven  for  his  poems 
and  novels. 

Swinburne  is  still  by  way  of  being  a  mystery 
and  I  may  be  excused  for  taking  up  so  much 
space  with  anything  that  throws  a  little  new 
light  on  him.  But  I  wish  I  had  left  myself  a 
little  more  for  dealing  with  Mr.  Bertrand  Rus- 
sell's new  book,  "Mysticism  and  Logic"  (Long- 
mans, Green;  $2.50).  The  other  day,  when  I 
was  reading  the  literary  column  of  a  weekly 
paper,  I  was  a  little  astonished  to  see  that  the 
writer,  in  opposing' the  view  that  we  have  today 
no  first-class  prose  writers,  mentioned  Mr.  Rus- 
sell as  an  instance  to  the  contrary.  But  the 
more  I  thought  of  it  the  more  I  began  to  believe 
he  was  right;  and  "Mysticism  and  Logic" 
has  been  quite  e'nough  to  settle  my  doubts.  My 
hesitation  was  caused  by  the  fact  that  one  thinks 
first  of  Mr.  Russell  as  a  mathematical  philosopher 
of  extraordinary  profundity,  part-author  of  the 
great  "Principia  Mathematica,"  of  which  it  has 
been  said  that  only  eighty-seven  persons  in  the 
world  can  understand  it  and  that  this  number 
does  not  include  both  the  authors.  But  he  is 
more  besides.  He  is  a  writer  .who  can  popular- 
ize philosophy,  even  mathematical  philosophy, 
without  making  it  vulgar  or  becoming  himself 
condescending;  and  he  can  write  nobly  and 
greatly  in  a  manner  intelligible  to  the  laity  with- 
out ever  seeming  to  stoop  to  their  level. 

"Mysticism  and  Logic"  contains  so  much  wit 
and  handles  difficult  matters  so  lightly  and 
adroitly  that  at  first  the  temptation  to  use  an 
easy  cliche  and  call  Mr.  Russell  a  "Laughing 
Philosopher"  is  almost  overwhelming.  But  then 
one  turns  over  the  pages  and  comes  on  this  pas- 
sage: 

That  man  is  the  product  of  causes  which  had  no 
prevision  of  the  end  they  were  achieving;  that  his 
origin,  his  growth,  his  hopes  and  fears,  his  loves 
and  his  beliefs  are  but  the  outcome  of  accidental 
collocations  of  atoms ;  that  no  fire,  no  heroism,  no 
intensity  of  thought  and  feeling  can  preserve  an 
individual  life  beyond  the  grave ;  that  all  the  labours 
of  the  ages,  all  the  devotion,  all  the  inspiration,  all 
the  noonday  brightness  of  human  genius  are  destined 
to  extinction  in  the  vast  death  of  the  solar  system, 
and  that  the  whole  temple  of  man's  achievement  must 
inevitably  be  buried  beneath  the  debris  of  a  universe 
in  ruins — all  these  things,  if  not  quite  beyond  dispute, 
are  yet  so  nearly  certain,  that  no  philosophy  which 
rejects  them  can  hope  to  stand.  Only  within  the 
scaffolding  of  these  truths,  only  on  the  firm  founda- 
tion of  unyielding  despair,  can  the  soul's  habitation 
henceforth  be  safely  built. 

This  is  not  comfortable  doctrine,  but  it  is  nobly 
expressed;  and  the  essay  from  which  it  is  taken, 
"A  Free  Man's  Worship,"  is  one  of  the  finest 


pieces  of  philosophical  writing  of  modern  times. 
In  general  recent  philosophy  has  either  been  of 
a  highly  technical  order  (like  Croce's)  or  has 
leaned  towards  the  popularity  of  the  salon  and 
the  lecture-room,  more  anxious  to  be  striking  and 
up-to-date  than  to  be  elevating  and  profound 
(like  Bergson's).  Philosophy  was  tending  to  dis- 
appear in  two  directions  from  the  survey  of  the 
ordinary,  unspecialized,  but  cultured  man,  who 
was  left  to  nourish  his  soul  on  poetry  alone. 
Now  again,  perhaps,  if  he  has  courage  to  face 
Mr.  Russell's  frightful  universe  and  to  extract 
from  it  the  lessons  of  courage  and  exaltation 
which  Mr.  Russell  extracts,  he  can  say: 

How  charming  is  divine  philosophy! 

Not  harsh  and  crabbed  as  dull  fools  suppose 

But  musical  as  is  Apollo's  lute. 

In  conclusion  I  must  mention  not  a  book  but 
an  incident  or  an  affair.  One  ought  to  begin: 
"All  London  has  been  talking  .  .  ;  *'  But  pre- 
cisely what  bothers  me  is  that  London  has  been 
doing  nothing  of  the  kind.  A  certain  gentleman, 
a  Mr.  Austin  Fryers,  has  produced  on  the  stage 
of  the  Court  Theatre  a  play  called  "Realities," 
which,  he  says,  was  written  by  Ibsen  as  a  sequel 
to  "Ghosts."  Now  Mr.  Heinemann,  Ibsen's 
English  publisher,  to  whom  apparently  Mr.  Fry- 
ers offered  the  copyright  of  this  piece,  produces 
a  letter  from  Dr.  Sigurd  Ibsen,  the  son  of  the 
dramatist,  to  the  effect  that  his  father  never 
wrote  any  such  play.  Moreover  the  Norwegian 
original  of  the  piece,  it  seems,  is  not  forthcom- 
ing— only  the  English  translation.  However,  it 
has  been  performed.  I  do  not  know  whether  it 
is  of  Ibsen  or  not.  Oswald  is  recovered,  Mrs. 
Alving  is  paralyzed,  Oswald  is  still  in  love  with 
Regina  and  uses  drugs  to  back  up  the  effects  of 
his  blandishments — but  no!  I  do  not  think  it 
is  by  Ibsen.  The  odd  thing  is  that  no  one 
seems  to  care,  and  this  perplexes  me.  Of  two 
things,  one:  either  an  impudent  fraud  has  been 
attempted  on  the  English  public,  or  an  unknown 
play  of  Ibsen's  maturity  has  been  discovered. 
But,  I  say  again  in  my  bewilderment,  no  one 
seems  to  care ;  and  the  critics  rather  lackadaisically 
discuss  three  possible  solutions:  (a)  that  it  is  all 
Ibsen;  (b)  that  it  is  all  Fryers;  (c)  that  it  is 
some  of  each.  The  truth  is,  I  suppose,  that 
Ibsen  is  a  little  out  of.  fashion  at  the  moment ; 
and  this  must  be  very  disappointing  to  Mr. 
Fryers,  whoever  wrote  the  play.  However  it  is 
too  late  for  him  now  to  fasten  the  thing  on  to 
Shakespeare.  EDWARD  SHANKS. 

London,  April  6,  1918. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


399 


The  Voice  of  Reason 

THE  AIMS  OF  LABOUR.  By  Arthur  Henderson, 
M.  P.,  Secretary  of  the  Labour  Party.  Huebsch; 
50  cts. 

Here  is  a  pamphlet  of  some  eighty-two  pages 
by  Mr.  Henderson,  to  which  is  appended  the 
"Memorandum  on  War  Aims"  of  the  British 
Labor  Party,  together  with  that  remarkable 
document  on  reconstruction,  "Labour  and  the 
New  Social  Order" — only  a  hundred  odd  printed 
pages  in  all.  Yet  in  this  small  compass  are 
contained  the  most  explicit  and  illuminating 
answers  to  those  questions  which  the  war  has 
compelled  every  one  of  us,  hopefully  or  despair- 
ingly, to  ask.  If  we  would  know  the  purpose 
and  meaning  of  the  democratic  forces  which  the 
conflict  has  summoned  even  while,  for  the  time 
being,  it  has  ruthlessly  crushed  their  outward 
manifestation,  that  knowledge  is  here;  if  we  are 
eager  to  discover  on  what  terms  and  until  what 
point  the  war  ought  to  continue,  the  answer  is 
here;  if  we  sometimes  wonder  about  what  kind 
of  programme  must  be  followed  in  the  coming 
strange  days  of  peace,  if  we  are  to  avoid  disaster 
in  an  impoverished  and  exhausted  world,  that 
programme,  in  specific  as  well  as  general  terms, 
is  presented  to  us  here.  All  the  complexities  and 
cross-purposes  that  Entente  diplomacy  has  fum- 
blingly  and  palteringly  bickered  over,  being  either 
afraid  or  unwilling  to  bring  them  into  the  open 
light  of  common  discussion,  are  here  frankly 
envisaged.  The  Labor  Party  does  not  flinch  from 
the  most  "delicate"  questions  of  the  hushed-voice 
diplomacy,  which  cannot  even  yet  wholly  free 
itself  from  the  nineteenth-century  tradition  of 
back-stairs  pourparlers.  The  break  is  complete 
and  final  with  that  kind  of  conventional  foreign- 
office  method  which  regards  the  representative 
chamber  as  a  mere  audience  hall  where  the  tri- 
umphs of  secret  negotiations  can  be  eloquently 
exposed  or  the  not-to-be-hidden  failures  gracefully 
explained  away.  Every  card  is  laid  on  the  table, 
and  although  the  discussion  is  tactful,  the  claims 
of  the  feelings  of  diplomats  are  not  regarded 
as  more  urgent  than  the  demand  for  a  more 
decent  world  from  the  millions  who  have  suf- 
fered all  things  to  bring  it  into  existence.  For 
example,  the  legitimate  aspirations  of  Italy  are 
unhesitatingly  supported,  but  the  flavor  of  im- 
perialistic ambition  in  other  Italian  claims  is  as 
unhesitatingly  condemned.  Similarly,  Alsace- 
Lorraine  is  treated,  as  it  ought  all  along  to  have 
been  treated,  as  an  international  question,  not 
as  a  private  property  problem  of  either  Germany 


or  France.  The  vexed  problems  of  the  Balkans 
and  of  the  African  colonies  are,  with  a  con- 
sistency that  never  loses  touch  with  the  facts, 
freely  recommended  to  the  decision  of  an  inter- 
national commission  acting  under  the  authority  of 
that  league  of  nations  which  it  is  the  business 
of  this  war  to  make  practicable.  The  Labor 
Party's  hostile  attitude  toward  an  economic  "war 
after  the  war"  and  its  placing  of  complete  repara- 
tion of  Belgium  as  the  sine  qua  non  of  even 
discussion  of  peace  do  not  need  elaboration.  The 
point  is,  nothing  has  been  left  to  a  mere  general 
declaration  of  good  intentions.  The  outline  is 
full  and  detailed. 

No  one  can  read  this  document  and  fail  to  see 
that  it  is  the  most  uncompromising  programme 
for  an  acceptable  peace  yet  proposed.  The  corner 
stone  of  the  entire  scheme,  of  course,  is  the 
proposed  league  of  nations.  But  it  is  precisely 
the  surrender  of,  complete  national  sovereignty 
implicit  in  any  league  of  nations  which  runs 
counter  to  the  whole  purpose  and  philosophy  of 
Germany's  world  politics.  Only  a  defeated  or  a 
revolutionized  Germany  can  be  a  trustworthy 
partner  in  any  such  league  as  the  British  Labor 
Party  proposes.  Even  what  is  conventionally 
called  "victory"  will  not  satisfy  it.  "Any 
victory,"  writes  Mr.  Henderson,  "however  spec- 
tacular and  dramatic  in  a  military  sense  it  may 
be,  which  falls  short  of  the  realization  of  the 
ideals  with  which  we  entered  the  war,  will  not  be 
a  victory  but  a  defeat.  We  strive  for  victory  be- 
cause we  want  to  end  war  altogether,  not  merely 
to  prove  the  superiority  of  British  arms  over 
those  of  Germany.  We  continue  the  struggle, 
dreadful  though  the  cost  of  it  has  become,  be- 
cause we  have  to  enforce  reparation  for  a  great 
wrong  perpetrated  upon  a  small  unoffending 
nation,  to  liberate  subject  peoples  and  enable 
them  to  live  under  a  form  of  government  of 
their  own  choosing,  and  to  destroy,  not  a  great 
nation,  but  a  militarist  autocracy  which  had  de- 
liberately planned  war  without  considering  the  in- 
terests either  of  their  own  people  or  of  the  Euro- 
pean Commonwealth  of  which  they  are  a  part." 

Yet  in  the  face  of  such  assertions  it  is  the 
solemn  truth  that  Arthur  Henderson  has  been 
described  as  a  person  of  "pacifist"  tendencies 
by  people  who  really  ought  to  have  known  bet- 
ter. Perhaps  the  myth  arose  from  his  resigna- 
tion from  the  Lloyd  George  cabinet  when  he 
disagreed  with  the  Premier  over  the  advisabil- 
ity of  sending  delegates  to  the  international  con- 
ference of  labor  and  socialists,  called  by  the 


400 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


Russians.  Mr.  Henderson  is  content  to  leave  the 
judgment  upon  the  merits  of  that  controversy  to 
history,  but  his  growing  leadership  in  interna- 
tional affairs  indicates  that  perhaps  a  large  part 
of  the  contemporary  world  of  labor  has  already 
judged.  He  stands  today  as  the  most  consistent, 
the  most  fearless,  and  the  most  powerful  advo- 
cate of  a  moral  victory  over  German — and  every 
other — imperialism.  It  is  no  accident  that  his 
hopes,  and  the  hopes  of  those  for  whom  he  speaks, 
receive  their  greatest  encouragement  from  the 
policies  and  aims  enunciated  by  President  Wilson. 

Now  what  does  it  mean — this  clarity  and  con- 
ciseness from  an  unofficial  body?  Since  Mr. 
Henderson's  book  was  written  the  programme  he 
advocates  has  been  adopted  by  inter-Allied  labor, 
and  the  visiting  delegates  of  American  labor, 
according  to  recent  dispatches  from  London, 
announce  themselves  as  sympathetic.  In  brief,  the 
whole  drift  of  events  shows  that  if  governments 
will  not  of  themselves  officially  present  a  common 
diplomatic  front  to  the  enemy,  the  peoples  will 
do  it  unofficially  and  without  invitation.  Already 
they  are  making  the  abolishment  of  secret  diplom- 
acy more  than  an  unctuous  phrase — here  is  a  clear 
instance  of  open  pragmatic  diplomacy  in  action. 
Bit  by  bit  the  whole  rotten  structure  of  interna- 
tional intrigue,  as  we  knew  it  before  the  war, 
is  being  destroyed.  Conventional  diplomacy  has 
shown  itself  bankrupt,  and  the  peoples  are 
appointing  their  own  receivers — "the  people  will 
not  choose  to  entrust  their  destinies  at  the  Peace 
Conference  to  statesmen  who  have  not  perceived 
the  moral  significance  of  the  struggle,  and  who 
are  not  prepared  to  make  a  people's  peace." 

In  this  pamphlet  Mr.  Henderson  makes  his 
eloquent  plea  for  preparation  for  a  people's  peace 
even  in  war  time.  It  is  a  plea  written  with 
admirable  good  temper  and  good  sense.  The  war 
has  raised  so  many  problems  that  it  is  a  kind  of 
psychological  self-protection  to  fall  back  on  the 
mechanical  theory  of  progress — that  preparation 
for  a  new  world  goes  on  while  we  sleep,  and 
that  a  finer  social  order  somehow  inheres  in  the 
mere  end  of  hostilities.  Our  own  political  think-, 
ing,  for  instance,  is  so  dominated  by  the  legalistic 
tradition,  which  cannot  even  imaginatively  envis- 
age any  other  political  entities  than  the  sovereign 
national  state,  that  our  press  is  quite  content  with 
what  one  might  call  the  automatic  slot  machine 
theory  of  war  and  peace.  The  theory  is :  you  put 
in  the  penny  of  a  military  victory  and  automat- 
ically pull  out  the  gum  of  a  perfect  peace  and 
a  happy  world.  Mr.  Henderson  puts  the  criminal 


folly  of  this  attitude  in  a  few  words:  "The  out- 
standing facts  of  world  politics  at  the  present 
time — and  when  peace  comes  this  fact  will  be 
made  still  more  clear — is  that  a  great  tide  of 
revolutionary  feeling  is  rising  in  every  country." 
The  reactionaries  are  tragically  deceiving  them- 
selves if  they  imagine  that  the  present  unchal- 
lenging  submission  of  the  peoples  to  all  sorts  of 
restriction  upon  freedom  is  an  earnest  of  the 
temper  with  which  they  will  face  the  problems 
of  reconstruction.  Of  course  Mr.  Henderson 
does  not  believe  in  violent  revolution;  the  whole 
bent  of  the  English  mind  is  towards  constitutional 
and  orderly  change.  Organized  revolution  in  the 
continental  sense  is  not  part  of  England's  historic 
background ;  her  people  do  not  plan  dramatic  and 
sudden  coups  d'etat.  But,  as  Mr.  Henderson 
points  out,  they  "are  capable  of  vigorous  action, 
of  persistent  and  steady  agitation  year  in  and  year 
out,  of  stubborn  and  resolute  pressure  against 
which  nothing  can  stand."  Our  own  gusty  and 
sporadic  methods  of  political  agitation  might 
learn  with  considerable  profit  from  this  even, 
stubborn  temper  of  the  British.  In  any  modern 
highly  organized  industrial  democracy  the  people 
stand  to  lose  almost  as  much  as  they  gain  by 
resorting  to  the  barricade  and  the  red  flag.  It  is 
just  the  prosaic  problem  of  production;  a  decent 
social  order  is  not  the  flower  of  that  impoverish- 
ment which  inevitably  arises  when  the  whole 
machinery  of  production  is  thrown  askew. 

Yet  the  decision  as  to  whether  reconstruction  is 
to  be  a  violent  or  peaceful  affair  does  not,  after 
all,  rest  with  the  democracies.  It  rests  with  the 
small  powerful  cliques  that  control  the  ma- 
chinery of  the  modern  state.  A  mere  restoration 
of  the  capitalistic  regime  which  the  war  has  dis- 
credited and  in  large  part  destroyed  will  not  be 
tolerated,  not  even  in  Germany;  for  as  Mr.  Hen- 
derson says  with  such  fine  dispassion,  "conscience 
and  reason  do  not  end  upon  the  frontiers  of 
Central  Europe."  In  a  word,  when  the  war  is 
over  and  democracy  has  defeated  its  foreign 
enemies,  it  will  know  how  to  defeat  its  domestic 
enemies.  That  domestic  victory  will  come  either 
through  peaceable  means  or  direct  assault,  but  the 
decision  as  to  which  method  shall  be  followed 
depends  upon  the  reasonableness  of  those  in  con- 
trol. They  cannot  too  early  begin  to  cultivate 
the  mood  whereby  they  can  gracefully  relinquish 
power.  For  only  in  an  atmosphere  of  rational 
accommodation  can  peace,  when  finally  it  does 
come,  be  in  very  truth  a  jewel  without  price. 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


401 


Literary  Claptrap 

LITERARY  CHAPTERS.    By  W.  L.  George.     Little, 

Brown;  $1.50. 

Mr.  George  is  best  known  to  us  as  the  author 
of  "The  Second  Blooming."  The  little  essays  of 
this  little  book  are  his  own  second  blooming, 
presumably.  They  are  a  little  forced,  and  will 
fade  early. 

He  seems,  himself,  to  think  them  rather  daring. 
"I  will  affront  the  condemnatory  vagueness  of 
wool  and  fleecy  cloud."  I  knew  a  lady  once, 
intelligent  and  of  uncertain  age,  who  confessed 
that  to  use  the  word  "harlot"  always  gave  her  a 
certain  thrill.  I  should  say  Mr.  George's  essays 
affected  him  in  the  same  fashion.  As  a  matter  of 
fact  they  are  most  agreeably  genteel.  Novelists, 
Mr.  George  declares,  are  not  as  highly  thought 
of  as  they  ought  to  be.  The  fame  of  the  novel 
must  inevitably  become  a  little  complicated  in  our 
increasingly  complicated  age.  Arnold  Bennett, 
Joseph  Conrad,  John  Galsworthy,  Thomas 
Hardy,  and  H.  G.  Wells  "hold  without  chal- 
lenge the  premier  position  today"  (boy,  page 
George  Moore).  J.  D.  Beresford,  Gilbert 
Cannan,  E.  M.  Forster,  D.  H.  Lawrence, 
Compton  Mackenzie,  Oliver  Onions,  Frank 
Swinnerton  are  particularly  promising.  (Later 
one  discovers  that  "Mr.  Bennett  and  Mr.  Wells 
have  taken  the  plunge  which  leads  to  popularity, 
but  the  younger  ones  have  produced  one  man, 
Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence.")  Miss  Amber  Reeves 
and  Miss  Sheila  Kaye-Smith  are  very  clever 
young  women.  Genius  does  not  apparently  flour- 
ish in  the  soil  of  a  comfortable  democracy.  And 
finally  (this  is  Mr.  George's  way  of  uttering  the 
word  which  thrilled  my  friend)  the  English  pub- 
lic still  refuses  to  allow  any  presentation  of  sex- 
interests  which  gives  their  actual  proportion  in 
the  scheme  of  life.  A  criticism  or  two,  of  the 
sort  which  many  hundreds  of  people  drop  from 
their  sleeves  on  the  desks  of  scores  of  editors  of 
literary  magazines,  fill  out  Mr.  George's  240 
pages.  I  confess  I  did  not  find  myself  gasping 
anywhere  at  Mr.  George's  audacity. 

He  writes  well,  at  times.  "It  may  be  that  the 
sunset  of  genius  and  the  sunrise  of  democracy 
happened  all  within  one  day."  "Humanity  grows 
fat,  and  the  grease  of  its  comfort  collects  round 
its  heart."  But  in  his  style,  as  in  his  ideas,  he 
pushes  to  the  verge  of  triteness.  "It  is  good  to 
know  the  young  -giant  who  will  some  day  make 
the  sacred  footsteps  on  the  sands  of  time."  That 
the  "literary  chapters"  were  composed  chiefly  for 
American  consumption  is  steadily  evident,  not 


only  in  the  use  of  the  pronoun  "you"  whenever 
America  or  Americans  are  signified,  but  in  the 
employment  of  such  phrases  as  "a  dark  horse" 
and  "a  combine  of  publishers."  Mr.  George  is 
very  gentle  with  America;  on  the  whole  she 
seems  to  him,  like  Miss  Kaye-Smith,  ultimately 
promising. 

I  cannot  forbear  quoting  one  stanza  from 
D.  H.  Lawrence's  verse,  and  Mr.  George's  com- 
ment: 

Helen,  you  let  my  kisses  steam 

Wasteful  into  the  night's  black  nostrils;  drink 
Me  up,  I  pray;  oh,  you  who  are  Night's  Bacchante, 

How  can  you  from  my  bowl  of  kisses  shrink! 

"I  cannot,"  says  our  author,  "having  no  faith 
in  my  power  to  judge  poetry,  proclaim  Mr. 
Lawrence  to  Parnassus,  but  I  doubt  whether  such 
cries  as  these,  where  an  urgent  wistfulness  min- 
gles in  tender  neighborhood  with  joy  and  pain 
together  coupled,  can  remain  unheard." 

Any  unfortunate  parent  whose  child  has  suf- 
fered from  croup  will  recognize  at  once  the  force 
and  accuracy  of  both  Mr.  Lawrence's  figure  and 
Mr.  George's  conviction. 

JAMES  WEBER  LINN. 


A  Swiss  View  of  ff^illiam  James 

THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  WILLIAM  JAMES.  By  Thomas 
Flournoy.  Authorized  translation  by  Edwin  B. 
Holt  and  William  James,  Jr.  Holt;  $1.30. 

In  the  spring  of  1910  William  James  went 
abroad  to  seek  relief  from  the  growing  heart- 
trouble  which,  in  the  summer  of  the  same  year, 
killed  him.  The  president  of  the  Association 
Chretienne  Suisse  d'Etudiants,  learning  of  the 
philosopher's  presence  in  Europe,  invited  him  to 
address  the  association  at  its  meeting  in  St. 
Croix.  He  agreed  to  do  so,  his  health  permit- 
ting. His  health,  however,  did  not  permit,  and 
M.  Flournoy,  an  old  friend  of  William  James's, 
was  invited  to  take  his  place.  By  that  time  Wil- 
liam James  was  dead.  The  lectures  Flournoy 
gave,  the  substance  of  this  book,  are  a  distin- 
guished act  of  piety  and  grace,  in  memory  of  a 
great  thinker  who  was  also  a  near  friend. 

M.  Flournoy  has  accomplished  admirably  the 
task  he  set  himself.  He  has  found,  in  James's 
own  spirit,  the  right  beginnings  for  James's  the- 
ory of  life  in  James's  temperament,  in  that  bal- 
ance of  sensibility  and  reasonableness  which 
makes  an  artist  and  which  leads  him  to  regard 
the  individuality  and  autonomy  in  things  with- 
out missing  their  connections  and  interplay. 


402 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


From  this  regard  sprang  his  rejection  of  monism, 
his  "radical  empiricism,"  his  conception  of  the 
character  and  function  of  thought  and  knowing 
which  he  called  pragmatism,  his  pluralism,  his 
tychism,  and  his  defence  of  the  plausibility  of 
theism.  M.  Flournoy's  exposition  of  these 
themes  and  of  their  interrelation  is  admirable, 
and  yet — 

And  yet — although  the  opinions  are  the  opin- 
ions of  James,  the  spirit  is  the  spirit  of  Flour- 
noy.  That  this  should  be  so  is  more  or  less 
inevitable.  No  mind  that  is  truly  a  mind  can 
merely  reproduce  what  it  apprehends.  Even  so 
passive  a  thing  as  a  mirror  turns  around  what 
it  reflects,  and  the  relations  it  presents  are  con- 
verse to  those  presented  it.  How  much  more 
transforming  the  reflection  of  an  active  spirit! 
And  when  the  theme  is  the  outlook  of  a  man 
so  myriad-minded  and  sympathetic  as  William 
James!  It  then  becomes  almost  inevitable  that 
the  pattern  into  which  his  thought  is  rewoven, 
the  places  on  which  the  high  lights  are  thrown 
and  the  shadows  spread,  shall  be  those  that  utter, 
not  a  little,  the  temperament  and  hope  of  the 
interpreter  at  least  as  much  as  the  character  of 
his  subject-matter.  M.  Flournoy  is  of  Swiss 
citizenship,  of  French  nationality,  of  the  Christian 
religion,  and  to  be  counted  among  idealists  in 
the  schools  of  philosophy.  And  James  had  once 
been  a  student  in  Geneva!  The  assimilation 
of  his  teaching  to  the  national  tradition  and  per- 
sonal bias  of  his  interpreter  has  this  empirical 
ground,  then;  and  it  is  made  unconsciously  and 
imperceptibly.  Pragmatism  is  thus  turned  into 
a  defence  of  spiritualism,  which  it  is  not;  into  a 
doctrine  of  the  limitations  of  the  intellect,  which 
it  is  not;  into  a  ideological  subjectivism,  which 
it  is  not.  It  is  adduced  to  Kant,  who  would 
have  been  horrified,  as  James  used  to  be  amused, 
at  such  adduction,  and  to  a  whole  series  of  Swiss 
writers,  among  them  Secretan  and  Fremmel, 
who  were  preoccupied  with  radically  different 
things,  special  pleadings,  in  fact,  for  religion 
against  the  scientific  method  of  which  pragma- 
tism is  the  philosophical  statement.  Radical  em- 
piricism is  made  to  mean  that  reality  is  experience, 
and  declared  to  agree  with  a  "phenomenalism" 
such  as  Renouvier's.  James's  personality  and 
philosophy  are  declared  "purely  Christian  in 
spirit,"  and  Christ  is  designated  as  "the  first 
pragmatist  when  he  declared  that  'by  their  fruits 
shall  ye  know  them'  and  that  the  truth  of  his 
doctrine  was  to  be  judged  by  putting  it  in  prac- 
tice." Also,  Christ  treated  the  problem  of  evil 


pluralistically,  and  was  also  in  this  respect  at  one 
with  James.  Finally  both  were — shall  I  say  sus- 
tained?— by  a  Swiss:  "it  would  be  elaborating 
the  obvious  to  dwell  longer  on  this  justification 
of  views  which,  heterodox  as  they  are,  have  been 
ably  supported  among  us  a  few  years  ago  by  so 
notable  a  Christian  as  Wilfred  Monod." 

However,  all  this  is  supererogatory.  M.  Flour- 
noy has  written  an  admirable  book,  the  best  on 
William  James  that  has  yet  appeared.  This 
English  version  has  been  made  by  Edwin  Holt, 
an  old  friend  and  the  most  brilliant  pupil  of 
James,  and  William  James,  Jr.,  a  son.  They 
have  given  it  a  distinction  which  always  equals 
and  at  points  exceeds  that  of  the  original. 

H.  M.  KALLEN. 


A  Scholarly  Vagabond 

ALONE  IN  THE  CARIBBEAN.  By  Frederic  A.  Fenger. 
Doran ;  $2. 

Little  as  Milton  was  thinking  of  tales  of  travel 
when  he  said  the  mind  can  make  a  heaven  of 
hell,  this  is  exactly  what  the  sensible  traveler 
seems  to  think  when  he  reports  his  journey. 
Satan's  wistful  idealism  is  not  always  needed; 
what  is  needed  however  is  that  the  writer  pro- 
ceed on  the  principle  that  what  he  thinks  about 
it  all  is  quite  as  useful  and  entertaining  as  where 
he  has  been  and  what  he  has  seen.  The  two 
things,  of  course,  need  not  be  mutually  exclusive. 

Such  another  Satanic  sightseer  is  Mr.  Fenger, 
whose  "Alone  in  the  Caribbean"  is  an  absorbing 
review  of  his  ride  along  the  Lesser  Antilles  in  his 
sailing  canoe  "Yakaboo."  Yet  it  took  more  than 
a  jaunty  stylist  to  sail  a  canoe  over  the  cross 
currents  and  chops  of  these  island  channels,  to 
the  universal  wonder  of  the  natives.  Although 
Mr.  Fenger  pauses  to  illustrate  by  diagrams  the 
construction  of  his  craft  and  to  describe  subtle 
tacks  at  critical  times,  he  is  chiefly  interested  in 
the  country  and  its  inhabitants.  This  interest  the 
reader  inherits,  and  adds  to  it  a  hearty  liking 
for  the  whimsical,  independent  navigator. 

Much  of  the  interest,  to  be  sure,  lies  in  the 
nature  of  the  subject:  forgotten  little  islands  in 
the  South  Atlantic  which  have  not  changed 
greatly  since  the  sway  of  the  ancien  regime,  when 
the  Empress  Josephine  and  Alexander  Hamilton 
were  born  here — a  romantic  setting,  free  for  the 
taking.  But  lively  as  is  kept  the  reader's  curiosity 
about  the  region,  and  unusual  as  this  vehicle  of 
romance  may  be  (a  deep  sea  canoe  with  no  rud- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


403 


der),  it  is   Mr.   Fenger's  style   of  thought  and 
expression  that  count  most. 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  no  sentimental  journey, 
no  travels  with  a  donkey ;  which  is  to  say  that  it 
is  refreshingly  unliterary.  Stevenson,  Conrad, 
W.  H.  Hudson,  the  author  probably  has  read, 
but  laudably  forgotten — quite  as  they  forget  one 
another.  Somewhere  toward  the  end  of  his 
chronicle  the  writer  happens  to  remark,  "The 
world  is  merely  one  huge  farce  of  comparison." 

Making  these  comparisons  is  his  entertainment 
— and  the  reader's  as  well.  Some  are  not  espe- 
cially illustrative ;  many  of  them  are  brilliant  bits 
of  verisimilitude ;  but  the  busy  skipper  fishes  them 
up  and  honestly  turns  all  over  to  you  just  as  they 
come  to  him.  Unlike  many  a  traveloguist, 
and  shopman,  he  never  strives  to  please.  The 
result  is  that  he  fascinates  from  the  time  "the 
new  clean  sails  hung  from  their  spars  like  the 
unprinted  leaves  of  a  book"  until  he  "was  back  in 
civilization  again  and  as  far  from  the  'Yakaboo' 
and  the  Lesser  Antilles  as  you,  sitting  on  the 
back  of  your  neck  in  a  Morris  chair."  There  is 
a  good  Yankee  slant  to  most  of  these  figures 
which  is  irresistible.  In  the  Bay  of  Fort  de 
France,  for  example,  he  had  difficulty  with  the 
customs  officials  but  succeeded  in  calling  out  to 
the  crowd  gathered  on  the  quay  for  one  M. 
Richaud,  to  whom  he  had  a  letter  of  introduction. 
"There  was  a  movement  in.  the  crowd  and  a  little 
man  was  pushed  to  the  outer  edge,  like  the  stone 
out  of  a  prune" — the  more  realistic  since  the 
crowd  was  made  up  of  negroes.  Quite  as  unprec- 
edented is  the  following,  from  an  account  of  a 
pursuit  of  humpback  whales  in  a  native  outfit: 
"We  had  eaten  no  food  since  the  night  before, 
and  all  day  long  the  brown-black  almost  hairless 
calves  of  the  men  had  been  reminding  me  in  an 
agonizing  way  of  the  breast  of  roasted  duck." 

After  passages  like  that  describing  the  author's 
moonlight  visit  to  St.  Pierre,  the  Pompeii  of  the 
Antilles,  and  how  he  "loafed  in  the  high  noon  of 
the  moon"  through  the  lava  covered  streets,  tak- 
ing refuge  at  last  in  the  cemetery  among  the 
legitimately  dead  and  buried,  it  is  not  so  easy  to 
show  that  Mr.  Fenger  is  no  stylist.  At  last  one 
realizes  the  beguilingly  simple  art  of  this  navi- 
gator who  once  recalled  Southern  France  and 
once  Venice,  wore  a  Swedish  leather  dog-skin  coat 
over  his  rags  when  he  climbed  Mt.  Pelee,  and 
read  himself  to  sleep  with  the  'TEneid"  in  the 
cockpit  of  his  canoe.  There's  no  vagabond  like  a 
gentleman  and  a  scholar. 

MYRON  R.  WILLIAMS. 


The  Deterioration  of  "Poets 

THE  LAST  BLACKBIRD.    By  Ralph  Hodgson.    Mac- 
millan;  $1.35. 

HILL  TRACKS.    By  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson.    Mac- 
millan;  $1.75. 

A   FATHER  OF  WOMEN,    and    Other  Poems.     By 
Alice  Meynell.     Burns  &  Gates,  London;  2/. 
POEMS.    By  Edward  Thomas.     Holt;  $1. 
THE  LILY  OF  MALUD,  and  Other  Poems.     By  J. 
C.  Squire.     Martin  Seeker,  London. 
THE    OLD    HUNTSMAN.      By    Siegfried    Sassoon. 
Dutton;  $2. 

A  LAP  FULL  OF  SEED.    By  Max  Plowman.    Black- 
well,  London;  3/6. 

For  the  psychologist  there  could  be  few  more 
fascinating  problems  than  the  rise  and  decline 
of  a  poet's  power.  It  is  a  truism  to  say  that  for 
every  artist,  of  whatever  art,  there  comes 
inevitably  a  time  of  deterioration;  but  this  is 
particularly  true  among  poets,  it  is  certainly  more 
conspicuous  among  them,  and  it  may  well  be 
asked  whether  by  the  rate  and  time  of  it  one 
cannot  accurately  appraise  a  poet's  importance. 
Not  always,  perhaps;  if  we  adhered  too  strictly 
to  this  theory  we  should  be  compelled  to  rank 
the  lyric  poets  almost  invariably  below  the  narra- 
tive or  contemplative  poets,  a  ranking  which 
could  hardly  be  acceptable  to  all.  For  it  is  a 
curious  fact  that  just  as  the  novelist  usually 
exhibits  greater  staying  power  than  the  poet,  con- 
triving for  a  longer  time  to  produce  works  on  a 
relatively  higher  plane  and  in  greater  quantity, 
so  the  objective  poet,  quite  as  clearly,  tends  to 
outstrip  the  subjective  poet.  The  Freudians 
might  say  that  this  is  because  the  subjective  poet, 
speaking  always  in  his  own  person,  out  of  his  own 
heart,  more  rapidly  therefore  gives  release  and 
full  expression  to  his  emotional  hungers;  whereas 
the  objective  poet,  finding  only  semioccasionally 
in  the  course  of  his  work  an  opportunity  for 
surrender  to  these  cherished  and  secret  compul- 
sions, compulsions  of  which  to  be  sure  he  is  only 
partially  aware,  leaves  them,  always,  in  that 
state  of  restlessness  and  frustration  which  incites 
him  to  a  renewal  of  labor.  It  might  be  a  mis- 
take then,  if  there  are  any  such  things  as  purely 
subjective  or  purely  objective  poets,  to  judge  the 
two  sorts  more  than  speculatively  by  this  stand- 
ard. It  would  be  obviously  fairer  to  measure 
only  subjective  against  subjective,  objective 
against  objective.  One  has  no  right  to  demand 
of  a  Rossetti  as  prolonged  and  fecund  a  bril- 
liance as  of  a  Browning.  The  affair  is  further 
complicated  by  the  fact  that  purity  of  type  is  so 
rare,  particularly  as  regards  the  poet  whom  we 
must  call,  for  lack  of  a  more  accurate  term, 


404 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


objective.  Many  objective  poets  begin  their 
careers  in  a  lyric  vein,  and  some  of  them  show 
a  disposition  to  return  once  more  to  it  at  the. 
end.  This  last  is  perhaps  the  class  to  which 
belong  our  greatest  poets,  those  whose  careers 
present  a  cyclic  evolution.  In  these  rare  cases 
it  is  not  so  much  deterioration  one  looks  for 
as  change. 

In  the  main  however,  if  we  keep  in  mind  these 
provisos,  we  may  consider  the  temporal  span 
of  a  poet's  evolution  to  be  a  fairly  good  empirical 
index  to  his  importance,  it  being  understood  of 
course  that  his  work  shows  sufficient  brilliance  to 
warrant  the  question  at  all.  "This  is  good,"  we 
remark,  "but  can  he  keep  it  up?"  And  on  the 
answer  depends  very  largely  our  judgment.  There 
is  also  to  be  considered  the  merely  practical 
aspect  of  this:  in  a  sphere  so  overcrowded  it  is 
those  who  endure  longest,  producing  most,  who 
will  be  longest  remembered.  The  lyric  poet  who 
early  exhausts  himself,  the  narrative  poet  who 
begins  to  repeat  his  theme  and  manner,  become 
as  it  were  known  quantities;  and  unfortunately 
the  world  is  disposed  to  lose  interest  in  known 
quantities  all  too  quickly.  Only  the  type  of 
poetic  genius  who  possesses  a  capacity  for  new 
experience,  perpetually  generating  new  complexes, 
evolving  therefore  from  one  manner  or  emotional 
attitude  to  another,  can  continue  to  delight  by 
continuing  to  surprise.  And  of  this  type  too 
there  are  infinite  gradations,  some  completing 
their  orbits  much  more  rapidly  than  others. 

Mr.  Gibson,  Mr.  Hodgson,  and  Mrs.  Meynell 
are  the  immediate  occasion  for  these  reflections, 
for  all  three  of  them,  in  their  latest  books,  exhibit 
a  marked  deterioration  in  quality.  Whether  or 
not  this  deterioration  is  permanent  we  have,  to 
be  sure,  no  way  of  knowing.  In  the  case  of 
Mr.  Gibson  the  deterioration  is  least  striking, 
as  is  natural,  since  Mr.  Gibson  is  predominantly 
an  objective  poet.  The  deterioration  of  a  lyric 
poet  is  apt  to  be  abrupt.  That  of  a  narrative 
poet  is  usuajlly  slow,  sometimes  only  clearly 
perceptible  in  retrospect.  We  can  see  now  that 
since  the  publication  of  "Fires"  Mr.  Gibson  has 
tended  to  repeat  himself,  to  allow  his  sensibilities 
to  harden ;  his  manner  has  become,  to  borrow  a 
psychological  term,  autistic.  Petrifaction  of 
style,  the  failure  to  invent  new  medium  and  new 
theme,  the  comfortable  habit  of  relying  a  little 
too  easily  on  the  well-known  and  often-used 
gesture,  began  perhaps  in  "Fires"  itself  and  has 
now,  in  "Hill-Tracks,"  reached  a  point  where, 
barring  an  unexpected  development,  we  may  say 


that  Mr.  Gibson  has  nothing  of  importance  to 
add  to  what  he  has  already  said.  He  belongs  to 
that  type  of  poet  which,  while  objective,  can  be 
objective  in  only  one  style,  which  even  when 
least  personal  in  theme  is  none  the  less  idiosyn- 
cratic in  manner;  he  employs  the  type  of 
objectivity  which  does  not  develop  under  the 
guidance  of  a  free- roving  and  universally  healthy 
intellectual  attitude,  but  at  the  dictate  of  a 
strong  personal  bias,  or  what  the  Freudians 
would  call  a  complex,  Shakespeare  and  Chaucer 
in  this  respect  lie  at  the  extreme  in  one  direction, 
Verlaine  and  Leopardi  in  the  other.  Poets  like 
Masefield  and  Gibson  lie  midway  between.  This 
is  not  to  imply  that  the  present  volume  is  utterly 
devoid  of  power  and  charm:  a  poet  of  Mr.  Gib- 
son's ability  cannot  lose  his  technique  or  per- 
sonality overnight,  and  even  in  deterioration  his 
work  remains  interesting.  At  the  same  time,  one 
is  driven  to  conclude  that  if  Mr.  Gibson  is  to 
keep  his  hold  on  us  he  must  evolve  a  new  manner, 
sink  a  new  shaft;  his  vein  seems  to  be  exhausted. 
"Hill-Tracks"  is  a  monotonous  book,  composed 
almost  wholly  of  poems  which  lie  midway  in 
manner  between  his  earlier  narrative  style  and 
the  ballad.  The  structural  method  is  discourag- 
ingly  uniform.  Mr.  Gibson  has  surrendered 
himself  to  a  predilection  for  place-names  which 
amounts  almost  to  mania,  and  poem  after  poem 
follows  the  same  scheme — beginning  and  ending 
with  a  recital  of  place-names,  sometimes  even 
iterating  them  throughout.  The  narrative  ele- 
ment is  thin;  the  emotional  element  is  frequently 
altogether  absent. 

Mrs.  Meynell's  book  is  slight,  and  demands 
little  comment.  Mrs.  Meynell's  technique  and 
manner  are  nearly  always  precise  to  the  point  of 
preciosity,  and  in  the  present  instance,  as  indeed 
for  some  time  past,  they  approximate  the  frigid. 
It  is  not  that  she  has  nothing  to  say,  or  nothing 
to  feel ;  but  the  emotivity  of  the  lyric  poet  is  not 
inexhaustible,  and  Mrs.  Meynell's  lyric  gift  was 
always  a  slender  one.  It  is  enough  to  say  that 
her  verse,  while  adroit,  no  longer  has  gusto. 

The  case  of  Mr.  Hodgson  is  more  interesting 
and  more  uncertain.  One  would  like  nothing 
better  than  to  be  told  that  his  new  book,  "The 
Last  Blackbird,"  is  not  really  a  successor  but  a 
predecessor  of  the  earlier  published  "Poems."  If 
that  is  not  the  case,  then  all  one  can  say  is  that 
Mr.  Hodgson's  collapse  is  nothing  short  of  ap- 
palling. Of  the  delicious  charm  and  magic 
which  infused  "Eve,"  "Stupidity  Street,"  "The 
Bull,"  and  other  things  in  the  earlier  book, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


405 


there  remains  in  the  present  volume  hardly  a 
trace.  Mr.  Hodgson  appears  to  have  outwept 
his  rain,  and  rather  suddenly.  Instead  of  the 
earlier  warmth,  color,  and  whim,  one  finds  here 
little  but  chill  abstractions,  smooth  modulation, 
and  a  curious  tendency  towards  the  cool  formal- 
ism of  certain  eighteenth  century  poets,  notably 
Thomas  Gray.  It  begins  to  look  as  if  our 
expectations  of  Mr.  Hodgson  had  been  too 
sanguine.  Must  we  class  him  among  the  three- 
poem  poets? 

The  remaining  four  volumes — those  of  Ed- 
ward Thomas,  J.  C.  Squire,  Siegfried  Sassoon, 
and  Max  Plowman — do  not  relate  to  our  theme 
of  deterioration.  Edward  Thomas  was  killed 
in  action,  and  "Poems"  was  his  first  and  last 
book  of  verse.  To  many  it  will  probably  prove 
disappointing.  Most  of  it  is  the  work  of  a 
sensitive  prose  craftsman,  a  lover  of  poetry,  with 
a  mind  rich  in  observation;  but  it  is  not,  per- 
haps, the  work  of  a  born  poet.  It  is  a  verse  of 
restless  approximations  rather  than  of  achieve- 
ment. The  sense  of  rhythm  is  so  imperfect  that 
one  is  continually  obliged  to  reread  a  line  several 
times.  This  is  no  doubt  due  in  part  to  the 
verse-theory  of  Mr.  Robert  Frost  (to  whom  the 
book  is  dedicated)  that  the  rhythm  of  poetry 
should  be  that  of  colloquial  speech ;  but  it  is  also 
due  to  defective  ear  and  a  consequent  poverty  in 
the  sense  of  prosodic  arrangement.  In  general 
the  style  is  cerebral,  cumulative  rather  than  selec- 
tive, and  somewhat  fatiguing;  the  most  we  can 
say  is  that  from  the  book  as  a  whole  emerges  an 
engaging  personality,  a  personality  of  many  and 
complex  moods,  most  at  home  however  in  the 
pastoral. 

In  some  respects  Mr.  J.  C.  Squire's  work  is 
not  unlike  that  of  Thomas :  it  is  apt  to  be  crabbed 
and  uneven,  and  it  is  almost  always  cerebral 
rather  than  emotional.  One  sometimes  admires, 
but  seldom  is  one  moved.  In  the  title  poem, 
"The  Lily  of  Malud,"  Mr.  Squire  has  con- 
siderably overworked  a  goodish  idea,  though 
even  to  begin  with  the  idea  was  perhaps  a  trifle 
precious.  The  effect  aimed  at  was  one  of  eeriness, 
but  Mr.  Squire's  details  are  too  commonplacely 
real,  and  the  rather  frequent  references  to  the 
mud  from  which  the  mysterious  lily  ascends  pre- 
cipitate the  vapor  of  illusion  somewhat  abruptly. 
.  .  .  It  is  a  kind  of  intellectual  falseness, 
also,  which  undoes  Mr.  Sassoon  and  Mr.  Plow- 
man. Mr.  Sassoon  is  at  his  best  in  the  shorter 
war-poems,  though  even  in  these  he  is  a  trifle 


too  self-conscious  and  academic.  Mr.  Plowman, 
a  disciple  of  Blake,  eliminates  too  persistently  the 
sensuous  element  without  which  poetry  is  barren. 
He  is  also  a  little  too  studiously  archaic. 
Occasionally  however,  as  in  the  symbolic  poem 
"The  Bowman,"  he  gives  us  a  formal  lyric  which 
is  very  effective. 

On  the  whole,  if  these  seven  volumes  are  a 
fair  test,  it  appears  that  the  renaissance  of  poetry 
in  England  is  not  so  vigorous  or  interesting  today 
as  it  was  between  1912  and  1915.  Have  the 
maturer  poets  of  England,  those  of  established 
reputation,  completed  their  orbits,  and  has  the 
interregnum  now  arrived  during  which  the 
apprentice  poets,  in  greater  numbers,  and  profit- 
ing by  the  adventures  of  their  predecessors,  are 
preparing  for  the  next  flight  ?  That,  at  any  rate, 
appears  to  be  the  state  of  things  in  both  England 
and  America — the  chief  difference  being  that  the 
American  poets  will  inherit  a  greater  freedom, 
the  English  a  finer  sensitiveness  to  language. 

CONRAD  AIKEN. 


The  'Brevity  School  in  Fiction 

ON  THE  STAIRS.    By  Henry  B.  Fuller.     Houghton 
Mifflin;  $1.50. 

Last  year,  you  will  remember,  Mr.  Fuller,  in 
THE  DIAL,  made  his  plea  for  shorter  novels.  He 
had  unkind  words  for  the  loose-tongued,  self- 
indulgent  Englishman  who  chats,  sprawls,  goes 
quite  ungirt,  and  for  the  diffuseness  and  form- 
lessness that  are  the  capital  defects  of  the  English 
novel.  He  approves  the  critic  who  says  that  the 
task  of  the  novelist  is  to  discover  the  nature  of 
his  interest  in  life,  and  to  express  that  interest  in 
the  form  of  a  story.  But,  he  adds,  it  must  be  an 
interest  disciplined,  which  shall  result  in  a  unified 
impression.  He  believes  that  in  50,000  words, 
properly  packed,  the  novelist  can  cover  long 
periods  of  time  and  can  handle  adequately  a  large 
number  of  individuals  and  of  family  groups.  To 
this  end  he  would  rule  out  long  descriptions  of 
persons,  set  descriptions  of  places,  conversation 
which  fills  the  page  without  .illuminating  it,  con- 
ventional scenes  and  situations.  The  novel  should 
be  spare-ribbed  and  athletic.  The  irrelevant 
should  be  pared  off,  so  as  to  leave  a  clear  outline 
for  movement  and  idea.  Mr.  Fuller's  plea  for 
shorter  novels  was  a  plea  for  more  artistic  novels. 
These  interminable  stories  that  Americans  are  so 
fond  of,  with  their  would-be  realism,  but  without 


406 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


form  or  development,  lack  even  the  rudiments  of 
art.  We  are  becoming  fatty  with  too  much  read- 
ing. The  quickened  tempo  of  our  modern  intelli- 
gence demands  a  change. 

Mr.  Fuller  did  not  tell  us  that,  all  the  time,  he 
had  up  his  sleeve  a  most  brilliant  example  of  the 
very  kind  of  novel  he  asked  for.  In  "Lines  Long 
and  Short"  he  had  made  a  series  of  sketches  for 
the  "short  novel."  Free  verse,  he  saw,  offered  a 
tempting  vehicle  for  the  modern  story  seeking  to 
escape  the  "stale  and  inflated  conventions."  This 
new  form  could  "lay  tribute  upon  some  of  the 
best  effects  and  advantages  of  poetry,  the  packed 
thought,  the  winged  epithet,  the  concentrated  ex- 
pression." And  these  little  sketches  of  his — dry, 
sardonic,  etched  in  brisk,  sharp  strokes — made 
story-telling  seem  like  almost  a  new  art.  They 
were  spacious  enough  to  improve  upon  that 
"trebly  compressed,  quintessentialized  pungency 
of  Spoon  River"  with  its  "escape  of  strongest 
ammonia."  Yet  they  avoided  all  the  confection- 
ery of  description  and  the  patter  of  conversation. 
After  such  a  book  and  Mr.  Fuller's  articles  the 
"short  novel"  was  inevitable. 

In  "On  the  Stairs"  he  has  filled  out  the  design, 
and  has  produced  a  book  which  has  all  the  brisk, 
sardonic  interest  of  these  free-verse  narratives  and 
yet  gives  the  spacious  sense  of  a  full-sized  novel. 
True  to  his  "conviction  that  story-telling,  what- 
ever form  it  may  take,  can  be  done  within  limits 
narrower  than  those  now  generally  employed," 
he  has  put  into  less  than  50,000  words  a  story 
that  covers  the  developing  Chicago  of  the  last 
forty  years,  the  history  of  a  wealthy  family,  the 
rise  of  a  self-made  man,  the  interlocking  of  his 
fortunes  with  the  wealthy  scion,  who,  while  the 
other  mounts  the  stair  of  fortune,  sinks  into  an 
ineffective  citizen,  "unable  to  command  and  un- 
willing to  obey."  There  is  the  younger  genera- 
tion as  affected  by  the  war.  There  is  the  whole 
ironic  comedy  of  the  feeble  struggle  of  the  aes- 
thetic spirit  against  the  hearty  and  masterful 
Chicago  growth  and  self-confidence.  Into  this 
story  Mr.  Fuller  has  packed  the  essentials  of  that 
sweep  of  American  life  that  interests  him.  And 
he  has  done  it  triumphantly,  with  just  that  terse 
suggestiveness  and  classic  sense  of  form  that  he 
has  admired  and  urged  in  others.  The  physician, 
anxious  about  the  health  of  American  fiction, 
has  quite  beautifully  healed  himself. 

Raymond  Prince  is  a  masterly  portrait — the 
rich  young  man  utterly  indifferent  to  business  or 
a  professional  career,  who  is  drawn  to  Europe, 
where  he  is  too  good  and  self-controlled  to  do 


anything  but  become  a  pallid  servitor  of  the  arts. 
Chicago  proves  an  infertile  field  for  the  aesthete. 
Raymond's  personal  contacts  are  scarcely  more 
successful  than  his  contacts  with  business  affairs. 
His  protagonist,  John  W.  McComas,  who  began 
life  as  the  Prince  coachman's  son,  and  has  found 
the  world  his  oyster,  manages  to  swing  Ray- 
mond's wife  and  even  his  son  into  his  influence; 
and  Raymond  is  left,  resentfully  contented  in  the 
obscure,  irresponsible  bachelor  existence  that 
should  have  been  his  walk  of  life  from  the  begin- 
ning. Raymond's  divorced  wife  is  long  since 
married  to  the  widowed  McComas;  the  son, 
home  from  the  war,  with  a  financial  career  ahead 
of  him,  is  marrying  McComas's  daughter.  Every- 
one goes  up  the  stairs  but  Raymond,  who  goes  out 
by  that  same  door  wherein  he  went. 

The  satiric  vision  of  these  two  men  is  contrib- 
uted by  a  narrator,  who  purports  to  be  an  old 
schoolmate  of  both,  tasting  in  his  own  life  neither 
the  public  splendor  of  McComas  nor  the  pale 
European  flavor  of  Raymond.  He  is  not  envious, 
this  narrator,  but  his  tone,  acid  but  not  unpleas- 
ant, biting  but  not  quite  cynical,  sets  exactly  in 
the  most  just  and  vivid  light  this  so  indigenously 
American  social  study.  To  the  consumer  of  the 
average  American  novel  "On  the  Stairs"  will 
seem  quite  dreadfully  to  lack  sympathy.  But  it 
will  delight  every  person  who  is  looking  for  that 
rarest  of  all  qualities  in  the  contemporary  Ameri- 
can novel — wisdom.  It  is  the  wisdom  of  a  mind 
that  has  nothing  to  preach,  no  social  problem  to 
solve,  no  moral  to  bequeath.  Mr.  Fuller  looks  at 
this  human  comedy  that  he  has  studied  for  many 
years,  and  puts  down  in  a  clear  and  composed 
form  the  truth  as  it  appears  to  him.  The  result 
is  an  extremely  bracing  attitude,  the  effect  of  an 
uncompromisingly  artistic  effort  instead  of  an 
ethical  one.  The  reader  is  balked  of  any  moral 
preferences.  The  self-made  man  is  no  more  at- 
tractive than  the  tepid  connoisseur.  You  may 
despise  Raymond  for  his  choked  patriotism,  but 
you  can  scarcely  admire  the  young  hero,  his  son, 
who  returns  from  the  war  to  his  capitalistic  ambi- 
tions. What  you  remember  is  not  any  moral, 
but  the  fine,  clear  outlines  of  a  piece  of  literary 
art  that  is  a  criticism  of  American  life  as  well  as 
a  dramatic  story. 

It  is  not  only  the  contour  that  is  classic.  Mr. 
Fuller  has  been  able  to  make  his  characters  types 
as  well  as  individuals.  They  criticize  American 
society  in  that  they  symbolize  whole  classes,  ex- 
press certain  current  attitudes.  Raymond  and 
Gertrude  and  Albert  satirize  themselves  and  all 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


407 


who  are  like  them,  and  they  do  it  just  by  being 
what  they  are  in  the  essential  attributes  that  Mr. 
Fuller  gives  them.  This,  I  take  it,  is  the  note  of 
the  good  old  classic  tales,  and  Mr.  Fuller  in  his 
rigor  for  form  has  achieved  the  same  effect  of 
significant  generality  expressed  through  the  indi- 
vidual. Similarly  a  typical  incident  or  a  fragment 
of  talk  tells  more  than  pages  of  description 
or  orthodox  vraisemblable  conversation.  "The 
world,  in  these  days  of  easy  travel  and  abundant 
depiction,  has  come  to  know  itself  pretty  well," 
says  Mr.  Fuller.  All  we  need  is  a  hint  to  call  up 
the  image  or  the  sociological  setting  we  should 
have  before  us.  The  novelist  who  uses  more  is 
either  letting  his  poetic  nature  run  away  with 
him,  or  is  writing  a  sociological  document,  of 
value  doubtless  in  future  centuries,  but  inadequate 
as  a  contemporary  work  of  art.  Mr.  Fuller 
achieves  a  further  criticism  of  the  ordinary 
novel  by  maliciously  calling  the  reader's  attention, 
at  various  points  in  the  story,  to  his  tempting 
romantic  opportunities — only  to  turn  away  to 
the  inexorable  truth  before  him  and  continue  his 
prosaic  but  tonic  way. 

"On  the  Stairs"  is  thus  a  variety  of  good  and 
important  things,  summing  up  into  a  delightful 
piece  of  literary  art.  But  its  chief  significance 
ought  to  be  the  liberation  of  those  embryo  Ameri- 
can novelists  who  have  been  writing  their  stories 
in  free  verse.  Here  is  a  brilliant  and  sound 
working  model  of  the  "novel  within  narrower 
limits."  Will  the  younger  American  writers  fol- 
low Mr.  Fuller's  evolution  from  lines  long  and 
short  into  the  brevity  novel  ?  Of  course  it  would 
be  unfair  to  expect  them  to  achieve  the  artistic 
finish  of  a  writer  who  twenty  years  ago  was 
writing  some  of  the  best  novels  of  his  day.  Per- 
haps. Mr.  Fuller  at  sixty  will  have  to  go  on 
writing  the  younger  generation's  novels  for  them. 
But  here  is  a  new  and  stirring  lead  that  must  be 
followed  if  we  are  to  get  down  in  black  and 
white  and  in  brisk  pertinent  form  the  myriad 
stories  of  the  American  life  we  know.  You  can- 
not read  "On  the  Stairs"  without  hoping  that 
here  is  a  new  fashion  in  literary  art.  "If  a  new 
day,"  Mr.  Fuller  said  in  one  of  those  memorable 
DIAL  articles,  "is  going  to  express  itself  to  ad- 
vantage, it  must  make  its  new  moulds  as  well  as 
find  its  new  material.  The  latter  vintage,  crude 
and  homely  as  it  may  be,  deserves  its  own  bot- 
tles." A  bottle  with  the  fine  contour,  brilliance, 
and  availability  of  Mr.  Fuller's  brevity  is  a  good 
bottle  for  any  vintage.  Let  the  vineyards  bring 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


JAPANESE  ART  MOTIVES.    By  Maude  Rex 
Allen.    McClurg;  $3. 

The  survival  and  persistent  revival  of  the  arts 
of  the  Orient,  particularly  of  the  decorative  pos- 
sibilities which  have  become  an  integral  part  of 
every  recently  and  properly  "done"  house,  make 
a  fitting  occasion  for  the  analysis  of  "Japanese 
Art  Motives."  In  her  book  Maude  Rex  Allen 
has  accomplished  her  task  thoroughly.  The  large 
selected  bibliography  with  which  she  concludes 
her  volume  confirms  the  fact  that  one  may  find, 
in  several  languages,  many  treatises  on  the  per- 
petually fascinating  topic  of  Oriental  art — its 
origin,  significance,  and  adaptation.  But  this 
author,  foreseeing  the  limitations  of  time  and 
knowledge  necessarily  imposed  on  the  most  inter- 
ested of  auditors,  has  gathered  from  these  sources, 
and  has  presented  clearly  and  specifically,  the 
essential  factors  which  from  the  Japanese  angle 
underlie  the  objects  of  beauty  and  utility  from 
which  our  civilization  is  deriving  benefit. 

Brought  up  as  we  are  on  the  Greek  and  Roman 
mythologies,  we  approach  Miss  Allen's  subject 
matter  with  an  unfamiliarity  based  on  ignorance. 
With  our  proverbially  superficial  knowledge  of 
even  those  arts  we  enjoy,  we  have  accepted  the 
beauty  of  the  Orient  with  no  attempt  to  com- 
prehend the  meaning  that  the  creators  thereof 
have  put  into  it.  Even  the  casual  reader  of  this 
book  will  be  instantaneously  impressed  by  its 
wealth  of  material — the  abundance  of  mythol- 
ogy, of  symbolism,  of  creative  imagination.  It 
astounds  us  as  much  by  its  similarity  to,  as  by 
its  preponderance  over,  the  conventional  classical 
lore.  Here,  indeed,  is  an  ancient  and  fecund 
field  wherein  the  dramatist-artist  will  find  sug- 
gestive themes,  although  the  recently  dramatized 
legend  of  "The  Willow  Tree"  supplies  a  none 
too  favorable  example. 

Never  forgetting  her  aim  or  her  audience,  Miss 
Allen  has  arranged  this  undoubtedly  chaotic  mix- 
ture of  religion,  superstition,  and  fact  with  skilful 
care.  Under  the  headings  "Plants,"  "Animals," 
"Deities,"  and  miscellaneous  "Symbolic  Objects" 
she  has  grouped  the  better  known  emblems,  giv- 
ing them  their  foreign  and  English  names,  and 
briefly  explaining  their  generic  significances  and 
their  application.  We  see  the  reasons  for  the  nu- 
merous Japanese  festivals,  and  the  "five  o'clock" 
becomes  a  doubly  cherished  moment  when,  with 
a  charm  of  detail,  we  visualize  the  augustly  au- 
spicious function  in  which  we  are  participating. 
And  we  regret  that  one  cannot  always  limit,  in 
the  orthodox  Japanese  fashion,  the  guests  to  the 
"celestial  number"  of  five,  nor  employ  thirty-two 
blessed  implements  in  the  brewing.  Even  the  ar- 
tificial landscape  arrangements  are  so  interestingly 
described  that  we  will  give  attention  hereafter 


408 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


to  the  least  attractive  of  our  bowled  miniatures 
— an  appreciation  mingled  with  an  intellectual 
enjoyment  hitherto  lacking. 

That  is  the  main  contribution  of  Miss  Allen's 
compendium.  Its  illustrations,  occasionally  col- 
ored, are  helpful;  its  index  and  references  valu- 
able; its  tales  interesting.  But  its  distinctive 
feature  is  that  it  contains  and  transmits  a  true 
educational  impulse;  it  teaches  us  by  making  us 
learn.  Perhaps  a  few  hours  after  our  reading  we 
shall  have  forgotten  exactly  what  the  "Yo  and 
In"  motive  meant  to  the  Chinese  Emperor  from 
whom  it  originated.  The  "Raincoat  of  Invisi- 
bility" may  justifiably  become  a  delightful  name, 
instead  of  a  memory  of  the  conventionalized  nat- 
ural form  it  represents.  But  there  is  no  question 
that  the  information  to  be  derived  from  this  book 
will  prevent  our  handling  a  Japanese  objet  d'art 
without  some  recognition  of  the  symbolism  with 
which  it  is  pregnant. 

A  HISTORY  OF  THE  PACIFIC  NORTHWEST. 

By  Joseph  Schafer.     Revised  edition.    Mac- 

milian ;  $2.25. 

This  is  a  new  edition  of  an  excellent  book. 
It  gives,  as  did  the  earlier  edition,  a  brief  and 
authoritative  account  of  the  discovery,  settlement, 
and  acquisition  by  the  United  States  of  the 
region  formerly  known  as  the  Oregon  Territory, 
now  Oregon,  Washington,  and  Idaho.  There 
is  a  good  map  of  the  country,  with  the  emphasis 
on  the  Pacific  Northwest.  And  the  interest  of 
the  story  is  enhanced  by  the  inclusion  of  portraits 
and  illustrations.  The  new  chapters  treat  of  the 
boundary  dispute  with  England,  of  the  social 
changes,  and  of  the  recent  experiments  in  govern- 
mental procedure  which  the  country  calls  radical. 
The  author  is  not  entirely  convinced  that  the 
initiative,  referendum,  and  recall  are  the  most 
successful  method  of  reaching  social  ends ;  but  he 
makes  very  clear  the  reason  why  these  new  com- 
munities became  the  experiment  stations  in  reform 
for  the  country.  It  is  worth  noting  today  that 
as  Oregon  is  abandoning  the  famous  three  R's, 
Massachusetts  is  making  an  effort  to  adopt  them. 
Professor  Schafer  does  not  point  out  that  it  has 
always  been  the  new  community,  at  least  in  the 
United  States,  which  responded  most  quickly  to 
demands  for  democratic  reforms  and  the  remedy 
of  abuses.  Kentucky  tried  to  abandon  slavery  in 
her  early  days ;  Illinois  was  democratic  before  she 
grew  rich.  But  he  does  describe  the  social  revo- 
lution from  ranchmen  to  small  farmers,  and  then 
the  next  revolution  from  small  farmers  to  great- 
scale  wheat  producers.  Any  who  may  need  a 
handy  manual  of  the  principal  facts  in  the  up- 
building of  the  far  Northwest  might  go  far  and 
search  long  before  finding  a  better  work. 


THE  QUEST  OF  EL  DORADO.     By  J.  A. 

Zahm.    Appleton;  $1.50. 

Under  the  pen-name  "H.  J.  Mozans,"  Father 
Zahm  is  known  as  the  author  of  several  attractive 
books  of  South  American  travels.  "The  Quest 
of  El  Dorado"  is  devoted  to  a  series  of  essays 
("chapters,"  they  are  termed)  describing  the 
expeditions  of  his  sixteenth-century  predecessors 
in  the  same  regions — that  succession  of  amazing 
explorers,  from  Belalcazar  to  Raleigh,  who 
achieved  the  impossible  in  their  quest  of  the 
incredible,  and  thereby  made  of  South  America  a 
mine  of  romance  richer  and  more  lasting  than 
the  gold  of  all  her  empires.  Nowhere  are  the 
pages  of  human  history  more  writ  with  the 
grandiose  and  the  bizarre — preposterous  courage, 
preposterous  cruelty,  preposterous  imagination. 
What  the  Spaniard  brought  to  America  out- 
glittered  what  he  found  there — an  orgulous  mag- 
nificence of  mind  which  distorted  the  world  of 
sensation  into  the  splendors  of  a  mirage. 

El  Dorado,  the  "Gilded  Man,"  priest-king 
of  a  mythic  golden  city,  was  first  heard  of, 
according  to  the  tradition,  from  a  poor  Indian, 
whose  description  of  what  appears  to  have  been 
a  native  rite  at  one  time  practiced  by  the  tribes 
about  Lake  Guatavita  so  excited  at  once  the  love 
of  gold  and  the  imagining  of  marvels  in  his 
hearers  that  the  tale  became  the  noise  of  the 
whole  world,  and,  growing  in  enchantment  with 
its  own  telling,  it  mingled  with  and  colored  all 
the  fables  of  Amazon  queens,  lost  empires  of 
the  Incas,  charmed  Cities  of  the  Caesars,  and 
resplendent  Houses  of  the  Sun,  in  which  the  Old 
and  New  Worlds  had  wedded  their  combining 
fancies.  "The  Most  Romantic  Episode  in  the 
History  of  South  American  Conquest"  is  Father 
Zahm's  rather  tame  sub-title  for  his  introduction 
to  what  is  certainly  the  most  abundant  fountain 
of  adventure — thrilling  and  bloody  and  fuming 
with  glory — that  is  as  yet  untouched  by  the 
literary.  The  introduction  itself  is  admirable, 
if  only  for  its  clear  sketch  of  events  and  its  care- 
ful references  to  Spanish  originals,  many  of  them 
little  known  in  the  United  States,  and,  especially 
in  the  case  of  the  South  American  imprints,  not 
readily  accessible. 

The  chance  of  the  times  is  throwing  into  Span- 
ish courses  many  of  our  young  college  folk;  this 
chance  will  not  altogether  have  failed  of  fortune 
if  it  turn  but  one  or  two,  fresh  with  the  gift 
of  fancy,  to  this  field  of  romance  at  once  rich 
and  ripe  for  a  gorgeous  harvesting.  Father 
Zahm's  book  is  liberally  illustrated  with  repro- 
ductions of  sixteenth-century  prints  and  maps, 
which  add  the  glamor  of  their  own  quaint  dis- 
tortions of  fact. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


409 


POEMS  OF  WAR  AND  PEACE. 

ITALIAN  RHAPSODY,  and  Other  Poems  of 

Italy.      By    Robert    Underwood    Johnson. 

Published  by  the  author,  70  Fifth  Avenue, 

New  York;  $1.50  and  $1. 

Of  his  "Poems  of  War  and  Peace"  Mr.  Rob- 
ert Underwood  Johnson,  who  has  become  his 
own  publisher,  has  now  issued  a  second  edition, 
which  includes  "The  Panama  Ode"  and  "The 
Corridors  of  Congress,"  together  with  several 
pieces  inspired  by  the  war.  Although  odes,  son- 
nets, and  blank  verse  by  no  means  fill  the  vol- 
ume, and  in  spite  of  a  careful  definitive  arrange- 
ment, the  heroic  mood  dominates  the  book  and 
gives  it  a  somewhat  archaic  flavor;  for  the  grand 
manner— with  all  its  panoply  of  alliteration,  rep- 
etition, inversion,  elision,  obtrusive  rhyme,  class- 
ical gear,  capitalized  abstractions,  and  senten- 
tiousness — can  no  longer  report  reality,  if  indeed 
it  ever  did.  In  a  day  of  such  grim  business  as 
today's,  poetry  can  move  us  with  unique  tran- 
scripts of  that  business  or  with  complete  escapes 
from  it.  Mr.  Johnson  offers  neither:  he  seems 
unable  to  report  this  war  as  no  other  war  has 
been  reported;  in  his  pages  war  is  War,  peace 
is  Peace,  man  is  Man,  the  enemy  is  the  Enemy — 
and  they  are  nothing  more;  yet  he  cannot  escape 
from  the  war: 

What  were  Nature,  Love,  and  Song 
In  the  presence  of  such  wro'ng? 

He  is  like  a  laureate  whose  business  it  is  to  pro- 
duce occasional  poems  about  events  of  which  he 
has  no  intimate  knowledge;  and,  as  becomes  an 
Academician,  he  does  this  much  rather  well — 
if  one  will  overlook  the  infrequent  halt  line  and 
hunted  rhymes  like  "poor  .  .  .  Kohinoor."  But 
such  poems  are  not  criticisms  of  life:  they  are 
studied  reflections  of  the  glamors  with  which 
other  laureates  have  gilded  life. 

This  somewhat  stale,  somewhat  frigid  unre- 
ality characterizes  Mr.  Johnson's  lyrics  also.  It 
taints  the  humor  of  the  two  or  three  vernacular 
pieces,  permitting  him  to  make  a  puppy  say: 

"For  cleanliness,"  my  father  said, 
"Is  next,  my  dears,  to  dogliness." 

His  humor,  like  his  beauty  and  his  learning,  is 
bestowed  on  his  subjects  from  without,  instead 
of  suffusing  them  from  within ;  his  emotions,  like 
his  epithets,  are  bookish.  The  Italy  of  the  verses 
in  "Italian  Rhapsody,  and  Other  Poems"  is  the 
Italy  of  the  literary  visitor,  of  the  poetic  tradi- 
tion— the  Italy  of  Chaucer,  Shakespeare,  and 
Keats,  but  not  the  Italy  of  Browning.  This 
unreality  does  not  preclude  feeling,  for  some  of 
the  lyrics — and  notably  the  "Farewell  to  Italy" 
— achieve  beauty  through  a  gentle  dew  of  emo- 
tion, continently  expressed;  but  it  does  preclude 


the  passion  that  evokes  the  genius  loci.  In  Mr. 
Johnson's  Italy  no  sunburned  girls  write  naughty 
words  with  fingers  dipped  in  wine.  And  when- 
ever feeling  deserts  him,  his  ear  goes  too;  his 
verses  turn  pedestrian  or  jig-jog;  his  rhymes 
become  obvious  ("June  .  .  .  dune  .  .  .  tune"; 
"love  .  .  .  dove  .  .  .  above")  or  wrenched 
("torso  .  .  .  more  so  ...  Corso").  Passion- 
ate poets  hold  their  audience  in  spite  of  faults  of 
taste,  but  when  taste  fails  the  literary  poet  he 
is  undone.  Mr.  Johnson  is  a  literary  poet  whose 
taste  is  not  always  loyal  to  him. 

PAWNS  OF  WAR.  A  Play  by  Bosworth 
Crocker.  With  a  foreword  by  John  Gals- 
worthy. Little,  Brown;  $1.25. 
This  is  a  compact  and  moving  little  play, 
written  in  a  fine,  sustained  style.  Perhaps  it  is 
still  too  early  for  any  play  woven  around  the 
invasion  of  Belgium  to  have  the  even  imperson- 
ality of  tone  which  is  characteristic  of  great 
tragedy.  Yet  Mr.  Crocker  almost  completely 
avoids  the  polemical  emphasis,  and  the  high  praise 
which  Mr.  Galsworthy  bestows  in  his  foreword 
is  well  merited.  The  dramatist  does  not  flinch 
from  portraying  the  full  horror  of  the  whole 
brutal  business,  as  that  nation-wide  horror  is 
reflected  in  the  lives  of  one  small  household.  But 
the  Germans  too  are  human,  caught  like  the 
Belgians  in  the  meshes  of  the  net  of  fate.  At 
the  final  scene — an  eloquently  restrained  and 
pathetic  climax — when  the  household  is  to  pay 
with  their  lives  for  the  death  of  the  head  of 
the  General  Staff,  the  German  commandant  can- 
not bring  himself  to  punish  the  wife  and  the 
daughter.  There  is  tragedy  for  him  as  well  as 
the  others  when  he  says,  "If  my  life  were  mine 
to  give — you  should  go — unharmed — you  and 
yours;  but  my  life  is  not  my  own;  it  is  pledged 
to  the  honor  of  the  Fatherland ;  I  am  General  of 
the  Sixteenth  Division ;  the  order  has  been  given ; 
the  proclamation  is  posted  on  your  walls;  my 
Chief  of  Staff  has  been  shot  down  in  this  house; 
there  is  no  way  out."  Anger  at  the  revolting 
cynicism  which  could  dictate  the  invasion  of  a 
peaceful  country  as  a  mere  military  measure,  is 
strengthened  rather  than  weakened  by  the  play- 
wright's assessment  of  the  invaders'  character 
without  moralistic  bias.  And  in  an  atmosphere 
of  bitterness  and  vindictiveness  it  is  a  consider- 
able achievement  to  write  a  play  around  the 
invasion  of  Belgium  that  shall  have  some  of  the 
inevitability  of  movement  and  structure  which 
the  mere  propaganda  play  can  never  attain,  to 
stir  pity  more  than  weak  hatred.  The  play's 
temper  is  admirably  reflected  in  the  title,  "Pawns 
of  War." 


410 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


THE    ESTHETIC    FUNCTION    OF    MUSIC,    LIKE 

that  of  poetry,  is  most  misunderstood  by  those 
who  are  most  adept  in  the  practice  of  the  arts. 
Skill  in  the  exercise  of  technical  methods  speedily 
becomes  a  pleasure  in  itself,  comparable  only  to 
the  delight  of  solving  a  problem  in  higher  mathe- 
matics. The  advocates  of  "pure"  or  absolute 
music,  much  as  the  defenders  of  imagist  poetry, 
derive  their  real  thrills  from  their  quick  recogni- 
tion of  the  hidden  order  in  a  complicated  science 
of  relations.  They  urge  an  art  washed  clean  of 
any  mere  animal  feeling,  stripped  of  any  factitious 
penumbra  of  representational  memory  or  con- 
fused, instinctive  suggestion.  In  a  word,  they 
make  the  fine  arts  a  new  and  more  subtle  form  of 
metaphysics.  These,  perhaps,  are  legitimate 
pleasures  for  the  virtuosi  who  can  retain  the 
sanity  of  realizing  their  own  weakness.  But  too 
many  of  our  musicians  and  poets  are  in  danger 
of  forgetting  the  homely  maxim  that  for  a  work 
of  art,  as  for  a  quarrel,  two  are  required — the 
artist  and  the  audience.  They  resent,  when  they 
do  not  ignore,  the  human,  all  too  human  claims 

of  their  auditors. 

.  •     •     • 

LIKE    EVERY    OTHER    BELLIGERENT    WE    HAVE 

discovered  that  an  atmosphere  of  war  is  not 
necessarily  an  atmosphere  conducive  to  great  lit- 
erature. Especially  has  it  been  painfully  im- 
pressed upon  us  that  the  war  itself  is  a  somewhat 
thankless  muse.  John  Masefield,  although  him- 
self the  author  of  two  notable  books  about  the 
war,  "Gallipoli"  and  "The  Old  Front  Line" 
(once  more,  in  many  places,  the  line  of  today), 
has  frankly  stated  his  belief  that  art  cannot  flour- 
ish during  the  actual  progress  of  war.  It  must 
wait  for  that  quieter  temper  which  will  follow 
the  end  of  hostilities.  Although  somewhat  em- 
barrassing, it  is  not  really  impossible  to  remember 
when  we  were  chuckling  at  the  foolish  German 
"hymns  of  hate"  and  wondering  why  on  August 
4,  1914  all  the  English  writers  whom  we  loved 
and  admired — with  a  strikingly  few  exceptions — 
seemed  all  at  once  to  be  stricken  with  literary 
palsy.  Well,  we  have  lived  for  over  a  year  in 
the  glass  house  of  war  itself,  and  certainly  are 
no  longer  in  a  position  to  cast  stones  at  our 
neighbors.  What  great  piece  of  American  fic- 
tion has  our  first  year  of  war  brought  forth? 
Or  of  poetry?  Or  of  really  fine  writing?  If 
we  are  honest,  we  have  to  admit — practically 
none.  Courageous  and  first-rate  bits  of  jour- 
nalism we  have  had  more  than  our  due  share  of. 
Some  of  Will  Irwin's  descriptions,  though  "pop- 
ular" in  every  sense,  would  have  been  creditable 
performances  for  any  writer.  Occasionally  there 
flickers  something  of  the  Mark  Twain  spirit 


in  the  dispatches  describing  our  own  "doughboys" 
in  France.  Ernest  Poole's  exposition  of  Russia 
and  the  Russians  in  his  new  book,  "The  Dark 
People,"  is  a  fine  bit  of  work.  Perhaps  a  dozen 
times  during  the  year  our  poetry  has  risen  to 
really  noble  heights,  surely  an  average  not  greater 
than  that  of  ordinary  peace  times.  But  taken 
altogether  these  few  stars  have  not  constituted 
a  wonderful  literary"  firmament.  We  can  now 
appreciate  how  the  propaganda  spirit  infects  even 
the  calmer  of  our  writers.  Everybody  seems 
anxious  to  prove  something  or  to  disprove  some- 
thing else.  The  recriminating  and  bickering 
spirit  has  insinuated  itself  into  the  most  objec- 
tive of  our  prose  stylists.  It  is  the  mood  not  of 
creation,  but  of  argument.  And  when  the  puri- 
tan tradition,  as  strongly  entrenched  as  it  is 
with  us,  marries  a  new  and  rather  unwieldly 
militaristic  experiment,  the  result  may  come  peril- 
ously close  to  moral  megalomania.  Our  writers 
have  yet  to  learn,  for  example,  that  the  most 
powerful  propaganda  is  the  quietest  propaganda 
— that  under-emphasis  is  considerably  more  ef- 
fective than  shrillness,  that  truth  of  artistic  vision 
and  courage  of  artistic  conviction  have  inalien- 
able claims.  When  we  wish  to  catch  a  glimpse 
of  the  human  side  of  that  mighty  conflict  red- 
dening and  rending  the  earth  of  Flanders  and 
Picardy  we  still  have  to  turn  to  those  fine  dis- 
patches of  Philip  Gibbs.  Nowhere  do  the 
courage  and  steadiness  of  those  who  are  battling 
for  us  gleam  more  clearly;  yet  the  account  is 
written  without  rancor  and  without  bitterness, 
and  with  great  pity  at  the  horror  and  awfulness 
of  that  wasted  young  flesh. 


THE      HISTORY     OF     OUR     SO-CALLED     POETIC 

renaissance  will  contain  no  sprightlier  chapter 
than  the  tale  of  the  Spectrist  school.  The  Spec- 
trists  came  among  us  in  a  moment  that  favored 
their  design.  The  Muse  was  on  the  make  here- 
abouts: patronesses  had  been  discovering  her; 
prizes  were  multiplying;  newspapers  were  giv- 
ing critics  their  head;  poetry  magazines,  mush- 
rooms or  hardier  plants,  were  springing  up  over- 
night; it  was  raining  anthologies — boom  times! 
In  concert  hall  and  museum  the  public  had  been 
acquiring  sophistication  and  a  safe  air  of  non- 
committal amusement  before  artistic  queerness. 
If  Cubists,  Futurists,  Imagists,  Vorticists,  and 
Others — why  not  Spectrists?  '  So  when  Emanuel 
Morgan  and  Anne  Knish  got  out  their  odd  little 
black  and  white  volume  of  "Spectra:-  New 
Poems,"  which  Mr.  Kennerley  slipped  unobtru- 
sively into  the  1916  tide  of  anthologies,  the 
public  smiled,  winked,  and  swallowed.  The  char- 
acteristic verse  inscription  dedicated  the  Spectra 
to  Remy  de  Gourmont.  The  inevitable  preface 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


411 


expounded,  with  the  right  mingling  of  erudition 
and  mysticism,  the  Spectric  theory  that  "the 
theme  of  a  poem  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  prism, 
upon  which  the  colorless  white  light  of  infinite 
existence  falls  and  is  broken  up  into  glowing, 
beautiful,  and  intelligible  hues" ;  that  a  poem  is, 
as  it  were,  an  after-image  of  "the  poet's  initial 
vision";  that  the  "overtones,  adumbrations,  or 
spectres  which  for  the  poet  haunt  all  objects  both 
of  the  seen  and  the  unseen  world  .  .  .  should 
touch  with  a  tremulous  vibrancy  of  ultimate  fact 
the  reader's  sense  of  the  immediate  theme" — the 
last  clause  fairly  crying  for  an  Imagist  rebuttal. 
Mr.  Morgan  employed  metre  and  rhyme;  Miss 
Knish  wrote  free  verse:  the  partisans  of  each 
form  were  gratified.  By  way  of  madness,  the 
poets  headed  their  Spectra  not  with  titles  but 
with  opus  numbers;  and  by  way  of  reason  in 
their  madness,  their  table  of  contents  supplied 
the  lowbrow  a  key  of  titles.  In  due  time  it  was 
divulged  that  Mr.  Morgan  was  a  painter  who 
in  Paris  had  fallen  under  the  influence  of  Remy 
de  Gourmont,  gone  in  for  poetry,  and  abandoned 
painting — but  not  his  sensitiveness  to  color;  that 
Miss  Knish  was  a  Hungarian  who  had  published 
a  volume  of  poems  in  Russian  under  a  Latin  title. 
Take  it  altogether,  Hoyle  was  satisfied  and  the 
Spectrists  were  gathered  to  the  bosom  of  the 
renaissance.  .  . 

•  •          • 

SOME  OF  THE  SPECTRA,  TO  BE  SURE,  WERE 
pretty  staggeringly  "queer";  but  queerer  things 
had  been — and  were  to  be.  Some  of  them,  too, 
were  undeniably  effective.  The  authors  began 
to  be  deluged  with  adulatory  letters  from  the 
most  advanced  poets  of  our  very  advanced  day, 
of  whom  the  men  naturally  inclined  to  address 
Miss  Knish,  and  the  women  Mr.  Morgan. 
Here  at  last,  it  appeared,  was  the  real  thing — 
pretense  stripped  away,  technique  reduced  to  low- 
est terms,  passionate  beauty  impaled  for  a  marvel- 
ing posterity — that  ultimate  method  for  which  the 
poets  from  Homer  to  themselves  had  been  so 
many  voices  crying  in  the  wilderness.  Certain 
poetry  magazines  were  impressed  and  sought  the 
privilege  of  giving  the  world  more  Spectra,  not 
all  of  which  have  yet  been  printed.  "Others" 
devoted  an  entire  issue  to  the  Spectrists ;  they  were 
successfully  parodied  in  a  college  magazine;  they 
acquired  disciples — a  Harvard  undergraduate, 
for  instance,  forswore  Iniagism  for  Spectrism,  and 
had  his  apostasy  roundly  rebuked  by  the  high 
priestess  of  his  earlier  faith.  Meanwhile  poets 
had  been  proving  their  discernment  by  calling 
the  attention  of  fellow  poets  to  these  bright  new 
stars  in  the  firmament  of  verse,  sometimes  inad- 
vertently introducing  the  Spectrists  to  themselves 
— entertaining  angels  unawares.  The  angels 


must  have  had  an  enviable  control  of  their  facial 
muscles,  acquired  perhaps  through  reading  the 
innumerable  serious  reviews  of  their  so  success- 
ful volume.  For  the  reviewers  ran  signally  true 
to  form:  the  more  conservative  reviewed  with 
alarm;  the  more  radical  poured  out  superlatives; 
the  professionally  cautious  maintained  their  fence- 
rail  dignity.  The  supremely  canny  avoided  the 
question  altogether,  or  evaded  responsibility. 
And  thereby  hangs  quite  the  funniest  tale  of  the 
whole  affair.  One  of  the  editors  of  a  distin- 
guished journal  of  opinion  delegated  his  duty  to 
Mr.  Witter  Bynner,  and  the  journal  paid  Mr. 
Bynner  a  neat  honorarium  for  his  solmenly  judi- 
cial appraisal  of  himself  in  the  role  of  "Eman- 
uel  Morgan,"  originator  of  the  Spectrist  the- 
ory. .  '.  One  wonders  whether  the  genesis  and 
course  of  Spectrism  is  not  the  most  illuminating 
criticism  of  much  that  is  most  pretentious  in  the 
new  arts.  It  seems  that  Mr.  Bynner,  while 
watching  a  performance  by  the  Russian  Ballet, 
announced  a  sudden  determination  to  found  a 
new  school  in  poetry.  What  to  call  it?  His 
programme  lay  open  at  "La  Spectre  de  la  Rose." 
Followed  two  weeks  of  indefatigable  composition 
in  collaboration  with  "Miss  Knish,"  then  pub- 
lication and  fame.  Probably  neither  of  the 
authors  was  prepared  for  so  gratifying  a  success. 
Indeed,  there  is  no  telling  how  far  the  "move- 
ment" might  have  gone  but  for  the  interruption 
of  the  war,  which  gave  "Miss  Knish"  a  commis- 
sion as  Captain  Arthur  Davison  Ficke. 


THE  PUBLISHERS  OF  "THE  ATLANTIC 
Monthly"  have  assumed  control  of  "The  Liv- 
ing Age"  and  announce  that  the  venerable  weekly, 
than  which  no  American  periodical  except  "The 
North  American  Review"  has  had  a  longer  unin- 
terrupted history,  will  shortly  broaden  its  scope  to 
include  again  reprints  of  contributions  to  Brit- 
ish periodicals,  to  which  selections  from  Conti- 
nental magazines  will  now  be  added.  In  1844, 
when  Littell  founded  "The  Living  Age,"  Amer- 
ican periodicals  were  almost  wholly  dependent 
upon  English  journals  for  their  contents — and 
upon  a  very  unreliable  trans-Atlantic  service. 
The  editor  was  wont  to  complain  that  he  had 
to  go  to  press  hearing  "the  noise  of  the  steamer's 
arrival,"  knowing  that  his  contributions  were  on 
board,  but  unable  to  make  use  of  them  before 
another  issue.  The  war,  which  has  greatly  in- 
creased our  intellectual  demands  upon  Europe, 
has  also  restored  something  of  that  uncertainty 
of  communication,  as  subscribers  to  foreign  pub- 
lications can  bear  witness.  One  trusts  that  his- 
tory will  not  repeat  itself  too  annoyingly  in  the 
new  office  of  "The  Living  Age." 


412 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


Spring 


Wasp  Studies  Afield,  by  Phil   and 

Nellie  Rau.  Do  you  know  how  the  wasps  build 
and  burrow?  How  they  work  and  play?  Have 
you  ever  seen  their  sun-dance?  The  authors 
have  watched  it  all,  and  report  their  observa- 
tions with  scientific  accuracy  and  in  most  enter- 
taining style.  Many  excellent  photographs  and 
drawings  illustrate  the  text.  Ready  in  May. 
Price,  about  $2  net.  Order  now. 

Above  the  French  Lines:  letters  of 

Stuart  Walcott,  member  of  the  Princeton  Class 
of  1917,  killed  in  combat  last  December.  They 
inspire  confidence  and  courage.  Illustrated, 
$1  net;  by  mail,  $1.06. 

Crime  Prevention:  Some  aspects  of  the 

police  problem  of  diverting  potential  lawbreak- 
ers from  criminal  courses.  By  Arthur  Woods, 
formerly  police  commissioner  of  Greater  New 
York.  A  crisp,  practical,  well-filled  book. 
$1  net;  by  mail,  $1.06. 


Early  Christian  Iconography  and  a 
School  of  Ivory  Carvers  in  Provence, 

by  E.  Baldwin  Smith  (No.  6,  Princeton  Mono- 
graphs in  Art  and  Archaeology),  $6  net;  by 
mail,  $6.24. 

Platonism,  by  Paul  Elmer  More,  $1.75 
net;  by  mail,  $1.83. 

Tales  of  an  Old  Sea  Port  (Bristol, 

R.  I.),  by  Wilfred  H.  Munro,  $1.50  net;  by 
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National  Strength  and  Interna- 
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mail,  $1.06. 

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1914,  by  Bernadotte  Everly  Schmitt,  $2  net; 
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Protestantism  in  Germany,  byKerr 
D.  Macmillan,  $1.50  net;  by  mail,  $1.58. 

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Princeton,  N.  J. 


BRIEFEK  MENTION 


Rather  tardily,  but  perhaps  as  soon  as  we  could 
expect,  are  appearing  manuals  of  information  about 
military  organization  and  insignia,  first  aids  for  the 
inquiring  civilian.  One  of  the  most  complete  is 
Lieut.  J.  W.  Bunkley's  "Military  and  Naval  Rec- 
ognition Handbook"  (Van  Nostrand;  $1.),  a 
clearly  illustrated  guide  which  should  prove  not 
without  value  in  the  services  as  well.  The  chap- 
ters on  the  organization  of  our  army  and  navy, 
and  on  the  etiquette  and  customs  peculiar  to  them, 
are  naturally  of  first  interest;  but  the  descriptions 
of  insignia  of  rank  in  the  other  important  armies 
and  navies  are  already  helpful  in  some  American 
cities  and  should  prove  increasingly  useful  as 
strange  uniforms  multiply  upon  our  streets. 

"A  Yankee  in  the  Trenches,"  by  R.  Derby 
Holmes  (Little,  Brown;  $1.35),  is  a  straightfor- 
ward, objective  report,  not  without  humor,  by  an 
American  who  enlisted  in  the  British  army  early  in 
the  war.  His  regiment  was  stationed  in  the  Somme 
district  and  took  part  in  the  battle  of  High  Wood, 
where  the  tanks  made  their  dramatic  first  appear- 
ance, to  the  demoralization  of  the  Germans.  But 
Corporal  Holmes  is  most  readable  when  he  is  tell- 
ing about  the  life  of  Tommy  Atkins  between  his 
periods  of  trench  service,  that  less  spectacular  life 
— full  of  quiet  incident  and  homely  detail — which 
the  author  has  had  to  subordinate  in  his  lectures. 
He  understands  and  admires  his  cockney  comrades, 
most  loyal  when  "grousing"  most  bitterly.  He  de- 
scribes and  commends  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  recreation 
work.  His  book  will  help  satisfy  the  curiosity  of 
our  stay-at-home  public  about  the  everyday  routine 
of  life  at  the  front;  and  a  chapter  of  suggestions 
about  what  to  send,  and  what  not  to  send,  to  the 
Sammies  should  prove  even  more  useful  than  the 
appended  glossary  of  army  slang. 

"The  Animal  Mind,"  by  Margaret  Floy  Wash- 
burn  (Macmillan;  $1.90)  has  in  its  second  edition 
been  subjected  to  a  thorough  and  comprehensive 
revision.  So  much  has  been  added  to  our  knowl- 
edge of  animal  behavior  in  the  last  decade  that  the 
data,  and  in  part  the  interpretation,  must  be  pre- 
sented in  altered  perspective.  Along  with  this 
increased  activity,  which  has  brought  about  a  special 
technique  for  animal  study — the  product  of  the  joint 
interest  of  the  biologist  and  the  psychologist — the 
position  of  comparative  psychology  has  become  more 
central  to  the  interpretation  of  human  behavior. 
All  these  interests  are  admirably  presented  in  Pro- 
fessor Washburn's  work.  The  volume  is  well  suited 
to  the  needs  of  college  students;  and  its  availability 
should  act  as  an  encouragement  to  the  introduction 
of  such  courses  in  institutions  that  set  value  upon 
adequate  surveys  of  the  essential  fields  in  the  broad 
domain  of  the  mind. 

Though  a  wan  humor  plays  over  the  characters 
in  "Children  of  Passage,"  by  Frederick  Watson 
(Button;  $1.50),  there  is  a  pervading  gloom  as  of 
Highland  mists  and  mildewed  Scottish  castles.  The 
poor  but  proud  and  noble  heroine  and  the  ancestor- 
less  millionaire  lover  are  familiar  figures  which  the 
author  has  not  endowed  with  any  particular  dis- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


413 


tinction.  Their  fortunes  fluctuate  a  bit  tediously 
through  the  three  hundred  odd  pages,  and  in  the 
end  the  hero  enlists  and  the  fragile  heroine  is  denied 
any  real  earthly  happiness.  Both  are  allowed  the 
rather  doubtful  satisfaction  of  looking  forward  to 
some  future  state  where  impecunious  nobility  is 
supposed  to  have  much  in  common  with  plebeian 
prosperity. 

"Kitty  Canary,"  by  Kate  Langley  Bosher  (Har- 
pers; $1.)  is  a  "glad"  book  with  a  typically  loving 
and  cheerful  heroine  who  finds  a  congenial  back- 
ground for  her  romantic  optimism  in  a  typically 
Southern  village.  Kitty  Canary — more  sedately 
Katherine  Bird — is  a  precociously  philosophical 
young  person,  deeply  concerned  with  life  and  given 
to  high-handed  management  of  her  own  and  other 
people's  affairs.  When  Father  or  Miss  Susanna 
shows  signs  of  insubordination,  Kitty  Canary  just 
whirls  the  objector  giddily  about  the  room  and 
after  this  joyful  exercise  her  wishes  are  pursued 
with  astonishing  docility.  Lovers  are  reunited;  a 
sick  wife  is  nursed  back  to  health;  a  selfish  husband 
is  punished;  dowdy  spinsters  are  transformed;  and 
other  desirable  changes  are  speedily  effected.  At 
the  end,  the  heroine's  own  love  affairs  are  satis- 
factorily arranged.  The  village  life  and  characters 
are  pleasantly  suggested;  and  doubtless  the  story 
will  contain  many  charms  for  girl  readers  of  board- 
ing school  age. 

"The  Neapolitan  Lovers"  (Brentano;  $1.40)  is 
an  historical  novel  by  the  famous  author  of  "The 
Count  of  Monte  Cristo"  and  "The  Three  Muske- 
teers." Frankly,  unless  one  be  of  that  happy  broth- 
erhood of  readers  who  "thoroughly  enjoy"  his- 
torical romance,  this  story  is  to  be  read  when  one 
is  sixteen  and  cares  little  if  a  book  be  neither  fish 
nor  fowl  nor  good  red  herring.  The  older  reader, 
used  to  and  demanding  credible  psychology,  is  likely 
to  find  the  story  of  the  story  more  interesting  than 
the  novel  itself.  For,  according  to  the  introduction 
by  R.  S.  Garnett,  the  book's  translator,  "Dumas 
had  long  awaited  an  opportunity  of  dealing  with 
the  Neapolitan  Claudius  and  the  Venetian  Mes- 
salina  (King  Ferdinand  and  Queen  Maria  Caro- 
lina). He  might  have  said  in  the  words  of 
Hernani:  'La  meurtre  est  entre  nous  affaire  de 
famille.'  In  1851  Dumas  wrote:  'Perhaps  some 
day  my  filial  vengeance  will  evoke  these  two  blood- 
stained spectres  and  force  them  to  pose  in  naked 
hideousness  before  posterity.' "  For  it  seems  that 
King  Ferdinand  was  Dumas's  father's  murderer, 
and  Dumas's  lifelong  desire  was  for  revenge.  It 
was  through  Garibaldi,  who  had  installed  Dumas 
in  the  Chiatamone  Palace  with  permission  to  exam- 
ine the  secret  archives  of  the  city,  that  the  author 
found  the  unique  set  of  public  documents,  manu- 
scripts, and  letters  which  the  hangman  had  reserved 
for  the  King.  And  anyone  who  has  read  even  one 
of  Dumas's  many  historical  romances  may  easily 
imagine  that  writer's  delight  at  the  opportunity. 
This  interesting  explanation  of  the  writing  of  the 
novel,  then,  may  excusably  be  given  in  lieu  of  a 
review;  there  isn't  a  hint  in  the  romance  itself  that 
it  is  done  to  revenge  the  murder  of  the  author's 
father. 


What  the  critics  say 
about  that  most  amaz- 
ing story  of  the  war — 

Gunner  Depew 

An  American  sailor 
in  the  service  of  France 

"It  is  impossible  to  laud  too  highly  the  optimism 
and  laughing  good  nature,  even  amid  battle  scenes, 
wounds  and  death,  unfolded  in  this  remarkable  story 
of  his  part  in  the  big  war,  as  played  by  an  American 
sailor  boy.  It  is  the  frankest,  most  natural  story  of 
its  kind.  The  word-pictures  of  battle  scenes  are 
splendidly  written.  But  the  most  graphic  writing  in 
the  book  is  where  Depew  describes  his  experience 
as  a  prisoner  of  war  in  Germany." — Portland  Ore- 
ffonian. 

"Depew's  story  needs  no  embroidering,  no  exaggera- 
tions. It  is  a  tale  that  would  loom  in  graphic  quality 
if  told  in  words  of  one  syllable.  That  part  of  it 
which  relates  to  the  voyage  of  terror  on  the  Y  arrow - 
dale  has  been  told  in  its  completeness  by  no  other 
writer."— New  York  World. 

"It  is%  a  capital  book  which  gives  us  another  of 
those  intimate  touches  with  regard  to  this  war  which 
are  entertaining  and  inspiring." — Philadelphia  En- 
quirer. 

"I  think  this  one  of  the  best  war  books  I  have  seen." 
— John  R.  Rathom,  Editor,  Providence  Journal. 

"It  is  a  rare  find  in  the  literary  world." — Rochester 
Democrat. 

"Here,  evidently,  is  a  soldier  of  the  legion  with 
a  story  worth  hearing.  .  .  The  sense  of  realism, 
of  verisimilitude,  is  so  strong  that  all  the  reader  has 
to  do,  all  he  can  think  of,  is  to  plunge  ahead  with 
the  writer  in  his  headlong  race  to  episodical  finishes, 
all  more  or  less  startling  and  amazing." — Philadelphia 
North  American. 

"It  appeals  to  me  as  one  of  the  most  gripping  war 
narratives  I  have  ever  read." — Managing  Editor, 
Cleveland  Plain  Dealer. 

"Told  in  a  more  unsophisticated,  self-revealing  and 
war-revealing  fashion  than  most  of  its  predecessors. 
Every  page  is  worth  reading." — Chicago  Post. 

At  All  Bookstores.     $1.50  net 
Chicago  —  REILLY  &   BRITTON  —  Publishers 


414 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


"I  visited  with  a  natural  rapture  the 
largest  bookstore  in  the  world." 

See  the  chapter  on  Chicago,  page  43,  "Your 
United  States/'  by  Arnold  Bennett 

It  is  recognized  throughout  the  country 
that  we  earned  this  reputation  because  we 
have  on  hand  at  all  times  a  more  complete 
assortment  of  the  books  of  all  publishers  than 
can  be  found  on  the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
dealer  in  the  entire  United  States.  It  is  of 
interest  and  importance  to  all  bookbuyers  to 
know  that  the  books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  procured  from  us  with 
the  least  possible  delay.  We  invite  you  to 
visit  our  store  when  in  Chicago,  to  avail  your- 
self of  the  opportunity  of  looking  over  the 
books  in  which  you  are  most  interested,  or  to 
call  upon  us  at  any  time  to  look  after  your 
book  wants. 

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NOTES  AND  NEWS 


Thorstein  Veblen,  author  of  the  famous  "Nature 
of  Peace,"  has  previously  contributed  to  THE  DIAL, 
and  needs  little  introduction  to  our  readers.  "The 
Passing  of  National  Frontiers,"  which  is  the  lead- 
ing article  for  the  current  issue,  is  the  first  of  a 
series  of  papers  on  internationalism  that  Professor 
Veblen  will  contribute  from  time  to  time.  For  the 
present,  Professor  Veblen  has  given  up  academic 
duties  for  work  connected  with  the  United  States 
Food  Administration. 

James  Weber  Linn,  who  contributes  a  brief  dis- 
cussion of  W.  L.  George's  "Literary  Chapters"  to 
this  issue,  is  in  the  English  Department  of  the 
University  of  Chicago.  He  is  a  frequent  contributor 
to  magazines  and  newspapers,  and  is  the  author  of 
"The  Second  Generation"  and  "The  Chameleon." 

Florence  Kiper  Frank  (Mrs.  Jerome  N.)  is  the 
author  of  "The  Jew  to  Jesus,  and  Other  Poems" 
(Kennerley,  1915)  ;  of  a  one-act  poetic  drama, 
"Jael,"  published  by  the  Chicago  Little  Theatre; 
of  some  plays  for  amateurs;  and  of  many  maga- 
zine contributions  in  prose  and  verse.  She  lives  in 
Hubbard  Woods,  Illinois. 


The  Century  Co.  will  shortly  issue  Professor 
Edward  Alsworth  Ross's  "Russia  in  Upheaval." 

Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.  have  added  "Artists' 
Families,"  by  Eugene  Brieux,  to  the  "Drama 
League  Series"  of  plays. 

The  library  of  the  late  Mark  P.  Robinson  and 
a  collection  of  books  in  fine  bindings  will  be  on  sale 
at  the  Anderson  Galleries  from  April  29  to  May  1. 

Harper  &  Brothers  announce  "How  to  Sell  More 
Goods,"  by  H.  J.  Barrett;  "Gaslight  Sonatas,"  by 
Fannie  Hurst;  and  "The  Panama  Plot,"  by  Ar- 
thur B.  Reeve. 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons  announce  that  after  May  1 
the  price  of  the  Loeb  Library  will  be  increased  to 
$1.80  per  volume  in  cloth  and  $2.25  per  volume  in 
leather. 

The  New  York  "Evening  Post"  has  reprinted 
from  its  columns  the  texts  of  the  secret  treaties  as 
made  public  by  Trotzky.  The  reprint  is  in  pamphlet 
form  and  sells  at  10  cts. 

The  Revell  Co.  have  recently  published  "The 
Soul  of  the  Soldier,"  by  Chaplain  Thomas  Tiplady, 
and  "Armenia:  A  Martyr  Nation,"  by  Dr.  M.  C. 
Gabrielian. 

Next  month  the  Frederick  A.  Stokes  Co.  will 
issue  "Surgeon  Grow:  An  American  in  the  Russian 
Fighting,"  by  M.  C.  Grow,  and  "Save  It  for  Win- 
ter," by  F.  F.  Rockwell. 

Francis  J.  Hannigan,  head  of  the  Periodical 
Department  of  the  Boston  Public  Library,  has 
compiled  "The  Standard  Index  to  Short  Stories: 
1900-1914,"  which  is  published  by  Small,  Maynard 
&  Co. 

The  following  war  books  have  been  published  this 
month  by  D.  Appleton  &  Co.:  "The  A.  E.  F.: 
With  Pershing's  Army  in  France,"  by  Heywood 
Broun;  "A  Surgeon  in  Arms,"  by  Capt.  R.  J. 
Manion;  "Glorious  Exploits  of  the  Air,"  by  Edgar 
C.  Middleton;  "From  the  Front,"  by  Lieut.  C.  E. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


415 


Andrews ;  and  "The  Call  to  the  Colors,"  by  Charles 
T.  Jackson. 

April  publications  of  Little,  Brown  &  Co.  include: 
"Mrs.  Marden's  Ordeal,"  by  James  Hay,  Jr.;  "A 
Soldier  Unafraid,"  translated  from  the  French  by 
Theodore  Stanton;  "The  Adventures  of  Arnold 
Adair,  American  Ace,"  by  Laurence  LaTourette 
Driggs;  and  "Caroline  King's  Cook  Book." 

Among  the  more  important  war  books  offered  by 
Grosset  &  Dunlap  in  their  reprints  at  75  cts.  are: 
"Fighting  in  Flanders,"  by  E.  Alexander  Powell ; 
"The  First  Hundred  Thousand,"  by  Capt.  Ian 
Hay;  "Germany — The  Next  Republic?"  by  Carl 
W.  Ackerman;  "The  Great  Push"  and  "The  Red 
Horizon,"  by  Patrick  MacGill;  and  "The  Battle  of 
the  Somme,"  by  John  Buchan. 

The  Scribners  are  preparing  "The  War  Letters 
of  Edmond  Genet,"  the  great  grandson  of  the  first 
ambassador  from  the  French  Republic  to  the  United 
States  and  the  first  American  to  fall  in  battle  after 
our  declaration  of  war.  Under  the  title  "You  No 
Longer  Count"  they  are  about  to  publish  a  trans- 
lation of  Rene  Boylesve's  novel  "Tu  n'es  plus 
Rien." 

Four  books  of  verse  were  published  by  the  John 
Lane  Co.  on  April  12:  "Mid-American  Chants," 
by  Sherwood  Anderson ;  "The  Evening  Hours,"  by 
Emile  Verhaeren,  translated  by  Charles  R.  Mur- 
phy; "The  Day,  and  Other  Poems,"  by  Henry 
Chappell,  with  an  introduction  by  Sir  Herbert 
Warren,  President  of  Magdalen  College,  Oxford; 
and  "Hay  Harvest,  and  Other  Poems,"  by  Lucy 
Buxton. 

April  issues  of  the  George  H.  Doran  Co.  have 
included:  "Crescent  and  Iron  Cross,"  by  E.  F. 
Benson;  "Face  to  Face  with  Kaiserism,"  by  James 
W.  Gerard;  "Germany  at  Bay,"  by  Major  Hal- 
dane  Macfall;  "The  Western  Front,"  being  the 
first  volume  of  official  war  drawings  by  Muirhead 
Bone;  and  three  novels — Gilbert  Cannan's  "The 
Stucco  House,"  E.  F.  Benson's  "An  Autumn  Sow- 
ing," and  John  Buchan's  "Prester  John." 

Among  the  books  announced  for  this  month  by 
the  J.  B.  Lippincott  company  are:.  "Over  Here," 
Lieut.  Hector  MacQuarrie's  account  of  his  ex- 
periences as  British  Inspector  and  lecturer  in 
America;  "Over  the  Threshold  of  War,"  the  early- 
war  diary  of  Nevil  Monroe  Hopkins,  of  the  Amer- 
ican Embassy  in  Paris;  "Offensive  Fighting,"  Maj. 
Donald  McRae ;  and  "Training  for  the  Street  Rail- 
way Business,"  by  C.  B.  Fairchild,  prepared  under 
the  supervision  of  T.  E.  Mitten,  President  of  the 
Philadelphia  Rapid  Transit. 

The  April  Macmillan  announcements  include: 
"History  of  Labor  in  the  United  States,"  by  John 
R.  Commons,  President  of  the  American  Economic 
Association;  "What  is  National.  Honor?"  by  Leo 
Perla;  "Cooperation,  The  Hope  of  the  Consumer," 
by  Emerson  P.  Harris,  with  an  introductory  note 
by  John  Graham  Brooks;  "The  New  Horizon  of 
State  and  Church,"  by  William  Herbert  Perry 
Faunce,  President  of  Brown  University;  "Historic 
Mackinac,"  by  Edwin  O.  Wood,  in  two  illustrated 
volumes;  and  two  books  of  verse,  James  Stephens's 
"Reincarnations"  and  Rabindranath  Tagore's 
"Lover's  Gift  and  Crossing." 


"There  is  the  saving  of  a  life — 
an  American  life — to  every  line  of 

LIEUTENANT-  COLONEL 

PAUL  AZAN'S 

The  Warfare 
of  Today 


"It  is  a  wonderfully  clear  guide 
for  fathers  on  how  their  boys 
fight  their  way  through  the  perils 
jj  of  modern  warfare . . .  Lieutenant- 
Colonel  Azan's  writings  acquire 
from  new  developments,  even  from 
affairs  so  momentous  as  the  Easter 
drive  of  the  Germans,  only  an  addi- 
tional wealth  of  material,  illustrat- 
ing ever  more  clearly  the  principles 
which  they  proclaim,  and  showing 
forth  ever  more  plainly  the  place 
of  those  principles  in  the  winning 
of  victory  .  .  .  There  is  the  saving 
of  a  life — an  American  life — to 
every  line  of  *The  Warfare  of 
Today/  And  there  is  in  the  end  1 
the  establishment  of  Allied  Vic- 
tory."— Boston  Transcript. 

=  B 

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416 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


FVf      HOT   T  V  Author.'  and  Publisher** 
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Anthology  of  Swedish  Lyrics 

175O  -  1915 

COLLECTED    AND    TRANSLATED 
BY  CHARLES  WHARTON   STORK 

"It  is  seldom  that  so  fortunate  a  combination  as  a 
fine  poet  like  Mr.  Stork  and  a  quite  unexploited 
literature  so  fine  as  Swedish  lyric  poetry  occurs  in 
the  history  of  letters." — N.  Y.  Times. 

Published  by 

The  American -Scandinavian  Foundation 

25  West  43th  Street,  NEW  YORK 
PRICE,  $1.50 


OF  NEW  BOOKS 


[The  following   list,   containing   QQ   titles,   includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.] 

THE  WAR. 

The  Warfare  of  Today.  By  Lieut.-Colonel  Paul  Azan. 
Translated  by  Major  Julian  L.  Coolidge.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  352  pages.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

The    Business    of    "War.      By    Isaac    P.    Marcosson. 

Illustrated,    12mo,    319    pages.      John    Lane    Co. 

$1.50. 
The  Russian  Revolution.     By  Alexander   Petrunke- 

vitch,    Samuel    Harper,    and    Frank    A.    Golder. 

The  Jngo-Slav  Movement.     By  Robert  J.  Kerner. 

12mo,  109  pages.     Harvard  University  Press.     $1. 
"The    Dark    People"*     Russia's    Crisis.      By    Ernest 

Poole.     Illustrated,   12mo,  226  pages.     The  Mac- 

millan  Co.     $1.50. 
Russia's    Ajsrony.      By    Robert    Wilton.      Illustrated, 

8vo,  356  pages.     Longmans,  Green  &  Co.     $4.80. 
Runaway    Russia.      By    Florence    MacLeod    Harper. 

Illustrated,  8vo,  321  pages.    The  Century  Co.     $2. 
America's    Message    to    the    Russian    Peoples     Ad- 
dresses by  the  members  of  the  Russian  Mission. 

8vo,  154  pages.     Marshall  Jones  Co.     $1.50. 
Surgeon  Grow:    An  American  in  the  Russian  Fight- 
ing.    Illustrated,  12mo,  304  pages.     Frederick  A. 

Stokes  Co.     $1.50. 
"Over    There"   with    the    Australians.      By    Captain 

R.  Hugh  Knyvett.     Illustrated,  12mo,  339  pages. 

Charles   Scribner's   Sons.      $1.50. 

"Ladies  from  Hell."  By  R.  Douglas  Pinkerton.  Il- 
lustrated, 12mo,  254  pages.  The  Century  Co. 

$1.50. 
The  Real  Front.    By  Arthur  Hunt  Chute.     12mo,  309 

pages.     Harper  &  Bros.     $1.50. 
Nothing  of  Importance.     By  Bernard  Adams.    -12mo, 

334  pages.     Robert  M.  McBride  Co.     $1.50. 
The  Big  Fight.    By  Capt.  David  Fallon.    Illustrated, 

12mo,  301  pages.     W.  J.  Watt  &  Co.     $1.50. 
Gunner  Depew.     By  Himself.     Illustrated,  12mo,  312 

pages.     Reilly  &  Britton  Co.     $1.50. 
The  Escape  of  a  Princess  Pat.     By  George  Pearson. 

Illustrated,   12mo,  227  pages.     George  H.  Doran 

Co.     $1.40. 
Crescent  and  Iron  Cross.     By  E.  F.  Benson.     12mo, 

240  pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1.25. 
The  Soul  of  the  Soldier.    By  Thomas  Tlplady.    With 

frontispiece,  12mo,  208  pages.    Fleming  H.  Revell 

Co.     $1.25. 

Battering   the   Boche.      By    Preston    Gibson.      Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  120  pages.     The  Century  Co.     $1. 
Germanism  and  the  American  Crusade.    By   George 

D.  Herron.     12mo,  44  pages.    Mitchell  Kennerley. 
War  Addresses:    1917.    Edited  by  Barr  Ferree.     8vo, 

55  pages.     The  Pennsylvania  Society,  New  York. 
Right  Above  Race.   By  Otto  H.  Kahn.   With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  182  pages.     The  Century  Co.     75  cts. 
Where    Do    Yon    Stand?      By    Hermann    Hagedorn. 

16mo,  126  pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     50  cts. 
Raemaekers's  Cartoon  History  of  the  War.     Vol.  I. 

Compiled  by  J.  Murray  Allison.     8vo,  206  pages. 

The   Century   Co.      $1.50. 
The  Book  of  Artemas.     12mo,  85  pages.     George  H. 

Doran  Co.     50  cts. 
Service  Record:     For   "The  Boy,"   the   Home  Folks, 

and   the  Coming  Generations.     12mo.     The   Pil- 
grim Press.     50  cts. 
Three  Brothers  Who  Plotted  to  Own  the  World.    By 

M.  E.  Starr.     16mo,  16  pages.    Paper.     10  cts. 

FICTION. 

The   Holy  City.    (Jerusalem   II.)     By   Selma  Lager- 

lof.      Translated    by    Velma    Swanston    Howard. 

12mo,  348  pages.     Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.     $1.50. 
Mashi,    and    Other    Stories.      By    Sir    Rabindranath 

Tagore.     12mo,    222    pages.      The  Macmillan   Co. 

$1.50. 
The   Flying  Teuton.     By  Alice    Brown.      12mo,    321 

pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     $1.50. 
The  Boardman  Family.     By  Mary  S.  Watts.     12mo, 

352  pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     $1.50. 
The    Unwilling   Vestal.     By    Edward   Lucas   White. 

12mo,  317  pages.     E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.     $1.50. 
Miss   Pirn's   Camouflage.      By   Lady    Stanley.      12mo, 

322  pages.     Houghton  Mifflin  Co.      $1.50. 
The    Martial    Adventures    of    Henry    and    Me.      By 

William    Allen    White.      Illustrated,    12mo,    338 

pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     $1.50. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


417 


Front  Lines.  By  Boyd  Cable.  12mo.  358  pages. 
E.  P.  Button  &  Co.  $1.50. 

The  House  of  Intrigue.  By  Arthur  Stringer.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  363  pages.  Bobbs-Merrill  Co.  $1.50. 

Over  Here.  By  Ethel  M.  Kelley.  With  frontispiece, 
12mo,  259  pages.  Bobbs-Merrill  Co.  $1.50. 

Pieces  of  Eight.  By  Richard  Le  Gallienne.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  333  pages.  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 
$1.40. 

Gaslight  Sonatas.  By  Fannie  Hurst.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  271  pages.  Harper  &  Bros.  $1.40. 

The  Making:  of  George  Groton.  By  Bruce  Barton. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  331  pages.  Doubleday,  Page 
&  Co.  $1.40. 

The  'Man  "Who  Lost  Himself.  By  H.  De  Vere  Stac- 
poole.  12mo,  300  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.40. 

Stealthy  Terror.  By  John  Ferguson.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  312  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.40. 

The  Foolishness  of  Lilian.  By  Jessie  Champion. 
12mo,  340  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.40. 

"Mr.  Manley."  By  G.  I.  Whitham.  12mo,  304  pages. 
John  Lane  Co.  $1.40. 

When  Bearcat  Went  Dry.  By  Charles  Neville  Buck. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  311  pages.  W.  J.  Watt  &  Co. 
$1.40. 

Prester  John.  By  John  Buchan.  With  frontispiece, 
12mo,  309  pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co.  $1.35. 

Branded.  By  Francis  Lynde.  With  frontispiece, 
12mo,  370  pages.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  $1.35. 

The  Little  Red  House  In  the  Hollow.  By  Amanda 
B.  Hall.  Illustrated,  12mo,  295  pages.  George 
W.  Jacobs  Co.  $1.35. 

Captain  Gault.  By  William  Hope  Hodgson.  12mo, 
295  pages.  Robert  M.  McBride  &  Co,  $1.35. 

The  Rider  in  Khaki.  By  Nat  Gould.  12mo,  279 
pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $1.25. 

Film  Folk.  By  Rob  Wagner.  Illustrated.  12mo, 
356  pages.  The  Century  Co.  $2.00. 

POETRY    AND    DRAMA. 

American    Poetry.      Edited    by    Percy    H.    Boynton. 

12mo,  721  pages.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     $2.25. 
The  Melody  of  Earth:  An  Anthology  of  Garden  and 

Nature  Poems  from  Present-Day  Poets.     Selected 

by    Mrs.    Waldo    Richards.       12mo,     301    pages. 

Houghton   Mifflin  Co.      $1.50. 
The  Poems  of  Francois  Villon.    Translated  by  John 

Payne.     12mo,  204  pages.     John  W.  Luce  &  Co. 

$1.75. 
Evening    Hours.      By    Emile    Verhaeren.      12mo,    73 

pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1. 
My  Ireland.     By  Francis  Carlin.     12mo,   195   pages. 

Henry  Holt  &  Co.     $1.25. 
Mid-American     Chants.       By     Sherwood     Anderson. 

12mo,  82  pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1.25. 
A   Cabinet    of   Jade.      By   David    O'Neil.      16mo,    106 

pages.     The  Four  Seas  Co.     $1.25. 
Songs  and  Sea  Voices.     By  James  Stewart  Double- 
day.       12mo,     106    pages.      Washington    Square 

Book  Shop,  New  York. 
The   Day,   and   Other  Poems.     By   Henry   Chappell. 

16mo,  78  pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1. 
Hay  Harvest,  and  Other  Poems.     By  Lucy  Buxton. 

12mo,  47  pages.     John  Lane  Co.     $1. 
The    Shadow-Eater.       By    Benjamin     De    Casseres. 

12mo,  59  pages.     Wilmarth  Publishing  Co. 
The  World  and  the  Waters.     By  Edward  F.  Garesche. 

12mo,   110  pages.     The  Queen's  Work  Press,  St. 

Louis.     $1. 

The  Bugle  Call.  By  Walter  Smith  Griffith.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  72  pages.  Published  by  the  author. 

$1. 
Flashlights    and    Depths.      By    Werther    Friedman. 

12mo,  88  pages.     The  Summit  Publishing  Co. 
Problems  of  the  Actor.    By  Louis  Calvert.     With  an 

introduction    by    Clayton    Hamilton.      12mo,    274 

pages.     Henry  Holt  &  Co.     $1.60. 

The  Art  of  Photoplay  Making.  By  Victor  O.  Free- 
burg.  Illustrated,  12mo,  283  pages.  The  Mac- 

millan  Co.     $2. 

HISTORY. 

Nationalism   and   the    War   in   the   Near   East.      By 

"A   Diplomatist."     Edited   by  Lord   Courtney   of 

Penwith.      8vo,    428    pages.      Oxford    University 

Press.     $4.15. 
The  Five  Republics  of  Central  America.     By  Dana 

G.  Munro.     Edited  by  David  Kinley.     With  map, 

8vo,  332  pages.     Oxford  University  Press.     $3.50. 
The   Colonial   Tariff  Policy  of   France.     By   Arthur 

Girault.    Edited  by  Charles  Gide.    8vo,  305  pages. 

Oxford  University  Press.     $2.50. 


Over  Here 


S?  War  Time  Rhymes 

Edgar  A  if 

Guest 

Over  Here  reflects  the  love  and 
loyalty  of  the  folks  at  home.  In  its 
warmly  human  pages  are  to  be  found 
a  message  of  courage  and  hope  and 
good  cheer  for  the  gray  days  ahead — 
a  ringing  declaration  of  faith  in  the 
high  ideals  for  which  our  country  is 
fighting. 

Loyal-hearted  folk  will  enjoy  Mr. 
Guest's  wartime  verse,  with  its  note  of 
human  kindliness  and  sympathy. 

At  All  Bookstores.     $1.25  net 

Chicago  —  REILLY  #»   BRITTON  —  Publishers 


RECENT  PUBLICATIONS 

A  Prophecy  of  the  War 

By  LEWIS  EINSTEIN.  With  introduction  by  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt.  12mo,  cloth,  pp.  94.  $1.00  net. 
Two  essays  originally  published  in  the  National 
Review  of  London  containing  a  striking  fore- 
cast of  the  World  War. 

Aram  and  Israel,  or  the  Aramaeans 
in  Syria  and  Mesopotamia 

By  EMIL  G.  H.  KRAELING,  PH.D.  8vo,  cloth, 
pp.  xvi+155.  $1.50  net. 

A  book  on  the  Aramaeans  has  long  been  a 
desideratum  for  students  of  Hebrew  and  Oriental 
History  and  this  volume  supplies  the  need. 

The  Foundations    and   Nature   of 
Verse 

By  GARY  F.  JACOB,  PH.D.  12mo,  cloth,  pp.  xi+ 
231.  $1.50  net. 

An  attempt  to  answer  these  interesting  ques- 
tions :  What  common  physical  and  psychological 
basis  have  prose,  verse  and  music ;  What  dif- 
ferentiates prose  from  verse  and  music  from 
both ;  From  the  point  of  view  of  structure,  what 
is  verse  ? 

The  Rhythm  of  Prose 

By  WILLIAM  MORRISON  PATTERSON,  PH.D.    Second 
edition.     12mo,  cloth,  pp.  xxiii+193.     $1.50  net. 
An    experimental    investigation    of    individual   dif- 
ferences in  the  sense  of  rhythm,   with  a  chapter 
on   vers   libre. 

COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

Lemcke  &  Buechner,  Agents 
30-32  West  Twenty-Seventh  Street,  New  York  City 


418 


THE    DIAL 


[April  25 


Your 
Responsibility 

in  supporting  the  President 
in  this  war  for  democracy 
is  in  direct  proportion  to 

Your 
Intelligence 

High  ideals  cannot  be  real- 
ized without  action.  Are  you 
backing  the  ideals  of  democ- 
racy by  your  actions? 


If  you  have  NOT  already     , 
bought  your 

LIBERTY 
BONDS 

You  have  NOT  fulfilled  your 
responsibility. 


No  matter  how  small  your 
salary,  you  can  save  enough 
to  meet  the  installment  pay- 
ments on  a  Liberty  Bond. 
Go  to  any  bank  and  find 
out  how  easy  it  is  to  do 
your  share  in 

Backing  the 
President  100* 


The  Controversy  over  Neutral  Rights  between  the 
United  States  and  France,  1797-1SOO.  Edited  by 
James  Brown  Scott.  8vo,  510  pages.  Oxford 
University  Press.  $3.50. 

The  Industrial  Development  and  Commercial  Poli- 
cies of  the  Three  Scandinavian  Countries.  By 
Povl  Drachmann.  Edited  by  Harald  Wester- 
gaard.  8vo,  124  pages.  Oxford  University  Press. 
$1.50. 

The  Hague  Court  Reports.  Edited,  with  an  intro- 
duction, by  James  Brown  Scott.  8vo,  664  pages. 
Oxford  University  Press.  $3.50. 

Instructions  to  the  American  Delegates  to  the 
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ports. Edited,  with  an  introduction,  by  James 
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Press.  $1.50. 

Trade  and  Navigation  Between  Spain  and  the  Indies 
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versity Press.  $2.25. 

Illustrations  of  Chaucer's  England.  Edited  by 
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Green  &  Co.  $2.50. 

Finances  of  Edward  VI  and  Mary.  By  Frederick 
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History,  Smith  College.  50  cts. 

Reconstruction  in  Louisiana  After  1S68.  By  Ella 
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penter. Illustrated,  8vo,  255  pages.  The  Abing- 
don  Press.  $1.50. 

A  Chronicle  of  One  Hundred  and  Fifty  Years:  The 
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1768-1918.  By  Joseph  Bucklin  Bishop.  Illus- 
trated, 8vo,  311  pages.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
$5. 

The  Romance  of  Commerce.  By  H.  Gordon  Self  ridge. 
Illustrated,  8vo,  422  pages.  John  Lane  Co.  $3. 

POLITICS,    SOCIOLOGY,    ETC. 

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The  Aims  of  Labor.  By  Arthur  Henderson.  16mo, 
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Losses  of  Life  In  Modern  Wars:  Austria-Hungary; 
France.  By  Gaston  Bodart.  Military  Selection 
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Press.  $1. 

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Die  Internationalisierung  der  Meerengen  und 
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The  Economic  Basis  of  an  Enduring  Peace.  By  C. 
W.  MacFarlane.  8vo.  80  pages.  George  W. 
Jacobs  Co. 

The  Way  Out  of  War:  A  Biological  Study.  By 
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Blocking  New  Wars.  By  Herbert  S.  Houston.  12mo, 
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The  World  Significance  of  a  Jewish  State.  By  A.  A. 
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ford University  Press.  $2.90. 

The  Employment  Department  and  Employee  Re- 
lations. By  F.  C.  Hendershott  and  F.  E.  Weakly. 
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paper. 

The  Employer,  the  Wage  Earner,  and  the  Law  of 
Love.  By  Charles  H.  Watson.  Hattie  Elizabeth 
Lewis  Memorial  Essays  in  Applied  Christianity. 
8vo,  31  pages.  University  of  Kansas.  •  Paper. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


419 


With  the  promptness  of  journalism — 

With  the  insight  and  sure-footedness  of  economic  research — 

With  the  graphic  quality  of  social  exhibits — 

THE   SURVEY  interprets  the  social  background  of  the  week's  news.     The  SURVEY  was 
the  first  American  journal  to  bring  out  the  real  significance  of  the  British  labor  offen- 
sive.     Editorials   in   the   liberal   Manchester   Guardian   and   the   conservative   London 
Times  bear  out  Paul  U.  Kellogg's  estimates  of   the  movement  of  the  English  workers  as   a 
force  for  endurance  and  coherence  as  well  as  for  democracy  in  the  present  crisis.      Here  is 
the  greatest  and  freest  organized  movement  in  Europe  today  supporting  the  principles  which 
America  stands  for  and  which  President  Wilson  has  enunciated — the  principles  which,  in  the 
words  of  an  English  newspaper  man,  were  worth   "twelve  army  corps   and   a   regiment   of 
angels"  to  the  forces  for  democracy  in  western  Europe. 


The  Huts 
By  Arthur  Gleason 

OF  THE  AMERICAN  Y.  M.  C.  A.  IN  FRANCE 

/^  LEASON  has  known  the  war  from  the  out- 
^J  set,  when  he  was  a  stretcher-bearer  in 
Belgium.  He  knows  the  work  of  the  English 
Y.  M.  C.  A.  He  knows  American  social  work 
as  an  investigator  and  journalist.  He  knows 
our  Y.  M.  C.  A.  in  France  and  writes  with 
authenticity  and  discrimination.  He  was  in  a 
vessel  torpedoed  off  the  coast  of  Ireland  and 
lost  everything  —  socks  and  manuscripts  included. 
But  he  has  set  out  again,  bringing  this  story 
with  him. 

Twice  Devastated 


\ 


\ 


\ 


By  Mary  Ross 

OF  THE   AMERICAN   RED  CROSS 

T>  ATTERIES  of  camions,  loaded  with 
-D  blankets,  clothing,  food    and  medi- 
\        cine,   were   made    ready   in   Paris   as 
\         early  as  January  by  the  American 
\         Red  Cross  to  rush  to  the  source 
\         of  any  fresh  stream  of  refugees 
\          dispossessed  by  the  great  Ger- 
\          man  drive.     A  story,  with 
«A\         photographs,  of  the  "twice 
Associates.  Inc.      %\  refugees"  is  on  the  way 

120  East  19th  St.,        %\  to  the   SURVEY  in  ,  re- 

New  York 

Enclosed  is  a  dollar 
bill.     Send  me   a  five 
months'    trial   subscrip- 
tion, beginning  now. 


\          sponse  to  a  cable. 


\ 
\\ 


The  War-Folk  of  Picardy 
By  Mary  Masters  Needham 

OF    THE    AMERICAN    COMMITTEE    FOR    DEVASTATED 
FRANCE 

WHAT  has  happened  to  the  sinistres — the 
people  left  behind  in  the  "liberated  area" 
when  the  Germans  fell  back  last  spring?  And 
to  the  emigres — those  who  came  back?  What 
of  the  American  agencies  that  worked  with 
them — the  Quakers,  the  Smith  College  Unit,  the 
American  Fund  for  French  Wounded  (the 
American  Committee  fpr  Devastated  France), 
the  American  Red  Cross  and  the  rest?  Mrs. 
Needham  returned  recently  from  Blerancourt, 
near  the  great  battleground  of  the  western  front, 
and  tells  from  first-hand  experience. 

Another  Article  on  the  British 
Labor  Movement 
By  Paul  U.  Kellogg 

EDITOR  OF  THE  SURVEY 

THE  ENGLAND  THEY  ARE  FIGHTING 
FOR. — An  Interpretation  of  the  Domestic  Pro- 
gram of  the  English  Labour  Party. — The  La- 
bour Party  has  stretched  its  tent-ropes  to  in- 
clude workers  "with  brain"  as  well  as  "with 
hand."  The  cooperative  movement  has  en- 
tered politics  and  made  common  cause  with 
the  labour  party. 


\ 


\ 


Name. 


Address. 


A   DOLLAR  will  get  these  issues  in  a  five  months'  trial 
•*•  *•  subscription  to  the  SURVEY, — an  adventure  in  coopera- 
\         tive  journalism   in  which   the  social  workers   of  America 
\         share  with  each  other  the  things  which  make  up  the  life 
\        and  labor  of  the  times. 

\  SURVEY  ASSOCIATES,  Inc.,  120  E.  19th  St.,  New  York 


When   writing  to  advertisers  please   mention   THE  DIAL. 


420  THE     DIAL  [April  25,  1918 


A  Square  Deal  for  the 
Crippled  Soldier 

When  the  crippled  soldier  returns  from  the  front,  the  govern- 
ment will  provide  for  him,  in  addition  to  medical  care,  special 
training  for  self-support. 

But  whether  this  will  really  put  him  back  on  his  feet  depends 
on  what  the  public  does  to  help  or  hinder. 

In  the  past,  the  attitude  of  the  public  has  been  a  greater  handicap 
to  the  cripple  than  his  physical  disability.  People  have  assumed  him 
to  be  helpless.  Too  often,  they  have  persuaded  him  to  become  so. 

For  the  disabled  soldier  there  has  been  "hero-worship;"  for  the 
civilian  cripple  there  has  been  a  futile  kind  of  sympathy.  Both  do 
the  cripple  more  harm  than  good. 

All  the  cripple  needs  is  the  kind  of  job  he  is  fitted  for,  and  per- 
haps a  little  training  in  preparation  for  it.  There  are  hundreds  of 
seriously  crippled  men  now  holding  down  jobs  of  importance. 
Other  cripples  can  do  likewise,  if  given  the  chance. 

Idleness  is  the  calamity  too  hard  to  be  borne.  Your  service  to 
the  crippled  man,  therefore,  is  to  find  for  him  a  good  busy  job,  and 
encourage  him  to  tackle  it. 

Demand  of  the  cripple  that  he  get  back  in  the  work  of  the 
world,  and  you  will  find  him  only  too  ready  to  do  so. 

For  the  cripple  who  is  occupied  is,  in  truth,  no  longer  handicapped. 

Can  the  crippled  soldier — or  the  industrial  cripple  as  well — count 
on  you  as  a  true  and  sensible  friend  ? 

RED  CROSS  INSTITUTE  FOR  CRIPPLED  AND  DISABLED  MEN 
.311  Fourth  Avenue      New  York  City 


To  those  interested  in  the  future  or  our  crippled  soldiers  the  Institute  will  gladly  send,  upon  request, 
booklets  describing  what  is  being  done  in  the  rehabilitation  of  disabled  men.  The  cost  of  this 
advertisement  is  met  by  a  special  gift. 


PRESS    OP    THE    BLAKELY-OSWALD    PRINTING    CO.,    CHICAGO. 


Notice  to  Reader. 

When  you  finish  reading  this  magazine  place 
a  one-cent  stamp  on  this  notice,  hand  same  to 
any  postal  employee  and  it  will  be  placed  in 
the  hands  of  .our  soldiers  at  the  front. 

No  Wrapping — No  Address. 

A.  S.  BURLESON.  Postmaster  General. 


THETHAL 


Fortnightly  Journal  of    • 

CRITICISM:  AND  DISCUSSION  OF  LITERATURE  AND  THE  ARTS 


Volume  LXIV. 
No.   766. 


CHICAGO,  MAY  9,  1918 


15  eta.  a  copy. 
(3.  a  year. 


IN  THIS  ISSUE 

Internationalism  as  the  Condition  of  Allied  Success 

By  NORMAN  ANGELL 

The  True  Authority  of  Science 

By  ROBERT  H.  LOWIE 


NE,W   MACMILLAN    BOOKS 

THE  MARTIAL  ADVENTURES 

TOWARD  THE  GULF 

of  HENRY  and  ME 

Edgar  Lee  Masters'  New  Poems 

William  Allen  White's  New  Book 

The  successor  to  "Spoon  River  Anthology"  —    ' 
another  series  of  fearlessly  true  and  beauti- 

"Truly one  of  the   best  books   that  has  yet 

ful   poems  revealing  American   life   as   few 

come  down  war's  grim  pike     ...     a  jolly 

books  have  done. 

book."—  N.  Y.  Post. 

"The   spiritual    history   of   our    own    middle 

"Honest  from   first  to  last.     .     .     Resembles 

west."  —  Chicago  Post. 

'Innocents  Abroad'   in   scheme   and   laughter 

"An    absorbing    book     .     .     .     beauty    joins 

a    vivid    picture    of    Europe    at   this 
hour.      Should    be    thrice    blessed,    for    man 
and    book    light    up    a   world    in    the    gloom 

hands    with    meaning    in    every    stanza    he 
writes."—  Philadelphia  Press.                     $1.50 

of  war."  —  N.  Y.  Sun.      Now  Third  Edition. 

Illus.  by  Tony  Sarg.    $1.50 

THE  FLYING  TEUTON 

Alice  Brown  's  New  Book 

THE  BOARDMAN  FAMILY 

"  'The  Flying  Teuton'  is  the  best  short  story 

that    has    come    out    of   this   war    in    either 

Mary  5.  Watts'  New  Novel 

English  or  American  magazines     .     .     .     one 

"An    achievement    in    realistic    fiction.     .     . 

of  the  five  best  short  stories  of  'the  year."  — 

She    is    both    artist    and    realist,    consistent, 

The  Bookman. 

vigorous  and   sane.     .     .     Her  portraits  are 

"No    writers    of    war    stories    have    accom- 

real   people     .     .     .     exceedingly   interesting 

plished  any  better  work  than  that  done  by 

and  excellent."—  #.  Y.  Times. 

Miss  Brown  in   'The  Flying  Teuton.'"—  #. 

"A    genuine    cross-section    of    contemporary 

y.  Times.                                                       $1.50 

American  life."  —  Chicago  Herald.           $1.50 

CO-OPERATION:    THE  HOPE 

"THE  DARK  PEOPLE": 

of  the  CONSUMER 

RUSSIA'S  CRISIS 

By  Emerson  P.  Harris 

Ernest  Poole  's  New  Book 

The  Failure  of  Middlemanism,  Reasons  and 

A   wholly   remarkable    and    informing   book 

the   Remedy,   Practical    Co-operation,    Back- 

touching on  almost  every  phase  of  the  Rus- 

ground   and    Outlook    are   the   titles   of   the 

sian    situation,    written    out   of    Mr.    Poole's 

parts  into  which  this  new  work  is  divided. 

recent  experiences  in  Russia.   This  is  perhaps 

"An    original    presentation    of    its    subject. 

the  first  truly  intelligent  account  of  the  real 

Much   better  than   any  other  book  on  con- 

forces  at  work   in   Russia   for   her   ultimate 

sumer's  co-operation  that  has  been  published 

salvation.                                          Illus.    $1.50 

in  this  country."                                             $2.00 

THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY,  Publishers,  New  York 

422 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


THE  UNWILLING  VESTAL 


Net,  $1.50 


By  EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE. 

Author   of   that  wonderful   historical    novel    "El  Supremo." 

The  New  York  Sun  says :  "Action  ?  From  the  first  word  of  the  first  sentence  Mr.  White  hardly  ever  lets 
up.  As  a  story  pure  and  simple  'The  Unwilling  Vestal'  is  technically  miles  ahead  of  'El  Supremo.'  Like 
his  first  novel  this  tale  of  Rome  in  the  years  between  100  and  200  A.  D.  is  related  mostly  by  episodes.  But 
the  story  does  not  lack  continuity.  And  it  has  suspense  to  a  notable  degree,  to  a  degree  far  beyond  the 
power  of  many  novelists  to  achieve." 


GONE  TO  EARTH 


By  MARY  WEBB.     Author  of  "The  Golden  Arrow,"  "The  Spring  of  Joy."  Net,  $1.50 

REBECCA  WE_ST,  in  The  New  York  Sun,  says :  "The  year's  discovery  has  been  Mary  Webb,  author  of  'Gone 
to  Earth.'  She  is  a  genius  and  I  shouldn't  mind  wagering  that  she  is  going  to  be  the  most  distinguished  writer 
of  our  generation." 

The  New  York  Evening  Post  says :  "Fidelity  to  nature  that  marks  the  early  character  description  of  'Gone 
to  Earth'  and  the  mingling  of  humor  and  beauty  in  the  novel  is  rarely  well  done.  The  picture  of  the  half  gypsy 
girl  with  tawny  hair  and  the  feet  of  a  born  dancer  with  her  pet  fox  and  her  kindness  to  all  things  ;  the  sketch  of 
the  abstracted,  callous  old  harper  with  whom  she  has  no  tie  but  one  of  blood,  will  not  be  forgotten  easily." 


By  JANET  LAING. 


BEFORE  THE  WIND 


Net,  $1.50 


The  Spectator  says :  "A  war  novel  in  which  the  scene  is  laid  in  England  and  the  plot  developed  with 
freshness  and  originality.  Miss  Laing  has  a  sense  of  character,  high  spirits,  and  a  generous  enthusiasm  for 
the  qualities  that  count.  Altogether,  this  is  a  most  agreeable  medley  of  cross-purposes,  excitement,  and  romance." 


CHILDREN  OF  PASSAGE 

By  FREDERICK  WATSON.  Net,  $1.50 

Scottish  American  says:  "A  well  written  book, 
full  to  overflowing  not  alone  with  sheer  clever- 
ness, but  with  a  tenderness  that  never  once 
degenerates  into  sentimentality.  Into  this  narra- 
tive of  Scottish  life  Mr.  Watson  has  wrought  a 
wonderful  picture  of  the  highlands  and  the  beauty 
of  their  desolate  glens." 

FRONT  LINES 

By  BOYD  CABLE.  Net,  $1.50 

Author  of   "Action   Front,"    "Between   the  Lines," 
"Grapes  of  Wrath." 

New  York  Herald  says:  "Few  of  the  multitude 
of  war  books  give  as  fine  and  dramatic  and 
photographically  exact  pen  picture  of  trench  life 
and  trench  fighting  as  the  stories  by  Boyd  Cable. 
He  writes  convincingly  and  well.  He  brings  the 
war  home  to  his  readers  with  startling  directness." 

THE  LOST  NAVAL  PAPERS 

By  BENNET  COPPLESTONE.  Net,  $1.50 

The  Argonaut  says:  "Every  story  in  the  present 
volume  is  a  thriller  and  yet  one  finishes  with  the 
impression  that  there  is  nothing  inherently  im- 
probable in  any  of  them.  The  author  has  created 
a  new  detective  character,  William  Dawson,  that 
deserves  to  rank  with  the  redoubtable  Sherlock 
Holmes." 


MY  TWO  KINGS 

By  MRS.  EVAN  NEPEAN. 

A  novel  of  the  Stuart  Restoration. 


Net,  $1.50 


The  dialogue  is  simply  amazing  in  its  brilliancy 
and  its  effect  of  actuality. 

The  Times-Picayune  says :  "The  charm  of  the  his- 
torical novel  still  lingers  amid  the  rush  of  today. 
This  fact  is  evidenced  in  Mrs.  Nepean's  thoroughly 
interesting  story.  All  the  color,  romance,  adven- 
ture and  intrigue  of  the  Stuart  Restoration  are 
interwoven  in  the  swiftly-moving  plot." 


TO  ARMS! 

By  MARCELLE  TINAYRE.  Net,  $1.50 

Translated  into  English  by  Lucy  H.  Humphrey. 

Sort  Francisco  Chronicle  says :  "The  book  has 
caught  the  real  spirit  of  France,  and  reading  it 
will  help  us  to  understand  better  that  valiant 
undaunted  fighting  line,  and  the  equally  valiant 
army  of  loyal  civilians  behind  it." 

GREATER  THAN  THE  GREATEST 

By  HAMILTON  DRUMMOND.  Net,  $1.50 

Boston  Times  says :  "This  is  a  stirring  romance 
of  the  great  contest  between  the  Pope  and  the 
Emperor  in  the  thirteenth  century.  The  story  is 
full  of  movement  and  color,  and  the  author  has 
been  singularly  successful  in  making  these  far-off 
days  of  struggle  and  intrigue  vividly  real  and 
vital  for  his  readers." 

THE  FIGHTING  FOOL 

A  tale  of  the  Western  Frontier. 

By  DANE  COOLIDGE.  In  Press.  Net,  $1.50 

A  story  of  cattle  thieves,  train  robbers,  ineffectual 
pursuit  of  the  law  and  successful  escapes  of  the 
law-breakers  in  Arizona  and  Mexico.  The  story 
is  keyed  up  to  white  heat  from  beginning  to  end. 

THE  FOUR  HORSEMEN 
OF  THE  APOCALYPSE 

From  the  Spanish  of  Vicente  Blasco  Ibanez.    Author- 
ized Translated  by   Charlotte  Brewster   Jordon. 

In   Press.     Net,   $1.50 

A  superb  drama  of  modern  life,  leading  up  to 
and  describing  the  first  stage  of  the  Great  War 
in  France. 

The  "Four  Horsemen"  are  Pestilence,  War, 
Famine  and  Death,  who  precede  the  Great  Beast 
of  the  Book  of  Revelations. 

The  work  of  a  great  genius  stirred  to  the  bottom 
of  his  soul  by  the  weeks  of  tension,  violence  and 
horror  which  culminated  in  the  great  epic  of  the 
Battle  of  the  Marne,  and  by  the  splendor  of  the 
Spirit  of  France  under  the  trial. 


SALT,  OR  THE  EDUCATION  OF  GRIFFITH  ADAMS 

By  CHARLES  G.  NORRIS.     Author  of  "The  Amateur."  Net,  $1.50 

This  novel  tells  the  story  of  an  American  boy  who  went  through  school  and  college,  but  who  was  not  educated 
until  later.  It  is  a  startling  commentary  on  the  methods  of  which  our  young  men  are  fitted  for  life.  Griffith 
Adams  is  an  American  type;  there  are  thousands  like  him.  His  story  is  the  history  of  the  average  collegian- 
only  that  his  is  perhaps  the  more  fortunate.  Business,  Friendship,  Love,  all  have  their  part  in  this  story  of 
a  lovable  character. 


In  Press 


Postage  Extra  At  All  Bookstore* 

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1918] 


THE    DIAL 


423 


IMPORTANT    NEW    BOOKS 


THE 

REAL  FRONT 


ARTHUR  HUNT  CHUTE 


THE  REAL  FRONT 

By  ARTHUR  HUNT  CHUTE 

This  is  a  vital  story — a  story  of 
the  inner  beauty — of  the  high  ideal- 
ism of  the  men  who  fight  and  die 
in  battle.  The  words  are  living, 
burning  things  that  leap  and  flash 
even  as  the  battle-sounds  of  which 
the  author  tells.  Here  at  last  is  a 
war  book  with  a  style  so  brilliant 
that  it  may  well  be  called  literature. 
Illustrated,  $1.50 


By  JOHN  SPARGO 

Mr.  Spargo  says:  "This  volume 
is  an  attempt  to  state  in  simple, 
popular,  and  untechnical  language 
the  essentials  of  the  Socialism  of  the 
Marxian  school  —  not  only  of  the 
philosophical  and  economic  theories 
of  Socialism,  but  of  the  principles 
underlying  the  policies  of  the  Social- 
ist movement."  Post  Svo,  Cloth,  $1.50 


THE  WINNING 
OF  THE  WAR 

By  ROLAND  G.  USHER,  Ph.D. 

Author    of    "Pan-Germanism,"    etc. 

Are  your  a  pessimist  about  the 
war?  Here  is  optimism  for  pessi- 
mistic people.  This  clear-sighted 
book  comes  at  an  opportune  moment 
when  the  American  army  is  enter- 
ing the  trenches.  Here  is  an  analy- 
sis of  the  situation,  showing  the 
true  basis  of  apprehenti^n,  and 
pointing  out  the  victory  which  will 
ultimately  belong  to  the  Allies. 

Maps.     Cloth,  $2.00 


WORRYING 
WON'T  WIN 

By  MONTAGUE  GLASS 

Author  of  "Potash  and  Perlmutter." 

Your  likeable  friends,  Potash  and 
Perlmutter,  are  here  in  a  new  book, 
in  new  experiences  both  humorous 
and  wise — which  take  your  mind  off 
war.  In  their  inimitable  way,  Abe 
and  Mawruss  discuss  the  various 
phases  of  the  European  situation, 
and  mix  up  German  secret  service, 
union  labor  and  hundreds  of  other 
subjects.  "There's  only  one  thing 
that  a  Russian  revoltionary  dictator 
really  and  truly  worries  about,"  says 
Abe.  "What's  that?"  asks  Maw- 
russ. "Losing  his  voice." 

Illustrated,  Post  8vo,  Cloth,  $1.50 

THE  MAN  WHO 
SURVIVED 

By  CAMILLE  MARBO 

Translated     from     the     French     by 

Frank  H.  Potter. 

This  story,  by  the  wife  of  a  dis- 
tinguished Frenchman,  is  remark- 
able even  without  the  war-time 
background  and  unfolds  a  situation 
as  novel  and  convincing  as  that  of 
Jekyl  and  Hyde.  It,  too,  is  the  story 
of  a  dual  personality.  At  the  be- 
ginning of  the  war,  two  friends  go 
into  battle  together.  One  is  killed. 
Let  Camille  Marbo  tell  you  of  the 
strange  experience  of  the  man  who 
survived.  Post  Svo,  Cloth,  fl.SS 

CONFESSIONS  OF 
THE  CZARINA 

By  COUNT  PAUL  VASSILI 

Here  is  a  book  of  revelations,  tell- 
ing the  fascinating  human  story  of 
a  highly  placed  and  beautiful  woman 
— the  Czarina  of  Russia.  You  see 
her  as  a  young  princess-bride.  You 
will  read  of  the  appearance  of  the 
famous  Anna  Wyrubewa  at  Court, 
the  Czarina's  own  love  story.  Colonel 
Orloff's  strange  suicide,  the  coming 
of  the  prophet,  and  the  debacle  of 
the  Revolution. 

Portraits.    Crown  Svo,  Cloth,  fS.OO 

HOW  TO  SELL 
MORE  GOODS 

By  H.  J.  BARRETT 

Up  against  the  war-dragon,  you 
will  want  to  sell  more  goods  than 
ever  before!  Here  is  a  book  that 
will  open  up  to  you  hundreds  of 
unthought  of  possibilities  ;  that  will 
give  you  a  new  point  of  view; 
show  you  the  value  of  an  optimistic 
personality  in  securing  sales.  Writ- 
ten largely  out  of  the  experiences 
of  salesmen  he  has  met,  the  author 
approaches  the  subject  in  a  perfectly 
simple  way  and  will  give  you  many 
valuable  pointers.  Crown,  Svo,  $2.00 


MODERN  METHODS 
IN  THE  OFFICE 

By  H.  J.  BARRETT 

A  book  without  which  no  business 
man's  outfit  is  complete.  The  author 
is  a  well-known  advertising  expert 
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practical,  possible  way. 

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WAR  GARDENS 

By  MONTAGUE  FREE 

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PRAYERS  FOR* 
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With  a  Series  of  Meditations 
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"Faith,"  etc. 

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tion. Many  of  the  prayers  and 
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Watson  Gilder,  Robert  Louis  Stev- 
enson, Woodrow  Wilson.  Others  by 
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man, Bishop  Brent,  Elwood  Wor- 
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Henry  Ward  Beecher. 

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424 


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[May  9 


THE    BEST-SELLING    WAR    BOOKS    OF    THE    SPRING 

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THE  GLORY  OF  THE  TRENCHES 

By  LIEUT.  CONINGSBY  DAWSON 

Author  of  "Carry  On:    Letters  In  Wartime" 

(Now  in  its  Twentieth  Edition) 

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How  Haig  Fight* 
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THE  BUSINESS 
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An  American  Girl'*  Experience*  When  the  German*  Came  Through  Belgium 

LIEGE:     ON    THE    LINE    OF    MARCH 

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Probably  no  other  American  girl  has  been  in  the  exact  position  of  Miss  Bigelow,  who  was  at  the  Chateau 
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and  the  people  of  that  country  those  tragic  events  of  w  hich  the  world  has  heard  much  but  not,  by  any  means, 
all  that  can  be  told. 


FASCINATING  HISTORY 


Behind  the  Purple  Curtain 

MY  EMPRESS 

By  MADAME  MARFA  MOUCHANOW,  First  Maid 
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Alexandra  of  Russia,  for  twenty-three  years. 

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prairies. 


New  Spring  Poetry      POSTHUMOUS 


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etc.  Translated  by  Charles  R. 
Murphy.  Cloth,  $1.00  net 

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of  love  poems  of  the  noted  Belgian 

author. 


or  ALGERNON  CHARLES 
SWINBURNE 

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and  THOMAS  J.   WISE. 

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author. 


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CONTENTS 


Norman  Angell     . 
Richard  Aldington 

Robert  H.  Loivie  . 
Guy  N earing    . 


INTERNATIONALISM  AS  THE  CONDITION 

OF  ALLIED  SUCCESS 

LETTERS  TO  UNKNOWN  WOMEN     .     . 

To  Sappho. 

THE  TRUE  AUTHORITY  OF  SCIENCE     . 
THE  RETURN     .     .     .    Verse    .     .     . 

OUR  PARIS  LETTER Robert  Dell     .     .     . 

THE  DETERMINANTS  OF  CULTURE  .     .  Max  Sylvius  Handman 

SENSE  AND  NONSENSE Harold  Stearns     .     . 

A  STATESMAN  SACRIFICED     ....  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

IRELAND'S  NEW  WRITER  OF  FICTION    .  Ernest  A.  Boyd     .     . 

THE  Two  MAGICS Conrad  Aiken  .     .     . 

REENTER  LITERARY  BURLESQUE     .     .  Clarence  Britten   .     . 

AN  IMAGIST  NOVEL Randolph  Bourne  . 


427 
430 

432 
434 
435 
438 
439 
441 
445 
447 
450 
451 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS     . 452 

The  Greek  Anthology. — There  Is  No  Death. — A  Short  History  of  Discovery. — 
Le  Morte  Darthur  of  Sir  Thomas  Malory  and  Its  Sources. — The  President's  Con- 
trol of  Foreign  Relations. — A  History  of  Architecture. — Child  Welfare  in  Okla- 
homa.— Peaceful  Penetration. — The  Significance  of  the  Protestant  Reformation. 
— Protestantism  in  Germany. — Disasters  and  the  American  Red  Cross  in  Disaster 
Relief. — Household  Management. — The  War  and  the  Bagdad  Railway. — A  His- 
tory of  the  United  States  since  the  Civil  War. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 458 

BRIEFER  MENTION 460 

NOTES  AND  NEWS .  462 

LIST  OF  BOOKS  RECEIVED 464 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


Contributing  Editors 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 


CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

ROBERT  DELL  HENRY  B.  FULLER  CLARENCE  BRITTEN 

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Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
Secretary-Treasurer,  at  608  South  Dearborn  Street,  Chicago. 


426  THE     DIAL  [May  9,  1918 


YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


AN  OUTLINE  SKETCH  OF  ENGLISH  CONSTITUTIONAL 

HISTORY 

By  GEORGE  BURTON  ADAMS,  Litt.D. 

"Written  with  the  excellent  object  of  instructing  Americans  in  regard  to  the  political 
institutions  which  they  have  inherited  from  the  mother  country.  .  .  Conceived  on  broad, 
rational  grounds,  even  where  its  nature  is  somewhat  controversial." — Springfield  Repub- 
lican. Cloth,  $1.75  net. 

THE  PROCESSES  OF  HISTORY        ' 

By  FREDERICK  J.  TEGGART,  Ph.D. 

This  volume  presents  a  new  and  highly  suggestive  approach  to  the  study  of  man. 
Mr.  Teggart  shows  that  an  application  of  the  method  of  science  to  the  facts  of  human 
history  throws  a  new  and  vivid  light  upon  the  characteristics  of  modern  political  organiza- 
tions and  accounts  for  the  wide  diversities  in  the  political  and  cultural  status  of  human 
groups.  Cloth,  $1.25  net. 

HUMAN  NATURE  AND  ITS  REMAKING 

By  WILLIAM  ERNEST  HOCKING,  Ph.D. 
Author  of  "The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience" 

The  instincts  and  innate  capacities  which  form  the  original  endowment  of  human  nature 
and  the  effects  of  the  various  influences — social,  political,  and  religious — which  largely 
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CHRISTIAN  BELIEF  IN  GOD 

A  German  Criticism  of  German  Materialistic  Philosophy 

By  GEORG  WOBBERMIN,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Dogmatics,  University  of  Heidelberg 

Translated  by  Daniel  Sommer  Robinson,  Ph.D. 

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THE  BURGLAR  OF  THE  ZODIAC,  AND  OTHER  POEMS 

By  WILLIAM  ROSE  BENET 

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pREJ^ 

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AL 

Journal  of  Criticism  ana  2D(0cu00ion  of  EiUratute  ana 


Internationalism  as  the  Condition  of  Allied  Success 


We  have  pretty  general  agreement  that 
the  aim  of  the  war,  as  far  as  America  is 
concerned,  is  a  completer  internationalism 
than  we  have  known  in  the  past — a  better 
international  order  by  virtue  of  which  the 
world  will  be  made  safe.  But  the  general 
attitude  to  that  aim  is  that  it  is  something 
to  be  established  after  victory  is  won,  when 
we  have  time — and  power — to  carry  out 
political  ideals  and  to  try  experiments. 
Meantime  we  are  likely  to  feel  that  it  is 
better  to  "get  on  with  the  war"  and  to  leave 
Utopias  alone,  especially  Utopias  that  have 
any  relation  to  pacifist  feeling,  which  it  is 
well  to  bury  as  deep  as  possible.  On  the 
whole,  perhaps,  we  feel  that  the  less  the 
public  concerns  itself  in  war  time  with 
policy  at  all,  the  better. 

It  is  here  suggested  that  this  attitude 
may  be  disastrous,  even  in  its  military 
consequences;  that,  indeed,  it  has  already 
been  so ;  that  the  progressive  development 
during  the  war  of  internationalist  policy 
and  feeling  is  an  indispensable  condition 
of  the  military  success  of  our  alliance;  that 
the  failure  sufficiently  to  recognize  this  is 
one  of  the  main  factors  of  the  greatest 
reverses  so  far  suffered  by  the  alliance. 

It  is  of  course  obvious  that  in  the  case 
of  a  war  fought  by  a  large  alliance,  made 
up  of  a  number  of  nations  different  in 
character  and  outlook,  success  depends  not 
only  upon  the  individual  strength  of  each 
member,  but  also  upon  the  capacity  of 
those  members  to  act  together  for  a  com- 
mon purpose.  And  it  will  readily  be 
admitted  that  such  capacity  of  many  states 
to  act  together  is  in  theory  "international- 
ism." But,  it  will  be  retorted,  these  things 
are  truisms,  so  obvious  as  to  be  in  no 
danger  of  oversight,  and  certainly  need- 
ing no  reinforcement  from  internationalist 
theory. 

Well,  it  is  just  three  years  and  eight 
months  after  the  beginning  of  the  war 
that  we  find  Mr.  Lloyd  George  in  the 


House  of  Commons,  pointing  to  one  factor 
alone  as  explaining  the  success  of  the  Ger- 
man drive.  The  enemy  was  "slightly 
inferior  in  infantry,  slightly  inferior  in 
artillery,  considerably  inferior  in  cavalry, 
undoubtedly  inferior  in  aircraft."  But 
there  was  one  thing  in  which  he  was 
superior — unity.  "In  so  far  as  he  has 
triumphed,  he  has  triumphed  mainly  be- 
cause of  superior  unity,  and  the  concen- 
tration of  his  strategic  plans."  And  the 
Prime  Minister  reinforced  the  point  by  the 
story  which  had  come  to  him  from  a  re- 
liable source,  that  the  Kaiser  had  said  to 
King  Constantine,  "I  shall  beat  them,  for 
they  have  no  united  command." 

But  that,  it  will  be  replied,  can  no 
longer  be  said.  We  have  now  a  united 
command,  even  if  it  has  taken  nearly  four 
years  of  war  to  get  it.  Unity  of  military 
command  however  will  simply  be  a  trap 
unless  it  is  based  upon  unity  of  political 
purpose:  unless  forged  in  certain  condi- 
tions of  public  temper  and  purpose,  it  will 
be  an  instrument  that  will  break  in  the 
hand.  Of  what  use  would  unity  of  com- 
mand have  been  two  years  ago,  if  at  work 
behind  the  lines  were  all  the  forces  that 
brought  about  the  misunderstanding  of 
the  real  nature  of  the  revolutionary  forces 
of  Russia  and  so  the  defection  of  Russia; 
the  divergence  of  purpose  between  Italy 
and  Servia  and  Greece,  the  alienation  of 
the  Southern  Slavs?  And  if  in  the  near 
future,  or  for  that  matter  at  the  peace 
conference  after  the  defeat  of  the  Central 
Empires,  Allied  policy  is  of  such  a  nature 
as  to  drive,  or  to  allow,  Russia  to  drift 
into  the  German  orbit  and  become  a  Prus- 
sian asset;  as  to  alienate  Japan,  to  develop 
the  elements  of  revolution  in  Ireland  and 
a  divergence  of  purpose  as  between  the 
American  and  the  British  or  French  democ- 
racies— if  elements  of  disunity  of  such  a 
character  develop  in  our  alliance,  the 
assertion  of  permanently  preponderant 


428 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


power  over  the  Prussian  may  well  become 
impossible.  And  such  a  failure  would  be  a 
failure  of  policy  due  to  a  certain  condition 
of  public  temper  and  feeling,  a  failure  to 
evolve  a  really  common  aim  and  to  em- 
phasize the  internationalist  element  of  our 
purposes. 

The  conclusion  so  far  might  be  sum- 
marized thus: 

The  military  success  of  the  Allies  de- 
pends upon  certain  political  factors — as, 
for  instance,  upon  the  unity  of  the 
alliance,  the  absence  of  such  misunder- 
standing as  might  well  grow  up  with 
Japan,  or  internal  disintegration  such  as 
that  which  has  put  Russia  out  of  the  war 
— as  well  as  upon  the  more  material  ele- 
ments, both  men  and  munitions,  to  which 
attention  is  more  readily  given. 

These  non-military  factors,  which  are 
indispensable  to  military  success,  depend 
upon  good  management  by  the  civilian 
rulers — the  politicians. 

Effective  civilian  rule  depends  upon 
civilian  public  opinion;  it  is  civilian 
opinion  alone  which,  for  instance,  in 
Europe  deposes  one  government,  like 
that  of  Mr.  Asquith,  in  favor  of  an- 
other, like  that  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 
If  that  change  was  wise,  it  must  greatly 
have  facilitated  the  task  of  the  soldier; 
if  unwise,  greatly  have  hindered  it. 

Now  stated  in  that  form,  these  propo- 
sitions are  almost  truisms.  Yet  they  run 
directly  counter  to  the  position  so  easily 
assumed  that  the  public  can  have  nothing 
to  do  with  policy,  or  that  policy  has  noth- 
ing to  do  with  military  success. 

The  grave  fact  in  the  history  of  the  war 
is  that  public  opinion  in  some  of  the  Allied 
countries  has  at  some  junctures,  with  the 
best  intentions  in  the  world,  been  largely 
responsible  for  errors  of  policy  which 
have  added  enormously  to  the  military 
difficulties.  Internal  upheavals,  changes 
of  policies  and  cabinets,  sudden  losses  of 
confidence,  errors  in  relations  with  allies 
have  occurred,  sometimes,  because  sin- 
cerely patriotic  people  have  overlooked 
the  fact  that  intensity  of  feeling  and  emo- 
tion— however  good  of  themselves — can- 
not stand  for  sound  political  judgment. 
There  are  situations  in  life  in  which  sheer 
emotional  fervor  is  the  one  thing  necessary 


to  carry  one  through  to  safety;  but  there 
are  others — as  when  someone  cries  "fire" 
in  a  crowded  theatre — when  our  instinct 
not  only  will  not  furnish  any  sure  guide  as 
to  the  right  thing  to  do  but  will  beyond 
doubt  destroy  us  if  we  obey  it.  The  great 
need  in  such  circumstances  is  to  "keep  our 
heads";  there  must  be  a  certain  moral 
discipline.  Unless  we  maintain  a  certain 
atmosphere  of  public  opinion,  a  capacity 
for  sane  and  sound  judgment  sufficient  to 
enable  us  to  differentiate  between  good  and 
bad  policy,  we  make  it  impossible  for  the 
soldier  to  bring  us  victory,  whatever  his 
efficiency  and  sacrifice. 

No  one  will  pretend  that  this  relation 
between  a  certain  condition  of  public  tem- 
per— the  need  for  a  wider  realization  of 
the  indispensability  of  internationalism — 
and  our  ultimate  military  success,  is  gener- 
ally recognized.  It  is  all  but  universally 
ignored.  It  has  taken  British  and  French 
radicalism  three  years  to  realize  the  need 
for  clarifying  and  emphasizing  the  inter- 
nationalist aims  of  policy  as  the  means 
whereby  disruption  of  the  alliance  by  fur- 
ther defections  like  that  of  Russia  may 
be  avoided.  American  public  opinion  so 
little  realizes  the  explanation  of  that  de- 
velopment of  policy  in  European  democra- 
cies, that  it  shows  itself  on  the  whole 
hostile  thereto.  American  public  opinion 
today  seems  as  little  disposed  to  give  due 
weight  to  certain  forces  at  work  in  Britain 
and  in  France  as  were  the  European 
Allies  a  year  ago  to  give  due  weight  to 
certain  forces  in  Russia.  The  impatient 
refusal  to  consider  the  nature  of  these 
present  forces  may  be  as  disastrous  to  our 
cause  in  the  future  as  was  the  failure  of 
Europe  properly  to  estimate  the  nature  of 
the  Russian  revolution. 

I  have  attempted  to  summarize  the  out- 
standing considerations  in  the  thesis  here 
broadly  indicated  by  the  following  ex- 
tended proposition:  The  survival  of  the 
Western  Democracies,  in  so  far  as  that  is 
a  matter  of  the  effective  use  of  their  force, 
depends  upon  their  capacity  to  use  it  as  a 
unit,  during  the  war  and  after.  That 
unity  we  have  not  attained,  even  for  the 
purposes  of  the  war,  because  we  have  re- 
fused to  recognize  its  necessary  conditions 
— a  kind  and  degree  of  internationalism 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


429 


to  which  current  political  ideas  and  feel- 
ings are  hostile,  an  internationalism  which 
is  not  necessary  to  the  enemy,  but  is  to  us. 

For  the  Grand  Alliance  of  the  democra- 
cies is  a  heterogeneous  collection  of  na- 
tions, not  geographically  contiguous  but 
scattered  over  the  world,  and  not  domi- 
nated by  one  preponderant  state  able  to 
give  unity  of  direction  to  the  group.  The 
enemy  alliance,  on  the  other  hand,  is  com- 
posed of  a  group  of  states,  geographically 
contiguous,  dominated  politically  and  mil- 
itarily by  the  material  power  and  geo- 
graphical position  of  one  member,  able  by 
that  fact  to  impose  unity  of  purpose  and 
direction  on  the  whole.  If  we  are  to  use 
our  power  successfully  against  him  in  such 
circumstances — during  the  war,  at  the  set- 
tlement, and  afterwards  (which  may  well 
be  necessary) — we  must  achieve  a  consoli- 
dation equally  effective.  But  in  our  case 
that  consolidation,  not  being  possible  by 
the  material  predominance  of  one  mem- 
ber, must  be  achieved  by  a  moral  factor, 
the  voluntary  cooperation  of  equals — a 
democratic  internationalism,  necessarily 
based  on  a  unity  of  moral  aim.  Because 
this  has  not  been  attained,  even  during  the 
war,  disintegration  of  our  alliance  has  al- 
ready set  in — involving  enormous  military 
cost — and  threatens  to  become  still  more 
acute  at  the  peace.  The  enemy  group 
shows  no  equivalent  disintegration. 

No  military  decision  against  the  unified 
enemy  group  can  be  permanent  if  at  the 
peace  table  it  becomes  evident  that  the 
Western  Democracies  are  to  revert  to  the 
old  lack  of  consolidation,  instability  of 
alliance,  covert  competition  for  isolated 
power  and  territory,  a  national  particular- 
ism which  makes  common  action  and  co- 
ordination of  power  cumbrous,  difficult,  or 
impossible.  If  there  is  to  be  a  return  to 
the  old  disunity  of  Europe  the  parties 
which  among  the  enemy  favor  aggression 
will  realize  that  however  much  their  pur- 
pose may  temporarily  be  defeated,  the 
greater  material  unity  of  their  alliance  will 
enable  it  sooner  or  later  to  overcome  states 
which,  though  superior  in  the  sum  of  their 
power,  have  shown  themselves  inferior  in 
their  capacity  to  combine  that  power  for  a 
common  purpose.  And  that  inferiority 
might  arise  as  much  from  passive  hostility 


to  abandoning  the  old  national  organiza- 
tion of  Europe,  from  sheer  lack  of  habit 
and  practice  in  international  cooperation, 
political,  military,  or  economic,  as  from  the 
presence  of  any  active  agents  of  disruption. 

The  factors  of  disintegration  in  the 
Grand  Alliance  are  of  two  kinds :  conflict- 
ing territorial  claims  by  the  component 
states  (illustrated  by  the  demands  of 
Czarist  Russia;  of  Italy,  Servia,  and  other 
Slav  groups;  of  Roumania,  Greece,  and, 
more  obscurely,  of  Japan)  and  conflict  of 
economic  interest  and  social  aspiration 
within  the  nations  (illustrated  by  the  strug- 
gles of  the  bourgeois  and  Socialist  parties 
in  Russia,  less  dramatically  by  the  revolu- 
tionary unrest  in  Italy,  and  even  in  France 
and  England).  These  latter  factors  are 
more  dangerous  with  us  than  with  the 
enemy,  because  our  historical  circum- 
stances have  rendered  us  less  disciplined 
or  less  docile,  less  apt  in  mechanical  and 
dehumanized  obedience. 

The  general  truth  we  are  here  dealing 
with  is  of  far  greater  importance  to  us 
than  to  the  enemy.  He  can  in  some  meas- 
ure ignore  it.  We  cannot.  His  unity,  in 
so  far  as  it  rests  upon  moral  factors,  can 
be  based  upon  the  old  nationalist  concep- 
tions; our  unity  depends  upon  a  revision 
of  them,  an  enlargement  into  an  interna- 
tionalism. 

The  kind  and  degree  of  international- 
ism indispensable  for  the  consolidation  of 
the  Western  peoples  if  they  are  to  use  their 
force  effectively  —  an  internationalism 
which  must  take  into  account  the  newer 
social  and  economic  forces  of  Western 
society — is  impossible  on  the  basis  of  the 
older  statecraft  and  its  political  motives. 
For  they  assume  as  inevitable  a  condition 
of  the  world  in  which  each  nation  must 
look  for  its  security  to  its  own  isolated 
strength  (which  must  derive  from  pop- 
ulation, territory,  and  strategic  position), 
thus  making  the  ultimate  interests  of  the 
nations  necessarily  rival.  The  capacity  of 
each  to  feed  its  population  and  assure  its 
economic  welfare  is  assumed  to  depend 
upon  the  extent  of  its  territory.  A  whole 
philosophy  of  "biological  necessity," 
"struggle  for  life  among  nations,"  "inher- 
ent pugnacity  of  mankind,"  "survival  of 


430 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


the  fit,"  is  invoked  on  behalf  of  this  old 
and  popular  conception  of  international 
life  and  politics.  Such  an  outlook  inevit- 
ably implies  an  overt  or  latent  rivalry 
which  must  bring  even  members  of  the 
same  alliance  sooner  or  later  into  conflict. 

The  only  possible  unifying  alternative 
to  this  disruptive  policy  is  the  form  of 
internationalism  outlined  by  President 
Wilson,  based  on  the  assumption  that  the 
vital  interests  of  all  Western  nations  are 
interdependent  and  call  for  some  perma- 
nent association  of  nations  by  which  the 
security  of  each  shall  be  made  to  rest  upon 
the  strength  of  the  whole,  held  together 
by  the  reciprocal  obligation  to  defend  one 
another. 

The  greatest  obstacles  to  such  a  system 
are  disbelief  in  its  feasibility  and  our  sub- 
jection to  the  traditions  of  national  sov- 
ereignty and  independence.  Were  it  gener- 
ally believed  in  and  desired,  it  would  be 
not  only  feasible  but  inevitable.  Our  gov- 
ernments could  aid  in  the  modification  of 
old  ideas  through  bold  and  definite  projects 
of  change  and  a  new  machinery  of  inter- 
national representation,  compelling  pub- 
lic imagination  to  take  stock  of  its  current 
conceptions. 


Such  references  as  have  been  made  by 
Allied  statesmanship  to  these  projects  have 
carried  the  implication  that  they  do  not 
concern  the  actual  waging  of  the  war,  or 
are  put  forward  as  an  alternative  to  its 
continuance.  And  that  of  itself  has  suf- 
ficed to  prevent  any  real  consideration  of 
them.  Yet  the  internationalism  of  which 
President  Wilson  has  shown  himself  to  be 
the  most  consistent  advocate  is  not  a  sub- 
stitute for  military  power,  or  an  alterna- 
tive to  the  active  prosecution  of  the  war; 
it  is  an  essential  part  of  the  political  means 
by  which  the  military  power  of  democra- 
cies, and  the  actual  prosecution  of  this 
war,  may  be  made  effective.  It  is  not  some 
remote  aim  of  the  future,  but  the  policy 
which  must  be  made  the  basis  of  our  own 
alliance,  for  the  purposes  of  the  war  itself, 
and  for  the  continued  resistance  of  our 
group,  to  the  end  that  we  may  use  our 
victory  effectively  by  coming  to  the  peace 
table  a  united  and  cohesive  league.  If 
this  is  not  already  an  accomplished  fact 
when  we  do  come  to  the  settlement,  the 
disruptive  tendencies  within  the  alliance 
may  well  be  intensified  and  our  problems 
of  justice  and  security  become  insoluble. 

NORMAN  ANGELL. 


Letters  to  Unknown  Women 


SAPPHO 


To  Sappho  of  Mitylene : 

Like  so  many  notorious  characters  of 
history  you  have  become  an  enigma,  as 
ambiguous  as  an  oracle.  So  little  can  be 
proved,  so  much  surmised  about  you — 
tradition  is  so  incoherent  and  conflicting — 
that  each  person  makes  you  a  projection 
of  what  he  desires  you  to  be.  And  if  it 
be  true  that  our  thoughts  of  the  dead  alone 
preserve  them  in  the  fields  of  Hades, 
then  yours  must  indeed  be  a  soul  of  many 
conflicting  personalities.  The  Sappho  of 
Pierre  Louys  would  not  be  recognized  by 
the  Sappho  of  Miss  Jane  Harrison,  and 
the  Sappho  of  Ovid  would  be  uneasy  with 
either. 

It  has  been  suggested  that  you  were 
not  one  but  two.  You  have  been  reck- 


lessly given  a  husband  and  a  daughter  and 
as  recklessly  deprived  of  them.  You  have 
been  described  as  a  debauched  creature 
and  as  a  school  mistress;  you  have  been 
drowned  for  the  sake  of  a  man's  love  in 
the  ^Egean  and  buried  in  an  Aeolic  grave 
by  your  girl  lovers.  Swinburne  has  shown 
you  as  a  nerve-tortured  fierce  thing,  cry- 
ing upon  death;  and  Lyly  has  made  you  an 
allegory  of  the  Virgin  Queen.  Your 
character,  O  sweet-smiling  weaver  of 
wiles,  is  varied  and  dubious.  You  have 
been  described  as  everything  except  a 
woman. 

Yet  your  reputation,  O  Sappho,  is  en- 
viable; you  are,  perhaps,  the  most  famous 
of  all  women.  Those  who  have  never 
read  a  word  you  wrote  and  those  who 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


431 


have  studied  you  to  the  last  syllable  are 
agreed  in  their  estimate  of  your  genius; 
while  those  who  have  glanced  carelessly  at 
your  poetry  wonder  upon  what  your  repu- 
tation rests.  Well,  it  rests  upon  the  mys- 
tery that  surrounds  you. 

That  mystery  is  due  to  a  Hebrew  tent- 
maker  who,  some  five  hundred  years  after 
your  death,  preached  with  extraordinary 
vigor  a  dogma  of  more  than  Lacedaemo- 
nian austerity,  with  the  result  that  later 
generations  in  a  frenzy  of  perverted  de- 
structiveness  wrecked  and  burned  much 
that  the  genius  of  Hellas  had  created — 
your  poems  among  them.  All  that  we  have 
of  you  are  a  few  tattered,  almost  unread- 
able papyri  and  such  fragments  as  were 
quoted  by  grammarians  and  critics  still 
extant.  But  the  fate  that  destroyed  your 
work  created  your  reputation.  We  are 
thrilled  by  those  fragments  as  by  no  other 
poetry  in  the  world,  and  your  fame  as  the 
greatest  woman-poet  of  all  time  remains 
unchallenged  because  it  cannot  be  disputed. 
Therefore,  sweet  nightingale,  herald  of 
the  spring,  you  prove  indeed  that  unheard 
melodies  are  the  sweeter. 

To  some  you  are  more  marvelous  as 
lover  than  as  poet.  Some  are  terrified  by 
the  fierceness,  the  madness  of  your  pas- 
sions and  will  "mistranslate  and  miscon- 
strue" to  prove  you  respectable.  I  have 
already  mentioned  the  fable  which  has 
invented  two  Sapphos,  one  a  matron  of 
eminence  and  purity  who  produced  your 
poetry,  and  one  a  courtesan  who  lived 
your  loves !  If  the  shades  beyond  Acheron 
can  smile  I  am  sure  your  smile  is  not  un- 
tinged  with  irony.  But  even  this  has  been 
bettered  and  you  are  represented  as  an 
even  more  commonplace  person,  a  cul- 
tured, Ruskin-like  school  mistress  presid- 
ing in  all  chastity  and  severity  over  vir- 
tuous girls  who  came  to  your  school  to 
learn  poetry.  Laugh,  Sappho,  laugh 
among  the  shadowy  asphodels  where  you 
lie  with  Anaktoria  and  Erinna  that  such 
things  should  be  said  of  you,  you  who 
from  love  were  paler  than  sun-dried  grass, 
who  sang  to  please  your  girl  lovers,  whose 
limbs  were  mastered  and  shaken  by  bitter- 
sweet love,  whose  soul  trembled  with  de- 
sire— a  wind  on  the  mountain  falling  on 


the  oaks — who  knew  like  Nossis  what 
flowers  were  the  roses  of  Aphrodite  and 
who  mourned  when  Atthis  left  you  for 
Andromeda ! 

No,  Sappho,  there  are  some  of  us  so 
unrepentant  that  we  cannot  bear  to  think 
of  you  confined  in  the  straight  garb  of  a 
blameless  life.  "To  the  pure  all  things 
are  pure"  is  of  all  your  fragments  that 
most  frequently  quoted  by  your  moral 
apologists.  They  are  innocent  of  irony. 
We,  perhaps,  are  too  delighted  by  that 
quality.  In  any  case  we  prefer  the  Sappho 
of  Nossis  and  Renee  Vivien  to  the  school 
mistress. 

It  has  been  your  fortune,  O  Sappho, 
to  be  loved  not  only  in  your  lifetime  but 
after  your  death.  When  we  read  those 
honey-sweet  words  of  Nossis — she  upon 
whose  tablets  melted  the  wax — we  feel  the 
slow  thrill  of  a  mortal  passion  stir  within 
us;  and  though  many  have  loved  you  since 
Nossis,  none  with  so  complete  an  aban- 
donment as  that  wistful  girl  from  the  great 
waste  beyond  the  pillars  of  Hercules  who 
died  in  Hellas  because,  it  seems,  our  world 
was  not  fair  enough  for  one  who  had  sur- 
prised your  secret  and  looked  at  beauty 
through  your  eyes. 

The  world  claims  you,  Sappho,  the 
world  which  has  lent  too  ready  an  ear  to 
the  Hebrew  tent-maker  whose  works  de- 
stroyed yours ;  the  world  of  school  masters 
and  rich  common  folk  claims  you,  explains 
you  away,  lest  in  their  own  time  loveliness 
should  be  justified  through  you.  But 
sometimes,  in  great  loneliness,  your  voice 
falls  upon  us  as  it  fell  once  upon  the  poet 
of  Anaktoria  who  loved  you  so,  and  you 
become  ours,  ours  only.  We — such  is  our 
self-esteem — seem  for  a  moment  really  to 
understand  you,  really  to  be  one  of  those 
whom  you  call  to  the  golden  cups  of  the 
Cyprian.  You  become  a  moment  in  our 
lives,  a  visible  embodiment  of  that  abstract 
beauty  of  Plato.  The  pride  and  pathos  of 
your  life  are  ours  also  and  we  know  why 
you  loved  evening  that  brings  back  all  good 
things  the  dawn  has  stolen  and  why  you 
sang  of  the  hyacinth  trodden  underfoot  by 
the  careless  shepherd. 

RICHARD  ALDINGTON. 


432 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


The  True  Authority  of  Science 


When  we  envisage  the  problems  of 
higher  education  in  our  country  nothing 
seems  more  desirable  than  to  gain  a  sane 
view  of  the  relations  of  cultural  and  utili- 
tarian studies.  It  is  not  yet  sufficiently 
realized  that  the  failure  of  the  classical 
curriculum  was  even  greater  on  the  cul- 
tural than  on  the  practical  side :  the  peda- 
gogues of  the  old  school  were,  indeed, 
successful  in  imparting  a  stock  of  largely 
useless  information,  but  they  were  by  the 
very  nature  of  their  training  unfitted  to 
convey  that  self-knowledge  which  consti- 
tutes the  essence  of  true  culture.  On  the 
specious  plea  that  our  modern  civilization 
rested  on  a  foundation  supplied  by  class- 
ical antiquity,  they  argued  that  we  could 
only  understand  ourselves  by  imbibing  the 
spirit  of  Greece  and  Rome.  Quite  apart 
from  the  wholly  incongruous  machinery 
they  employed  to  compass  this  end,  they 
failed  to  realize  that  the  basis  of  our  cul- 
ture, both  economic  and  industrial,  lay  far 
back  of  the  Hellenic  period;  and  that  pre- 
cisely what  is  most  characteristic  of  our 
own  age — technology  and  experimental 
science — is  hardly  derived  at  all  from 
classical-  sources.  At  the  very  best,  then, 
they  could  have  interpreted  merely  some 
shreds  and  patches  of  that  mottled  fabric 
we  now  prize  as  Caucasian  civilization. 

But  if  our  classical  schoolmasters  failed 
of  achieving  their  avowed  purpose,  our 
modern  institutions  of  learning,  with  their 
stress  on  technical  and  vocational  training, 
likewise  fall  short  of  the  mark.  The  stu- 
dent, take  him  by  and  large,  learns  much 
of  scientific  detail;  but  of  the  essence  of 
science,  of  its  place  in  modern  life  and 
the  conditions  fostering  or  impeding  its 
growth,  he  remains  densely  ignorant. 
These,  it  might  be  contended  on  Grad- 
grind  principles,  are  all  very  well  but  have 
no  place  in  an  avowedly  utilitarian  course. 
Yet  the  implied  antinomy  is  false.  There 
is  no  inherent  conflict  between  professional 
and  cultural  work.  Pomology  itself,  to 
take  the  bull  by  the  horns,  is  not  without 
cultural  potentialities.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  is  precisely  the  lack  of  this  cultural  ele- 
ment in  our  modern  American  universi- 


ties and  professional  schools  that  thwarts 
the  highest  professional  accomplishment. 
Here,  then,  are  the  double  claims  of  the 
History  of  Science  to  a  large,  nay  a  domi- 
nant, position  in  our  college  curricula.  To 
the  general  student  it  renders  intelligible 
the  most  distinctive  element  of  latter-day 
culture,  while  also  it  teaches  the  student 
of  science  how  to  be  a  student  of  science. 
These  purposes,  naturally  enough,  cannot 
be  attained  by  an  uncoordinated  accumula- 
tion of  names  and  dates;  their  fulfilment 
depends  on  the  accentuation  of  the  socio- 
logical view  of  science. 

Precisely  because  science  has  come  to 
occupy  so  large  a  part  in  modern  civiliza- 
tion, its  pursuit  has  been  invested  with  a 
mystifying  halo  which  Huxley  trenchantly 
dispelled  by  defining  science  as  merely  a 
sort  of  etherealized  common  sense.  The 
scientist,  too  often  yielding  to  the  siren 
voice  of  his  unsophisticated  admirer 
among  the  laity,  postulates  an  impossible 
"scientific  man" — as  useless  an  abstraction 
as  that  notorious  figment  the  "econom- 
ic man,"  which  now  graces  the  refuse- 
heaps  of  the  political  philosopher's 
laboratory.  The  truth  is  that  science  can 
be  understood  solely  as  a  sociological  phe- 
nomenon, as  the  product  of  cooperative 
group  activity  within  a  larger  social  group. 
It  may  not  be  flattering  to  the  scientist's 
pride  to  be  classed  with  the  members  of  a 
guild,  a  cooperative  dairy  organization, 
or  a  consumers'  league;  but  scientific  work 
in  its  nobler  and  its  lesser  aspects  becomes 
comprehensible  as  soon  as  it  is  regarded 
from  this  angle. 

With  mutual  benefit  societies  of  the 
type  described,  the  informally  organized 
but  none  the  less  real  brotherhood  of  sci- 
entists shares  the  merging  of  individual 
profit  in  a  higher  purpose.  If  the  effects 
of  scientific  cooperation  sometimes  extend 
far  beyond  the  immediate  circle  of  the 
workers'  guild,  this  must  be  accounted  a 
by-product  rather  than  an  altruistically 
devised  result.  But  membership  in  an 
ostensibly  altruistic  society  neither  sup- 
presses the  instinct  of  selfishness  nor  does 
it  reduce  all  participants  to  a  dead  level  of 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


433 


equality.  In  the  rural  organizations 
founded  by  Raiffeisen  the  benignant  spirit 
of  their  founder  proved  to  be  very 
unequally  distributed  among  the  members; 
and  so  in  scientific  cooperation  the  quest  of 
individual  glory,  as  attested  by  many  a 
nauseating  priority  squabble,  tends  to 
thwart  or  compromise  the  common  pur- 
pose. 

Since  scientists  form  a  definite  group 
(or  more  strictly  a  number  of  groups) 
within  the  state,  it  is  possible  for  a  clash 
of  social  interests  to  retard  their  progress. 
Church  and  state  may  interfere  to  erect 
obstacles  in  their  path.  The  friction 
between  research  and  theology  forms  the 
burden  of  an  oft  repeated  tale.  Legal 
enactments  against  vivisection  and  the  util- 
ization of  corpses  are  a  grim  reminder 
that  the  scientist's  course  is  not  yet  strewn 
with  roses.  Yet  as  soon  as  we  assume  the 
sociological  point  of  view  the  whole  mat- 
ter appears  in  a  new  light.  It  is  not  a 
priori  obvious  that  the  scientist  must  under 
all  circumstances  have  the  right  of  way. 
Sociologically  his  ideals  represent  only  one 
of  an  indefinitely  numerous  set  of  values. 
As  the  caste  of  scientists  cannot  endure  the 
over-assertiveness  of  individual  members, 
so  society  at  large  may  legitimately  wax 
jealous  of  the  dominance  of  a  caste  within 
its  midst.  May  not  science  appear  to  the 
laity  as  a  harmless  pastime  like  chess,  or 
stamp  collecting?  No  one  would  interfere 
with  such  pursuits  under  normal  condi- 
tions, yet  who  would  yield  to  them  pur- 
poses of  his  own?  It  is  here  that  history 
must  step  in  to  vindicate  the  ways  of  sci- 
ence and  show  why  the  standards  of  sci- 
ence merit  absolute  primacy  over  other 
values. 

But  still  more  fascinating  than  the  inter- 
action of  selfish  and  altruistic  motives 
within  the  guild  of  learning,  or  than  the 
conflict  of  that  caste  with  other  castes,  is 
the  influence  of  the  group  on  the  intel- 
lectual work  of  its  single  members.  The 
individual  scientist  finds  himself  in  a  para- 
doxical position.  Without  the  guild  her- 
itage from  the  past  or  the  aid  of  his 
contemporaries  he  is  powerless.  Yet  that 
same  society  which  raises  him  high  above 
the  level  of  earliest  beginnings  arrests  his 
flight  when  he  takes  wing  to  soar  aloft. 


Chafe  and  fume  as  he  may,  he  is  caught 
in  the  vise-like  grip  of  a  dread  machine. 
For  social  groups  have  laws  more  inexor- 
able than  those  of  nature,  and  no  victim 
escapes  without  paying  toll. 

A  relatively  harmless  sociological  char- 
acteristic of  the  scientists'  group  is  the 
importance  of  imitation.  Ethnologists 
have  long  been  familiar  with  this  factor  in 
various  domains  of  culture.  A  set  form 
of  artistic  product  or  ritualistic  perform- 
ance springs  up  and  is  somehow  adopted 
as  a  norm,  which  is  reproduced  a  hundred- 
fold. Science,  too,  has  its  fashions  and 
patterns,  and  like  other  fashions  they 
change  periodically.  Thirty  years  ago 
biologists  were  outlining  genealogical 
trees;  today  they  are  absorbed  in  the  laws 
of  heredity.  In  the  seventies  and  eighties 
ethnologists  were  mapping  the  resem- 
blances that  obtained  between  the  cultures 
of  remote  tribes;  at  present  their  gaze  is 
riveted  to  historical  connections  and  routes 
of  diffusion.  Such  fashions  are  not  dic- 
tated by  pure  reason;  nor  are  they  purely 
innocuous.  The  scientist  caught  in  the 
maelstrom  of  a  current  movement  is  likely 
to  lose  his  sense  of  values:  he  neglects 
what  a  later  period  regards  as  no  less  sig- 
nificant than  the  topic  on  which  he  lav- 
ishes his  attention.  It  is  the  history  of 
his  science  that  alone  may  bring  him  to 
his  senses,  that  may  enable  him  to  get  his 
bearings  and  see  his  own  work  in  proper 
perspective;  and  it  is  thus  the  history  of 
his  own  subject — and  that  alone — which 
can  supply  his  individual  need  of  culture. 

Scientific  fashions  of  the  kind  mentioned 
represent  only  one  phase  of  the  subtle 
workings  of  that  social  menace  which  con- 
stitutes the  arch-foe  of  science  and  of  prog- 
ress— respect  for  authority.  The  authority 
may  be  vested  in  the  person  of  a  master; 
and  here  history  notes  the  paradox  that 
the  very  personality  that  rises  to  ascend- 
ancy by  setting  at  naught  the  power  of 
precedent,  itself  becomes  a  new  centre  of 
traditionalism,  blighting  the  development 
of  the  disciples'  individualities.  Yet  bane- 
ful as  is  the  influence  of  hero-worship, 
there  are  still  more  insidious  agencies 
lurking  in  the  social  environment — so  dif- 
ferent from  the  fictitious  atmosphere  of 
pure  reason — in  which  the  scientist  actu- 


434 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


ally  works.  By  a  law  of  compensation  one 
personality  will  sooner  or  later  be  pitted 
against  another  and  gain  a  following.  But 
against  impersonal  authority  there  is  little 
hope  of  redress.  It  is  not  merely  the  opin- 
ions of  the  scholars'  caste  as  such  that 
weight  down  the  individual  seeker  of  truth. 
From  the  very  beginning  he  has  borne  the 
yoke  of  a  divided  allegiance;  nor  does  he 
only  individually  bear  the  badge  of  mem- 
bership in  other  guilds. 

The  whole  caste  of  truth-seekers  is  ever, 
by  a  dire  osmosis,  tinged  by  the  current 
conceptions  of  their  age;  nay,  it  is  histor- 
ically accurate  to  say  that  from  the  start 
they  have  been  tainted  with  that  larger 
human  society's  original  sin  of  myth-mon- 
gering.  As  Professor  Mach  points  out 
in  one  of  the  most  illuminating  chapters 
of  his  "Mechanics,"  a  Newton  himself 
will  lapse  into  the  folklore  bequeathed  by 
the  past,  "though  even  on  the  pages  imme- 
diately preceding  his  clear  intellect  shines 
in  undiminished  splendor."  And  a  mod- 
ern physicist  who  purports  to  give  experi- 
mental proof  for  the  atomic  theory 
already  casts  wistful  glances  into  the 
future  for  some  subtler  hypothetical  cause 
of  the  now  verified  atomic  phenomena. 

The  vicious  circle  is  thus  complete.  Sci- 
ence has  demonstrably,  as  in  the  case  of 
chemistry  and  alchemy,  grown  out  of 
mythology,  and  the  whole  of  its  progress 
may  be  represented  as  the  gradual  slough- 
ing of  the  folkloristic  shell.  But  that  shell 
has  infinite  powers  of  regeneration  and  is 
constantly  nurtured  from  without  and 
within.  Indeed,  the  more  we  contemplate 
the  conditions  of  research,  the  more  we 
marvel  at  the  fact  that  the  scientist's  quest 
has  not  been  an  utter  failure.  He  must 
guard  against  the  promptings  of  self-inter- 
est; he  must  shun  the  tutorship  of  his  mas- 
ters; he  must  constantly  search  his  heart 
to  cast  out  the  demons  of  prepossessions 
sucked  in  with  the  mother's  milk  and  the 
surrounding  medium  in  which  he  lives. 
This  duty  of  eternal  vigilance  is  the  lesson 
he  derives  from  the  history  of  science. 

But  for  the  laymen,  too,  the  history  of 
science  has  a  message  hardly  less  signifi- 
cant. The  pursuit  of  knowledge  by  an 
international  band  of  trained  workers  con- 
stitutes a  sociological  experiment  on  a 


'grand  scale  with  results  of  a  crushing  a 
fortiori  force.  No  conditions  exist,  none 
can  be  conceived,  more  favorable  to  the 
dominance  of  reason  in  any  social  body 
than  those  which  actually  obtain  in  the 
cooperative  labor  of  scientists.  If  even 
these  conditions  are  so  remote  from  the 
ideal,  if  the  forces  of  precedent  and  myth 
constantly  nullify  or  minimize  progress 
towards  the  projected  goal,  degrading  it 
to  one  of  those  ritualistic  processions  in 
which  every  three  groping  steps  in  advance 
are  followed  by  two  backward,  then  the 
mystic's  view  of  the  danger  of  excessive 
rationalization  of  modern  culture  is  gro- 
tesquely false.  As  Professor  Robinson  in 
one  of  the  highest  flights  of  historical- 
mindedness  points  out,  there  is  not  the 
slightest  warrant  for  putting  on  the  brakes 
when  going  uphill.  Mankind  will  never 
be  sufficiently  radical  or  sufficiently  reason- 
able; and  as  we  can  never  introduce  too 
little  reason  into  our  psychologizing,  so  we 
can  never  be  too  rationalistic  in  our  phi- 
losophy or  too  radical  in  our  programmes. 
Herein  lies  the  supreme  lesson  of  the  His- 
tory of  Science.  ROBERT  H.  LOWIE. 


The  Return 


Lilies  white  and  roses 

Will  load  the  fragrant  breeze, 
But  when  the  mute  throng  closes 

We'll  take  no  note  of  these. 

Soft  music  will  be  swelling 

In  each  attentive  ear, 
Of  pride  and  homage  telling — 

We  shall  not  heed  nor  hear. 

There  will  be  talk  of  slaughter, 
Of  rage  and  carnage  hot 

Beyond  the  pathless  water — 
But  we  shall  heed  them  not. 

Around  us  long-loved  faces 
With  tearful  eyelids  bright 

Shall  take  their  wonted  places 
Unseen,  though  full  in  sight. 

Through  tributes  fond  and  loving 

We'll  go  as  if  at  rest, 
With  fast-closed  eyes  unmoving, 

Hands  crossed  upon  the  breast. 

GUY  NEARING. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


435 


Our  Paris  Letter 


Life  in  Paris  has  been  anything  but  peaceful 
during  the  last  month.  Treason  "affairs,"  air 
raids,  long  range  bombardments — everything  has 
been  put  in  the  shade  by  the  great  battle  on 
which  attention  is  now  concentrated,  for  on  its 
issue  may  depend  the  fate  of  Paris  and  of  France. 
Paris  is  waiting,  as  it  waited  during  that  fort- 
night of  September,  1914  when  its  destiny  hung 
in  the  balance.  When,  after  those  days  of  acute 
tension,  the  welcome  news  came  that  Paris  was 
saved,  none  of  us  thought  that  we  should  ever 
have  to  undergo  the  same  experience  again.  And 
now  after  nearly  four  years  of  war  Paris  is  once 
more  threatened.  The  danger,  it  is  true,  is  not 
so  imminent,  but  it  is  there  nevertheless.  I  lived 
with  the  people  of  Paris  during  that  terrible 
fortnight  and  acquired  a  profound  affection  and 
admiration  for  them.  When  I  say  the  people,  I 
mean  what  we  name  in  French  the  peuple  as 
distinct  from  the  bourgeoisie,  for  the  bourgeoisie 
for  the  most  part  was  at  Bordeaux  or  anywhere 
but  in  Paris.  Only  the  real  Parisians  were  left, 
and  in  spite  of  the  anxieties  of  the  moment  Paris 
was  never  so  charming.  Now  as  then  Paris  is 
left  to  the  Parisians — and  the  Americans.  Not 
those  Americans,  I  may  add,  who  inhabit  the 
Avenue  du  Bois-de-Boulogne,  but  the  Americans 
whom  the  war  has  brought  here  to  teach  the 
Parisians  that  they  must  not  judge  the  United 
States  by  its  idle  rich.  Whatever  else  may  come 
out  of  this  war,  at  least  it  will  have  enabled  the 
French  to  have  made  the  acquaintance  of  real 
Americans.  Some  Americans,  I  gather,  are  a 
little  disillusioned.  They  had  idealized  the  French 
to  such  an  extent  that  when  they  came  into  contact 
with  them  and  discovered  that  they  were  not  all 
heroes  of  romance,  but  just  human  beings  with 
the  ordinary  failings  of  humanity,  they  were  dis- 
appointed. Especially  as  the  particular  failings 
of  the  French — their  lack  of  business  habits,  for 
instance — are  not  those  common,  as  a  rule,  in 
America.  An  American  is  disconcerted  in  a 
country  where  time  does  not  count,  where  every- 
body is  late  for  his  appointments,  and  where  a 
man  that  calls  on  you  on  business  will  talk  for 
half  an  hour  on  everything  except  the  object  of 
his  visit  and  be  seriously  offended  if  you  show 
signs  of  impatience.  But  all  that  is  bound  to 
wear  off,  and  when  Americans  really  get  to  know 
the  French  they  will  put  up  with  their  weaknesses 
— for  every  one  of  us  has  his  own — and  appreciate 
their  great  qualities.  Meanwhile,  I  hasten  to  add, 


if  Americans  are  sometimes  irritated  a  trifle  by 
certain  unaccustomed  conditions,  they  never  show 
it.  The  tact  of  the  men  in  control  of  the  Ameri- 
can "bureaux,"  and  their  care  to  avoid  the  slight- 
est ruffling  of  the  French  susceptibilities,  are 
beyond  all  praise. 

At  a  time  like  this  one  sees  the  people  of  Paris 
at  their  best,  for  only  the  best  elements  remain. 
There  has  been  a  tremendous  exodus  during  the 
last  fortnight,  and  the  population  of  Paris  must 
be  temporarily  reduced  by  about  one  fourth.  The 
railway  stations  have  been  an  extraordinary  sight, 
only  to  be  compared  with  that  which  they  pre- 
sented during  the  exodus  of  1914.  No  seats  can 
now  be  reserved  and  no  luggage  is  registered. 
Tickets  have  to  be  taken  in  advance  for  a  specified 
train,  and  there  have  been  long  queues  of  people 
waiting  for  hours  to  get  them;  a  few  days  ago 
an  acquaintance  of  mine  had  to  wait  at  the  Gare 
d'Orsay  from  six  to  eleven  in  the  morning,  and 
many  people  have  had  to  wait  longer.  The  pres- 
sure is  now  reduced,  but  it  is  still  bad  enough.  I 
have  always  refused  1;o  wait  in  a  queue  for  any- 
thing, for  it  is  my  firm  conviction  that.,  nothing 
in  life  is  worth  it,  and  neither  air  raids,  nor  bom- 
bardments, nor  even  the  remote  danger  of  a 
German  invasion  of  Paris  will  induce  me  to 
change  the  habits  of  a  lifetime.  Besides,  when 
one  has  Paris  "dans  le  sang,"  to  desert  her  in  the 
hour  of  danger  would  seem  like  deserting  one's 
mistress.  But  the  wealthy  and  fashionable  quar- 
ters of  Paris  are  deserted,  and  one  would  imagine, 
as  one  walks  down  the  avenues  that  stretch  from 
the  Palace  de  1'Etoile,  the  Boulevard  Malesherbes 
or  the  Avenue  des  Champs-Elysees  and  its  abut- 
ting thoroughfares,  that  it  was  the  end  of  August 
instead  of  the  beginning  of  April.  Only  the 
tender  green  of  the  spring  foliage  corrects  the 
impression  given  by  the  long  rows  of  shuttered 
windows.  The  well-to-do  have  been  joined  in 
their  exodus  by  the  casual  inhabitants  of  Paris, 
those  that  have  come  here  from  the  country  to 
earn  a  living,  especially  domestic  servants,  em- 
ployees of  dressmakers  and  milliners,  and  so  on. 
As  the  press  is  forbidden  to  publish  any  details 
about  the  air  raids  or  the  bombardment,  gro- 
tesquely exaggerated  reports  about  their  effects 
have  been  circulated  in  the  provinces,  and  panic- 
stricken  families  in  country  towns  and  villages 
have  implored  their  relatives  in  Paris  to  return 
home  at  once.  But  the  real  Parisian  peuple 
remains,  as  in  1914. 

The  popular  attitude  is  also  the  same  as  in 
1914,  rather  pessimistic  and  quite  philosophical; 


436 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


pessimistic,  that  is  to  say,  in  the  general  and 
somewhat  inaccurate  sense  of  the  term.  The 
newspapers  preach  the  duty  of  blind  confidence, 
but  the  naturally  skeptical  Parisian,  who  has 
heard  this  duty  preached  for  nearly  four  years 
and  has  observed  that  blind  confidence  has  not 
been  justified  by  events,  turns  a  deaf  ear.  With 
his  innate  good  sense  he  recognizes  too  that  his 
feelings  about  events  can  have  no  influence  on 
them.  He  is  inclined  to  fear  the  worst,  but  at 
the  same  time  he  is  firmly  resolved  to  make  the 
best  of  it.  He  knows  that  the  French  people  and 
the  French  soldiers  have  done  their  utmost  to 
secure  success  and  that,  if  success  be  not  achieved, 
"tant  pis."  This  war  has  made  me  doubtful 
about  the  advantages  of  education,  for  all  through 
it  the  "uneducated  classes"  have  shown  that  they 
possess  much  more  good  sense  than  their  "bet- 
ters," and  have  kept  their  heads  much  more 
successfully.  The  palm  for  unreason  must  cer- 
tainly be  given  to  the  "intellectuals,"  who  have 
talked  more  nonsense  than  any  other  class.  One 
rarely  hears  among  the  people,  for  instance,  the 
hysterical  cant  that  so  many  newspapers  have 
published  about  the  air  raids  and  the  bombard- 
ment. Some  journalists,  whom  one  would  never 
have  suspected  of  religious  fervor,  have  denounced 
the  "sacrilege"  involved  in  bombarding  a  church, 
thereby  attributing  to  the  Germans  the  amazing 
feat  of  taking  an  exact  aim  from  a  distance  of 
seventy  miles.  The  Parisian  public,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  not  disposed  to  make  too  much  of  inci- 
dents which,  deplorable  as  they  are,  are  trifles  in 
comparison  with  what  is  going  on  at  the  front. 
The  Parisians  do  not  like  being  bombed  and 
bombarded,  but  they  take  their  risks  coolly  as 
inevitable  consequences  of  war  and  feel  that  there 
is  something  indecent  in  shrieking  at  the  death 
of  a  few  score  civilians  in  plain  clothes  at  a 
moment  when  thousands  of  civilians  in  uniform 
are  falling  at  the  front.  I  sympathize  with  their 
attitude,  for  I  have  never  been  able  to  understand 
why  the  life  of  a  man  becomes  of  no  value  the 
moment  he  is  dressed  in  blue  or  khaki. 

On  one  point  popular  opinion  in  Paris  is  very 
definite:  this  must  be  the  last  offensive  of  the 
war.  The  traditional  good  sense  of  the  Parisian 
people  tells  them  that  if  the  German  attack  is 
repulsed  it  will  be  more  than  ever  plain  that  no 
military  solution  is  possible.  An  article  by  M. 
Jean  Longuet  in  the  "Populaire"  of  March  30 
exactly  expressed  the  opinion  of  the  vast  majority 
of  the  people  of  Paris  and  of  France.  There  is, 
he  said,  only  one  immediate  duty,  to  resist  the 


attack;  but  when  it  has  been  repulsed,  the  time 
will  have  come  to  negotiate.  That  the  censor 
should  have  allowed  such  an  article  to  appear 
without  a  word  suppressed  is  in  itself  significant. 
It  is  the  general  opinion  that  the  enemy  is  making 
his  last  desperate  effort,  an  effort  due  to  internal 
conditions  in  the  Central  Empires  quite  as  much 
as  to  military  considerations;  if  that  effort  fails, 
negotiations  will  perforce  be  much  more  easy. 
Of  course  there  are  still  people,  especially  in 
newspaper  offices,  who  talk  about  continuing  the 
war  for  any  number  of  years  that  may  be  neces- 
sary to  obtain  a  military  victory,  but  few  of  them 
are  to  be  found  among  the  proletariat  or  the 
peasants — still  fewer,  I  should  suppose,  among 
the  men  at  the  front.  The  old  argument  that 
if  peace  were  made  now  there  would  be  another 
war  ten  years  hence,  no  longer  has  any  effect. 
The  reply  is  that  it  would  be  a  less  evil  to  have 
another  war  in  ten  years  than  to  continue  this 
war  for  ten  years  longer.  Nobody  here  expects  a 
peace  which  will  establish  the  millennium  or  even 
an  ideal  peace  from  the  democratic  point  of 
view,  but  again  the  good  sense  of  the  French 
man  or  woman  of  the  people  says  that  one  cannot 
always  have  what  one  would  like,  and  besides 
there  is  no  guarantee  that  if  the  war  goes  on  for 
several  years  longer  the  millennium  will  be  any 
nearer.  Peace  at  any  price  has  very  few  advo- 
cates, in  fact  none;  there  is  an  irreducible  mini- 
mum— Lord  Lansdowne  defined  it  in  his  first 
letter — but  all  beyond  that  is  considered  legiti- 
mate matter  for  negotiation. 

So  thoroughly  is  this  recognized  by  the  peuple 
that  certain  jusqu'auboutiste  pronouncements 
cabled  to  the  French  press  from  America  have 
caused  a  certain  uneasiness,  although  they  have 
not  destroyed  confidence  in  the  policy  of  Presi- 
dent Wilson,  with  which  they  hardly  accord. 
Their  authors  evidently  do  not  yet  realize  what 
this  war  means  and,  in  particular,  what  it  means 
to  France.  Peace  with  defeat  .will,  of  course, 
never  be  accepted,  but  President  Wilson's  formula 
of  "peace  without  victory"  is  not  regarded  wholly 
with  disfavor.  If  all  this  sounds  somewhat  dis- 
couraged to  Americans,  they  must  remember  what 
the  French  people  have  sacrificed  in  this  war. 

The  ordeal  through  which  we  are  passing  here 
makes  it  almost  impossible  to  give  one's  mind  to 
anything  but  the  war.  But  the  other  night, 
having  been  awakened  by  the  alarm  of  an  air 
raid  at  three  in  the  morning,  I  began  to  read  a 
book  that  had  just  come  from  the  publishers, 
"Le  Socialisme  centre  1'Etat"  ( Berger-Levrault, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


437 


Paris),  by  M.  Emile  Vandervelde,  the  distin- 
guished Belgian  Socialist  and  President  of  the 
International  Socialist  Bureau.  The  title  will 
astonish  many  people,  for  it  is  a  common  fallacy 
that  Socialism  is  identical  with  "Etatisme" — why 
is  there  no  English  equivalent  for  that  useful 
word?  M.  Vandervelde's  purpose  is  to  combat 
that  fallacy,  which,  as  he  admits,  is  shared  by 
many  Socialists  or  persons  claiming  that  title. 
He  has  no  difficulty  in  showing  that  the  Socialism 
of  Marx  and  Engels,  for  instance,  far  from 
being  etatiste,  was  exactly  the  contrary,  for  it 
aimed  at  the  abolition  of  the  state  as  we  know  it. 
If  they  admitted  the  conversion  of  certain  serv- 
ices or  industries,  such  as  the  railways,  into  state 
monopolies,  it  was  only  as  a  measure  of  transition, 
not  as  a  final  aim.  And  they  never  supposed  that 
a  state  monopoly  was  Socialism.  Many  of  their 
followers  have  even  opposed  all  state  monopolies 
as  dangerous  to  the  proletariat,  on  the  ground 
that  they  paralyze  the  action  of  the  working  class 
and  strengthen  the  bourgeoisie.  M.  Vandervelde 
admits  the  danger  if,  for  instance,  the  employees 
of  the  state  are  prevented  from  organizing  them- 
selves and  are  deprived  of  the  right  to  strike.  The 
notion  that  Socialism  can  be  brought  about  by  the 
gradual  absorption  of  production  by  the  state  or 
the  municipalities — that,  for  instance,  the  munici- 
palization  of  the  gas  or  water  is  a  step  toward 
State  Socialism — is  a  delusion.  A  bureaucratic 
State  Socialism  such  as  is  conceived  by  some  of 
the  leading  members  of  the  English  Fabian 
Society  would  produce  a  servile  community,  in 
which  the  worker  would  be  the  "wage-slave"  of 
a  state  official  instead  of  a  capitalist.  To  this 
conception,  that  of  the  organization  of  labor  by 
the  state,  Socialism  properly  so-called  opposes 
that  of  the  organization  of  labor  by  the  workers 
themselves,  grouped  in  vast  associations  independ- 
ent of  government. 

State  control  of  industry  has  been  so  enor- 
mously extended  by  the  war  that  this  book  is 
very  opportune.  That  extension  has  been  hailed 
by  many  Socialists  as  a  triumph  for  their  ideas 
and  is  feared  by  many  opponents  of  Socialism  for 
the  same  reason.  It  was  necessary  to  demonstrate 
that  these  hopes  and  fears  are  alike  mistaken,  and 
M.  Vandervelde's  demonstration  is  convincing. 
In  fact  state  control  of  industry  has  greatly 
diminished  the  liberty  of  the  workmen  and  ham- 
pered their  collective  action  and  it  might  easily 
be  used  to  reduce  them  to  complete  subserviency 
and  to  make  efforts  at  economic  emancipation 
more  difficult  than  ever.  It  is  a  maxim  of 


Social  Democracy  that  the  workers  should  aim 
at  the  conquest  of  political  power,  so  as  to  obtain 
control  of  the  state  in  order  to  get  rid  of  it. 
For  the  "government  of  men"  Socialism  would 
substitute  the  "administration  of  things."  But 
M.  Vandervelde  shows  that  the  conquest  of  polit- 
ical power  alone  will  not  be  sufficient.  One  of 
the  most  interesting  parts  of  his  book  is  that  in 
which  he  exposes  the  failure  of  political  democ- 
racy and  of  the  parliamentary  system.  It  is  a 
wholesome  corrective  to  the  notion  that  if  Ger- 
many would  only  adopt  the  system  of  a  govern- 
ment responsible  to  a  parliament,  all  would  be 
well.  In  fact,  as  M.  Vandervelde  shows,  the 
people  has  very  little  more  effective  influence  on 
the  government  in  the  countries  called  demo- 
cratic than  in  the  others.  Perhaps,  as  M.  Vander- 
velde says,  no  country  in  the  world  is  so  com- 
pletely dominated  by  the  financial  interests  as 
France,  which  has,  in  form,  the  institutions  most 
nearly  democratic  of  all  the  great  nations,  not 
excepting  the  United  States.  It  is  much  to  be 
hoped  that  this  book  will  be  translated  into 
English,  for  it  is  quite  the  most  valuable  work 
of  the  kind  that  has  appeared  for  a  long  time. 
It  would  be  impossible  to  give  in  so  small  a 
compass,  for  the  book  is  quite  short,  a  clearer 
exposition  of  what  Socialism  means  and  does  not 
mean.  M.  Vandervelde  has  an  admirable  style 
and  makes  his  subject  interesting  to  the  least 
specialist  of  readers;  the  book  is  essentially  a 
popular  one.  Incidentally  it  should  do  much  to 
reconcile  with  the  Socialists  those  revolutionaries, 
or  "radicals"  as  I  believe  you  call  them  in  Amer- 
ica, who  rightly  dread  the  restriction  of  individual 
liberty  that  would  result  from  a  system  of  state 
monopoly.  The  difference  between  Socialists  and 
Syndicalists  in  France  is  chiefly  one  of  method, 
and  there  is  every  sign  of  a  rapprochement  be- 
tween them  due  to  the  disgust  of  the  younger 
Socialists  with  Parliamentarism  and  with  the 
etatiste  tendencies  of  some  of  their  leaders,  who 
are  much  nearer  to  the  Italian  "Reformists"  and 
the  English  Fabians  than  to  the  International 
Socialist  party.  A  scission  between  these  bour- 
geois Socialists  and  the  adherents  of  revolutionary 
Socialism  seems  sooner  or  later  inevitable.  In 
any  case,  revolutionary  Socialism  is  likely  to  be 
stronger  than  ever  after  the  war  and,  whether 
one  agrees  or  not  with  its  principles  and  aims,  it 
is  desirable  to  know  what  they  are.  That  knowl- 
edge can  be  obtained  without  difficulty  from  M. 
Vandervelde's  book. 


ROBERT  DELL. 


Paris,  April  Q,  lQl8. 


438 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


The  Determinants  of  Culture 

CULTURE  AND  ETHNOLOGY.    By  Robert  H.  Lowie. 
Douglas  C.  McMurtrie,  New  York;  $1.25. 

There  was  a  time  within  the  memory  of  men 
still  living  when  the  barely  discovered  presence 
of  "primitive  man"  was  made  the  occasion  for  the 
most  elaborate  theories  of  racial  differences,  of 
social  evolution  and  social  reform.  The  slender- 
est factual  basis  was  made  to  carry  the  most 
imposing  superstructures  of  speculation,  in  which 
patriotism  of  skin,  hair,  and  language,  tribal 
bias,  and  the  desire  to  gain  or  maintain  certain 
economic  advantages  were  blended  in  the  most 
fantastic  manner  with  half-baked  and  half- 
digested  data  of  cephalic  indices,  of  skull  sutures, 
of  brain  weights,  and  of  cultural  stages.  These 
were  the  days  when  Gobineau  flourished,  when 
Chamberlain,  Woltmann,  and  Wirth  burned 
incense  before  an  idol  of  their  own  making 
called  the  Aryan,  and  when  a  sanctimonious 
hypocrisy  insisted  on  taking  upon  itself  "the 
white  man's  burden" — at  so  much  per  cent. 

By  its  own  weight  and  impetus  the  thing 
became,  in  the  course  of  time,  a  frightful  nuis- 
ance. Honest  and  reputable  ethnologists  were 
as  afraid  of  a  generalization  as  of  leprosy.  Prof. 
Franz  Boas,  for  example,  than  whom  there  is 
none  greater  in  the  field  of  ethnology,  after  a 
lifetime  of  research  has  ventured  to  put  forth 
generalizations  covering  less  than  three  hundred 
scanty  pages.  Yet  while  scientific  ethnologists 
were  chary  of  generalizations,  others  with  the 
meagerest  ethnological  information  came  forth 
and  presented  to  an  expectant  world  the  awful 
spectacle  of  the  passing  of  the  great  race,  or 
put  to  us  the  terrible  query:  race  or  mongrel? 
Unbiased  thinkers  will  therefore  be  more  than 
grateful  to  Dr.  Lowie  for  having  come  out 
bravely  and  stated  in  popular  language  the  exact 
limits  within  which  any  generalizations  in  ethnol- 
ogy can  safely  be  made,  given  the  present  state  of 
our  knowledge  concerning  primitive  man. 

Dr.  Lowie  briefly  discusses  three  of  the 
unilateral  interpretations  of  culture — the  psycho- 
logical, the  racial,  and  the  environmental — and 
comes  to  the  sound  conclusion  that  culture  or 
civilization  cannot  be  interpreted  in  terms  other 
than  itself.  Neither  the  geographical  environ- 
ment, nor  the  biological  structure  of  the  race, 
nor  the  fundamental  and  general  characteristics 
of  the  mental  processes  can  account  for  the  rise 
and  continuation  of  civilization.  If  geographical 
environment  is  to  account  for  it,  how  is  it  that 
the  same  geographical  environment  gives  rise  to 


two  different  civilizations?  If  race  is  to  account 
for  it,  how  is  it  that  a  race  as  different  from  the 
white  as  is  the  Japanese  has  shown  itself  capable 
of  taking  over  all  the  civilization  of  the  white 
man  and  improving  on  much  of  it?  Or  how 
account  for  the  fact  that  the  white  race  itself, 
although  biologically  the  same  for  the  last  two 
thousand  years,  has  shown  such  wide  and  enor- 
mous changes  in  civilization  ?  To  speak  of  devel- 
opment or  evolution  in  this  connection  is  verbiage. 
What,  then,  does  determine  culture?  Dr. 
Lowie  realizes  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  any 
attempt  at  an  analysis  of  the  determinants  of 
civilization,  and  his  conclusions  are  given  cau- 
tiously. He  brings  forth  in  explanation  what 
might  be  called  the  principle  of  cumulative  incre- 
ments. A  very  slight  advantage  of  speed  or 
originality  or  alertness  or  elasticity,  given  the 
complicated  set  of  factors  on  which  it  has  to 
work,  will  result  in  a  very  imposing  structure. 
Given  a  certain  group  which  possesses  an  indi- 
vidual who,  by  accident  or  by  design,  happens  to 
have  produced  a  better  tool  than  was  ever  pro- 
duced before,  that  tool  used  by  other  individuals, 
with  whatever  additions  they  may  have  to  make, 
will  in  the  course  of  time  result  in  a  tool  of 
greater  versatility  and  effectiveness.  It  follows 
that  the  more  people  there  are  using  such  a  tool 
the  greater  will  be  the  additions  made  to  it,  the 
more  it  will  be  perfected,  the  more  it  will  accom- 
plish, the  greater  the  control  it  will  give  to  its 
owner,  and  the  greater  are  his  possibilities  of 
producing  more  and  better  tools.  And  civiliza- 
tion is  chiefly  a  question  of  tools.  It  is  easy  to 
see  now  how  all  the  other  factors,  which  up  till 
now  were  made  singly  to  carry  the  responsibility 
of  causing  civilization,  can  find  their  place  in 
such  an  explanation.  If  race  has  anything  to  do 
with  civilization,  it  probably  works  in  the  manner 
suggested  by  McDougal  in  the  investigation  car- 
ried on  by  the  Cambridge  Expedition  on  the 
Torres  Straits  natives;  namely,  that  "primitive" 
communities  produced  fewer  great  men  than  civ- 
ilized communities.  The  main  body  of  the  people 
remains  the  same  in  both,  except  that  at  the  upper 
end  of  the  civilized  scale  there  are  more  "geniuses" 
to  get  things  started  and  furnish  those  small 
increments  which,  when  piled  up  over  a  large 
period  and  by  many  people,  give  us  civilization. 
A  closer  look  into  the  matter  however  will  show 
us  that  it  is  not  necessary  to  assume  racial  differ- 
ences to  bring  forth  such  a  proposition.  "Primi- 
tive" communities  are  much  smaller  in  numbers 
than  civilized  communities ;  hence  they  will  neces- 
sarily furnish,  on  the  one  hand,  a  smaller  per- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


439 


centage  of  unusual  variations — of  great  men — and 
on  the  other,  the  work  of  whatever  great  man 
there  be  has  a  smaller  area  on  which  to  work  and 
the  results  will  necessarily  be  more  meager. 

So  also  with  the  physical  environment.  A  very 
small  difference  in  rainfall  and  water  supply,  in 
sunshine,  in  accessibility,  in  soil  productivity,  in 
mineral  deposits  may  make  or  mar  a  civilization 
at  a  time  when  the  tribe  is  absolutely  dependent 
on  any  of  these  factors.  All  it  needs  is  a  push, 
and  the  logic  of  events  will  do  the  rest.  And 
finally,  if  mental  processes  should  get  the  slightest 
kink  in  them,  due  to  one  accident  or  another,  and 
prevent  the  meeting  of  an  important  situation,  or 
the  utilization  of  certain  resources,  the  group  is 
doomed;  while  another  group  with  no  such  kink 
will  go  on  and  establish  a  civilization.  It  is 
perfectly  evident,  then,  how  overwhelming  a  role 
is  played  by  accident  in  the  origin  of  civilizations. 
The  single  factors  which  determine  them  are  too 
vast,  the  combinations  too  numerous,  not  to  give 
hostages  to  chance. 

The  trouble  with  the  unilateral  explanations  of 
culture  is  that  they  are  too  naive,  too  elementary. 
They  do  not  see  far  enough;  they  get  lost  in  the 
contemplation  of  the  foundations.  Hence  they 
never  explain  civilization ;  they  never  get  that  far. 
They  are  like  the  scientist  who  would  explain  a 
Greek  temple  as  so  many  nomadic  ions  and  elec- 
trons, or  a  man  engaged  in  the  beef-packing  indus- 
try as  so  much  protoplasm  and  so  many  chromo- 
somes. Neither  explanation  tells  us  what  a  Greek 
temple  is,  or  why  the  man  is  engaged  in  the 
business  of  beef-packing  rather  than  that  of  drying 
prunes.  And  it  is  not  electrons  and  chromo- 
somes which  make  one  civilization  different  from 
another,  but  temples  and  dried  prunes. 

As  a  sort  of  an  "aside"  for  those  too  much 
wedded  to  the  notion  of  racial  superiorities  and 
inferiorities,  Dr.  Lowie  gives  a  lengthy  chapter 
on  primitive  family  nomenclature.  This  is  an 
ironical  comment  on  those  who  maintain  the 
simplicity  of  the  mental  processes  of  primitive 
man.  Latin  syntax  or  modern  "classical"  political 
economy  cannot  compete  with  the  complicated 
machinery  of  savage  relationships.  I  do  not  know 
whether  Dr.  Lowie  intended  this  chapter  to  be 
viewed  in  this  light,  but  it  could  not  help  but 
occur  to  me  while  I  was  reading  his  book. 

People  who  live  under  the  influence  of  racial 
antipathies  do  not  read  books  on  ethnology,  no 
matter  how  good  they  are.  And  so,  unfortunately, 
Dr.  Lowie  is  writing  for  a  packed  audience,  which 
will  not  fail  to  give  him  hearty  applause. 

MAX  SYLVIUS  HANDMAN. 


Sense  and  Nonsense 


THE  REBUILDING  OF  EUROPE.     By  David  Jayne 
Hill.     Century;  $1.50. 

AMERICA   AFTER  THE  WAR.     By  "An   American 
Jurist."     Century;  $1. 

Although  the  war  has  started  an  avalanche  of 
historical  apologia  and  special  pleading  of  one 
sort  or  another,  discussion  about  the  functions 
and  purpose  of  the  state  has  been  amazingly 
infertile.  Practically  all  that  has  been  written 
on  political  theory  in  the  United  States,  for 
example,  has  been  a  fairly  dispassionate  analysis 
of  the  German  theory  of  the  state,  which  has 
trailed  off,  usually,  into  a  splutter  of  invectives 
that  successfully  becloud  thought.  The  attempt 
at  any  really  honest  intellectual  examination  of 
first  principles  has  been  mere  lip  service; 
it  has  been  much  easier  to  reflect  the  emotional 
warmth  of  partisan  anger.  That  excuse  was 
tempting,  for  no  discipline  is  more  formidable 
than  that  involved  in  thinking  out  conceptions  of 
the  state.  What  is  called  political  science  is 
largely  mythology.  Nearly  every  other  science 
has  to  a  great  extent  emancipated  itself  from 
its  primitive  vagueness  by  sharply  limiting  its 
field  of  application  and  by  devising  its  own 
method  and  its  own  set  of  terms,  each  of  which 
has  a  constant  and  clearly  defined  meaning.  But 
political  science  is  still  in  the  nebulous  stage 
where  sociology,  legal  history,  and  quaint  bits  of 
metaphysical  jargon  jostle  in  splendid  confusion. 
The  reason  why  the  Prussian  theory  of  the  state  is 
so  clearly  articulated  is  that  it  is  not,  in  reality, 
a  theory  of  the  state  at  all.  It  is  nothing  but  an 
appendage  to  philosophical  and  historical,  and 
even  religious,  theories  which  often  are  mere 
ingenious  and  intricate  systems  devised  to  justify 
an  already  existing  exploitation. 

It  is  gratifying,  then,  to  find  Mr.  Hill  writing 
about  first  principles  with  such  admirable  clarity 
and  good  temper.  "The  Rebuilding  of  Europe" 
is  an  honest  attempt  to  paint  two  conflicting  con- 
ceptions of  the  state  against  a  genuine,  rather 
than  a  partisanly  selected,  historical  background. 
And  the  gist  of  his  argument  is  simplicity  itself: 
his  book  is  a  long  and  detailed  attack  on  the 
theory  of  absolute  sovereignty.  He  shows  how 
the  early  Roman  Empire  was  in  one  aspect  an 
attempt  to  form  a  society  of  nations  wherein  the 
members  had  certain  obligations  to  the  union  as 
a  whole.  This  conception  ran  directly  counter  to 
dynastic  ambition,  and  when  medieval  Europe 
emerged,  it  emerged  as  a  congeries  of  independent 
nations  free  to  attack  each  other  at  their  own 
pleasure.  The  Holy  Alliance  was  the  attempt — 


440 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


in  many  ways  successful — to  preserve  the  unlim- 
ited right  of  princes  to  subdue  and  control  their 
own  people,  and  to  hurl  their  nation  as  a  whole 
against  any  other  nation  whenever  they  might 
think  the  pastime  worth  while.  This  childish 
conception  of  absolute  sovereignty  is  far  from 
being  a  mere  relic  of  medievalism,  nor  would  it 
be  fair  to  say  that  only  Germany  clung  to  it. 
What,  as  Mr.  Hill  points  out,  was  Rousseau's 
"la  volonte  generale"  but  the  old  medieval  theory, 
with  the  people  instead  of  the  prince  playing  the 
role  of  hero?  In  1914  even  democracies  accepted 
the  absolute  sovereignty  theory,  although  they 
were  never  so  blatant  in  their  profession  of  it  as 
Germany.  It  was  considered  painfully  archaic 
to  say  that  the  king  could  do  no  wrong,  but  it 
was  not  even  questioned  that  the  state  could  do  no 
wrong.  National  interests  had  inalienable  rights ; 
they  were  limited  only  by  opposing  rights — which 
might  or  might  not  be  stronger.  Only  war  could 
determine.  This  anarchy  Mr.  Hill  calls  Europe's 
heritage  of  evil,  although  he  might  as  truly  have 
called  it  the  world's  heritage  of  evil.  But  the 
bitter  experiences  of  four  years  of  cooperative 
warfare  have  made  the  theory  of  limited  sov- 
ereignty extremely  popular  with  democracies.  The 
necessity  for  common  action  has  revived  the 
ancient  concept  of  public  right,  so  cheerfully  flung 
overboard  by  the  Realpolitiker.  Under  the  pres- 
sure of  events  it  is  coming  to  have  some  of  its 
ancient  validity.  In  fact,  one  of  the  deepest 
meanings  in  this  conflict  is,  shall  the  idea  of  abso- 
lute sovereignty  survive?  The  whole  possibility 
of  any  future  league  of  nations  goes  to  ruin  unless 
this  idea  of  absolute  sovereignty  be  destroyed. 
When  Germany,  either  by  military  defeat,  by 
revolution,  or  by  a  real  change  of  heart  due  to 
the  disillusion  of  this  war,  agrees  to  limit  her 
sovereignty  in  those  respects  where  it  clashes  with 
public  international  policy,  the  war  will  have 
been  won.  And  Mr.  Hill  is  fair  enough  to  admit 
that  the  Germans  do  not  cling  as  pertinaciously 
to  the  theory  of  absolute  sovereignty  as  they  did 
four  years  ago.  The  voice  of  reason  is  not  silent 
even  in  Central  Europe.  But  it  seems  to  be  pretty 
effectively  muffled.  Even  at  this  late  date  the 
Imperial  Chancellor  can  calmly  announce  to  the 
world  that  the  relations  between  Russia  and  Ger- 
many are  a  purely  private  affair  between  those 
two.  The  accredited  spokesmen  of  Germany  can 
still  talk  as  if  everybody's  business  is  nobody's 
business — but  their  own.  It  must  be  admitted 
that  this  cheerful  defense  of  international  anarchy 
comes  today  chiefly  from  Germany.  We  hear 


none  of  it  in  Russia,  little  of  it  in  England  or 
America  or  even  in  France,  where  the  national- 
istic spirit  is  probably  stronger  than  in  any  other 
country  in  the  world.  It  is  principally  in  Ger- 
many that  public  men  still  talk  as  if  they  were 
living  in  the  dark  ages.  Yet  the  irony  of  events 
is  mocking  their  words.  For  all  their  braggadocio, 
even  the  Germans  have  come  to  see  that  a  first- 
class  power  can  no  longer^ be  self-sufficing.  At 
the  very  moment  when  they  announce  that  their 
unlimited  right  to  act  as  a  sovereign  state  cannot 
even  be  discussed,  they  dream  of  an  alliance  with 
other  states  which  they  call  "Middle  Europe." 
And  at  the  very  moment  their  Junkers  are  loudly 
proclaiming  that  international  law  no  longer 
exists,  they  are  berating  Prince  Lichnowsky 
because  he  had  the  indiscretion  to  point  out  that 
Germany  had  not  been  overscrupulous  in  observ- 
ing it.  It  is  an  impossible  game.  Some  day 
Germany  will  realize  that  she  cannot  have  it 
both  ways,  just  as  the  nations  opposed  to  her 
have  already  begun  to  realize  that  there  is  no 
security  for  any  nation  except  common  interna- 
tional security.  Future  historians  will  say  that 
Germany  was  the  worst  sufferer  from  her  own 
doctrines.  Mr.  Hill's  sensible  argument  is  well 
summed  up  in  this  quotation : 

In  its  dynastic  sense  the  word  must  be  eliminated 
from  the  vocabulary  of  international  politics.  For 
democracies  the  word  sovereignty  in  its  absolute  sense 
has  no  meaning.  What  remains  of  it  and  all  to  which 
constitutional  states  can  lay  claim  is  merely  the  right 
of  a  free  and  independent  nation  to  exist,  to  legislate 
for  itself,  to  defend  itself,  and  to  enter  into  relations 
with  other  similar  states  on  the  basis  of  juristic 
equality,  under  principles  of  international  law  which 
respect  its  inherent  rights  as  free  constitutions  respect 
the  rights  of  the  individual  persons  who  live  under 
them. 

Now  to  turn  from  Mr.  Hill's  sound  argument, 
which  has  vision  but  which  avoids  being  just 
visionary,  to  the  little  volume  by  "An  American 
Jurist"  is  to  experience  a  shock.  It  is  so  pathet- 
ically and  ridiculously  reactionary  and  stupid 
that  at  first  one  is  inclined  to  believe  it  a  bur- 
lesque. For  example:  "The  alliance,  or,  if 
preferred,  the  present  coordination,  of  America 
with  the  Entente  powers,  is  entirely  fortuitous; 
it  is  pursuant  to  no  treaty,  or  even  international 
conversation.  .  .  All  such  alliances  are  at  best  but 
temporary."  Again:  "To  enforce  Belgian  neu- 
trality is  not  the  primary  reason  why  America 
engaged  in  the  war  against  Germany,  nor  is  the 
violation  of  the  spirit  of  American  democracy  the 
real  reason."  And  later,  so  that  the  point  won't 
be  missed:  "It  is  to  be  feared  that  the  American 
proclamation  of  democracy  as  a  universal  prin- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


441 


ciple  of  government  is  disquieting  to  those  of  our 
own  allies  whose  regime  is  aristocratical,  if  not 
absolutely  monarchical.  It  takes  no  note  of  the  real 
strength  of  European  aristocracies  at  the  present 
time.  Lord  Northcliffe  has  evidently  detected 
this  danger,  for  he  has  announced  that  America 
is  not  now  fighting  for  democracy.  .  .  In  order  to 
abolish  monarchy  in  Europe  it  will  be  necessary 
to  uproot  the  whole  social  order  of  all  European 
states  except  Switzerland.  An  American  propa- 
ganda for  democracy  outside  of  America  is  there- 
fore inexpedient,  as  it  tends  to  shock  and  alienate 
the  aristocratic  classes  in  the  various  countries  of 
the  European  allies  of  America.  .  .  Americans 
should  bear  in  mind  that  it  is  not  absolutely  impos- 
sible that  in  some  circumstances  France  may  yet 
become  a  monarchy  and  join  some  future  league  of 
the  kings."  Incredible,  you  say.  But  there  is  more 
to  come.  "Whether  the  future  Government  of 
Russia,  as  it  shall  be  ultimately  reorganized,  may 
not  take  exception  and  umbrage  to  the  speedy 
recognition  by  America  of  the  Revolution  remains 
to  be  seen."  And  after  the  war?  Well,  "the 
real  test"  will  come  "when  politicians  begin  their 
mischievous  appeals  for  total  disarmament  and 
for  the  neglect  of  our  war  defensive  with  the 
hope  of  capturing  a  discontented  and  impover- 
ished people.  If  democracy  passes  through  the 
ordeal  safely,  proves  conservative,  and  continues 
to  exhibit  an  intelligent  and  elevated  political 
outlook,  discarding  the  coming  socialistic  program 
of  extreme  political  demagogues,  the  republic  will 
be  safe  for  a  long,  a  conservative,  and  an  interest- 
ing future."  There  is  really  no  need  of  quoting 
further;  unless  one  saw  it  in  black  and  white,  it 
would  seem  utterly  impossible  that  such  senile 
stupidity  could  be  published  and  read  seriously 
today.  Yet  it  is  probably  true  that  the  author — 
who  ought  some  day  to  be  glad  that  he  remained 
anonymous — considered  that  he  was  writing  a 
shrewd  and  well  balanced  argument  against  the 
tender-minded  shibboleths  of  our  time:  democ- 
racy, the  league  of  nations,  socialism,  the  elimina- 
tion of  war,  progressive  disarmament,  free  trade, 
and  so  on.  That  is  the  pity  of  it.  It  is  a  joke, 
of  course,  but  a  rather  sorry  joke  for  the  millions 
of  young  men  who  are  going  through  the  ordeal 
by  fire  so  that  a  somewhat  different  and  somewhat 
more  rational  international  system  may  emerge. 
They  are  hardly  fighting  to  make  the  world  safe 
for  this  kind  of  international  anarchy,  which 
seems  so  agreeable  to  the  prejudices  and  unyield- 
ing perversity  of  unteachable  old  men. 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


A  Statesman  Sacrificed 

THE  LIFE  OF  SIR  CHARLES  DILKE.     By  Stephen 
Gwynn  and  Gertrude  M.  Tuckwell.    Macmillan ; 

$10. 

"The  Life  of  Sir  Charles  Dilke"  comes  as  a 
reminiscence  of  one  of  the  keenest  personal  trag- 
edies of  the  nineteenth  century.  The  case  of  that 
unfortunate  statesman  belongs  among  those  Falls 
of  Princes  by  which  the  medieval  imagination 
was  taken  captive,  or  the  human  documents  on 
which  Meredith  based  his  novels.  The  clearest 
intellect,  the  widest  intelligence,  the  greatest 
political  imagination  among  the  ministers  of 
Gladstone's  government  of  1880-5,  sharing  with 
Chamberlain  the  hope  of  the  party  and  recog- 
nized as  almost  certainly  the  successor  of  Glad- 
stone in  its  leadership,  on  the  eve  of  supplement- 
ing his  great  personal  force  by  marriage  to  the 
most  brilliant  woman  in  England,  Sir  Charles 
Dilke  stumbled  into  one  of  the  pitfalls  which 
society  maintains  as  evidence  of  its  good  inten- 
tions. He  was  named  as  corespondent  in  a 
divorce  case,  sued  for  damages  by  the  husband, 
and  though  the  suit  was  dismissed  in  his  favor, 
found  no  remedy  in  English  judicial  procedure. 
The  only  verdict  that  he  could  obtain  from  the 
courts  was  a  "not .proved,"  and  meanwhile  public 
opinion  had  found  him  guilty.  The  forces  which 
united  against  him  are  perfectly  comprehensible 
in  Victorian  England — royal  domesticity,  official 
clericalism,  bourgeois  puritanism,  journalistic  sen- 
sationalism; the  Queen,  the  government,  the 
church,  the  press  made  a  phalanx  which  no  man 
could  withstand.  Against  them  he  had  only  the 
loyalty  of  a  few  friends,  of  a  constituency  of 
workingmen,  and  of  the  woman  who  married 
him  in  the  face  of  popular  clamor — Mrs.  Mark 
Pattison,  whose  youthful  portrait  George  Eliot 
drew  in  Dorothea  Brooke.  Thenceforth  he  was 
relegated  to  the  outer  circles  of  public  life,  a 
phenomenon  in  Parliament  like  Charles  Brad- 
laugh,  the  man  who  came  back,  or  who  like 
Bacon  refused  "to  go  out  in  a  snuff."  "The  Life 
of  Sir  Charles  Dilke"  is  a  monument  to  the 
strength  of  character  which  carried  him  through 
a  quarter  century  of  failure  without  diminution 
of  personal  dignity,  or  active  will  to  service,  or 
generous  interest  in  life,  or  sweetness  of  mind. 
It  is  also  a  record  of  public  waste  of  precious 
resources  that  makes  the  true  tragedy  of  Sir 
Charles  Dilke  a  national  one. 

For  Dilke  was  one  of  the  few  men  in  the 
governing  aristocracy  of  Britain  who  took  their 
function  seriously.  He  was  able  and  willing  to 


442 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


give  himself  the  arduous  training  necessary  for 
such  as  are  to  bear  authority  in  a  modern  com- 
monwealth. To  the  ordinary  political  education 
of  an  English  university,  with  its  forum  for  dis- 
cussion of  public  affairs,  he  added  a  personal  in- 
spection of  the  British  Empire  which  bore  fruit 
in  the  book  which  first  made  him  known, 
"Greater  Britain."  He  supplemented  this  grand 
tour  with  journeys  to  other  countries,  and  made 
it  a  prime  object  to  meet  and  study  the  men 
who  held  the  reins  of  government  in  them.  He 
even  overcame  the  Englishman's  prejudice  against 
knowing  a  language  other  than  his  own. 
Besides  this  he  studied  ceaselessly  every  sub- 
ject of  importance  that  came  before  Parliament 
in  his  many  years  of  service:  foreign  af- 
fairs were  his  specialty,  but  in  addition  he  was 
an  expert  in  imperial  defence  both  by  land 
and  sea;  in  local  government  and  parliamentary 
procedure ;  in  trades-unionism,  housing,  industrial 
insurance,  and  land  tenure;  and  no  mean  critic 
of  the  government  of  the  difficult  dependencies — 
Ireland,  India,  and  South  Africa.  He  got  up 
every  one  of  these  subjects  with  an  immense 
accumulation  of  facts  and  yet  contrived  to  keep 
his  general  grasp  firm  and  his  view  lucid.  His 
speeches  in  Parliament  and  to  his  constituents 
were  compact  of  information,  authoritative  state- 
ments. His  pleasures  were  true  recreations  and 
subordinate  to  the  great  end  of  keeping  himself 
fit  for  his  work.  The  usual  avocations  of  the 
aristocratic  governing  class,  the  barbarians,  he  put 
by  without  a  regret.  There  is  a  scarcely  tolerant 
smile  behind  the  passage  in  his  diary  in  which  he 
records  the  efforts  to  make  his  chief,  Lord  Gran- 
ville,  Foreign  Secretary  in  the  cabinet  of  1880-5, 
attend  to  business: 

Late  on  Tuesday  afternoon,  May  23rd,  Lord  Gran- 
ville  was  in  such  a  hurry  to  adjourn  the  House  of 
Lords,  and  bolt  out  of  town  for  Whitsuntide,  that  he 
let  the  French  send  off  our  Identic  Note  to  the 
Powers  in  a  form  in  which  it  would  do  much  harm, 
although  this  was  afterwards  slightly  altered.  On  the 
next  day,  Wednesday,  the  24th,  Mr.  Gladstone  brought 
Lord  Granville  up  to  town  again,  and  stopped  his 
going  to  the  Derby,  and  at  1 :30  p.  m.  they  decided  to 
call  for  immediate  Turkish  intervention  in  Egypt. 

Sir  Charles  Dilke  began  public  life  in  1867, 
offering  himself  as  candidate  for  Parliament  from 
Chelsea.  He  wrote  to  his  father  on  this  occasion : 
"Though  I  should  immensely  like  to  be  in  Par- 
liament, still  I  should  feel  terribly  hampered 
there  if  I  went  in  as  anything  except  a  Radical." 
In  this  speech  he  foreshadowed  his  future  atti- 
tude, favoring  reform  in  electoral  machinery  and 
distribution  of  representation,  payment  of  Mem- 
bers of  Parliament,  universal  suffrage,  legal  rec- 


ognition of  trades  unions,  and  direct  taxation. 
On  his  election  to  Parliament,  a  year  later,  he 
broadened  this  platform  to  include  practically  the 
whole  programme  of  political  radicalism  for 
the  next  half  century.  It  gives  one  a  sense 
of  his  extraordinary  prescience  merely  to  enumer- 
ate the  causes  of  which  he  was  an  early,  some- 
times the  earliest,  champion.  In  1870  he  insisted 
on  complete  freedom  of  national  education  from 
religious  influence,  and  resigned  the  chairman- 
ship of  the  London  Branch  of  the  Education 
League  because  he  would  not  accept  the  govern- 
ment's compromise  on  this  point.  In  the  same 
year  he  replied  to  the  stock  objection  to  equal 
suffrage — that  most  women  are  against  it — "You 
will  always  find  that  in  the  case  of  any  class 
which  has  been  despotically  governed 
the  great  majority  of  that  class  are  content  with 
the  system  under  which  they  live."  At  the  first 
meeting  of  the  Land  Tenure  Association  in  1870 
he  declared  in  favor  of  taxing  the  unearned  in- 
crement. In  the  same  year  he  presided  at  the 
meeting  of  the  Aborigines  Protection  Society.  He 
was  in  favor  of  a  large  measure  of  local  self- 
government,  and  so  was  ready  to  vote  for  Irish 
Home  Rule  as  early  as  1874.  As  to  coercion  of 
that  unhappy  country,  he  could  not  understand 
"how  those  who  shuddered  at  arbitrary  arrests  in 
Poland,  and  who  ridiculed  the  gagging  of  the 
press  in  France,  could  permit  the  passing  of  a  law 
for  Ireland  which  gave  absolute  powers  of  arrest 
and  of  suppression  of  newspapers  to  the  Lord- 
Lieutenant."  In  1867  he  proposed  to  extend  the 
factory  acts  to  all  employment,  and  year  after 
year  discussed  this  subject  so  that  Mr.  Sidney 
Webb  declared,  "We  can  trust  no  one  but  Sir 
Charles  Dilke  in  Parliament  to  understand  the 
principles  of  factory  legislation."  He  saw  with 
satisfaction  the  birth  of  the  Labor  Party  after 
the  Taff  Vale  decision  against  the  trades  unions, 
and  rejoiced  that  "the  difficulty  of  upsetting  the 
judgment  .  .  .  will  nurture,  develop,  and 
fortify  it  [the  party]  in  the  future."  Although 
he  became  a  master  of  parliamentary  procedure, 
he  confessed:  "I  was  never  favorable  to  the 
Parliamentary,  and  I  was  even  hostile  to  the 
Party  system,"  preferring  the  direct  intervention 
of  the  people  through  the  referendum. 

In  foreign  affairs,  as  in  domestic,  Sir  Charles 
Dilke  maintained  consistently  the  attitude  which 
was  characteristic  of  his  radicalism.  He  was  a 
sincere  friend  to  small  nationalities,  the  street 
named  for  him  in  Athens  bearing  witness  to  the 
gratitude  of  at  least  one  of  them.  He  was  a 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


443 


member  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  government  which  in 
1882  intervened  in  Egypt  to  suppress  the  nation- 
alistic movement  headed  by  Arabi  Pasha,  but  he 
wrote:  "I  thought  and  still  think  that  anarchy 
could  have  been  put  down  and  a  fairly  stable  state 
of  things  set  up  without  any  necessity  for  a  British 
occupation."  He  was  opposed  to  the  Boer  War, 
though  holding  that  "when  the  country  was 
seized  by  the  war  fever  interposition  was  useless." 
In  the  war  of  1870  between  France  and  Ger- 
many, he  would  have  had  England  take  the  first 
step  in  the  war  against  war: 

If  Gladstone  had  been  a  great  man,  this  war  would 
never  have  broken  out,  for  he  would  have  nobly  taken 
upon  himself  the  responsibility  of  declaring  that  the 
English  Navy  should  actively  aid  whichever  of  the 
two  Powers  was  attacked  by  the  other.  This  would 
have  been  the  beginning  of  the  international  justice 
we  are  calling  for.  I  dp  not  blame  Gladstone  for  not 
daring  to  do  it,  for  it  requires  a  morally  braver  man 
than  any  of  our  statesmen  to  run  this  kind  of  risk. 

To  him,  in  common  with  most  Englishmen,  it 
appeared  that  France  and  not  Germany  was  the 
attacking  power,  and  the  sentence  in  "Greater 
Britain" — "If  the  English  race  has  a  mission  in 
the  world,  it  is  surely  this,  to  prevent  peace  on 
earth  from  depending  on  the  verdict  of  a  single 
man" — was  written  against  Louis  Napoleon.  But 
later  he  would  have  changed  its  application. 
"Poor  German  Liberals,"  he  wrote,  "who  aban- 
doned all  their  principles  when  they  consented  to 
tear  Alsace  and  Lorraine  from  France,  and  who 
now  find  themselves  powerless  against  the  war 
party,  who  say  'What  the  sword  has  won  the 
sword  shall  keep.'  "  And  he  quoted  the  words 
of  an  Alsatian  deputy  in  the  Reichstag  in  1874: 

"Had  you  spared  us  you  would  have  won  the 
admiration  of  the  world,  and  war  had  become  impos- 
sible between  us  and  you.  As  it  is,  you  go  on  arming, 
and  you  force  all  Europe  to  arm  also.  Instead  of 
opening  an  age  of  peace,  you  have  inaugurated  an  era 
of  war;  and  now  you  await  fresh  campaigns,  fresh 
lists  of  killed  and  wounded,  containing  the  names  of 
your  brothers  and  your  sons." 

He  added:  "The  view  of  this  Alsatian  deputy 
is  my  view.  I  do  not  believe  that  might  makes 
right."  In  1887  he  wrote  a  brilliant  survey  of 
the  relations  of  the  six  great  powers  which 
appeared  first  anonymously  in  "The  Fortnightly 
Review"  and  later  in  book  form  as  "The  Present 
Position  of  European  Politics."  He  traced  the 
beginning  of  the  "reign  of  force"  in  Europe  to 
the  annexation  of  Alsace-Lorraine  in  1871,  but 
he  showed  how  that  system  was  developed  with 
England's  connivance  by  the  Treaty  of  Berlin  in 
1878.  He  believed  that  the  cup  which  the  rulers 
of  the  nations  were  even  then  holding  to  the  lips 
of  their  crucified  peoples  might  still  pass  from 


them.  Yet  his  words,  those  of  a  statesman  whom 
his  countrymen  elected  in  their  puritan  pride  to 
dishonor,  have  the  pathetic  ring  of  Cassandra 
prophecy.  In  1876  he  had  noted  in  Parliament 
one  great  difficulty  in  the  way  of  fair  dealing 
among  nations — secret  diplomacy.  "This  Europe 
is  probably  mined  beneath  our  feet  with  secret 
treaties."  In  1908  he  noted  another — the  press: 

We  are  so  confident  in  our  own  profound  knowledge 
of  our  wish  for  European  peace  that  we  hardly  realize 
the  extreme  danger  for  the  future  which  is  caused  by 
all  suggestion  that  we  have  succeeded  in  isolating 
Germany,  or  are  striving  to  bring  about  that  result. 
The  London  articles  written  in  violent  support  of  a 
supposed  alliance  did  the  harm ;  and  to  anyone  who 
keeps  touch  for  himself  of  Continental  opinion  the 
harm  was  undoubted,  and  tended  to  produce  several 
undesirable  results. 

One  scarcely  wonders  at  finding  Sir  Charles 
Dilke  devoting  much  of  his  time  in  his  last  years 
to  problems  of  imperial  defence. 

The  quotations  given  above  serve  to  identify 
Sir  Charles  Dilke  as  a  radical  in  the  full  force 
which  the  term  could  bear  in  the  years  of  his 
active  life.  Indeed  some  of  his  utterances  ring 
like  those  of  Mr.  Sidney  Webb  or  Mr.  Arthur 
Henderson  in  1918.  It  is  difficult  therefore  to 
recognize  Sir  Charles  Dilke  as  an  aristocrat  of 
the  aristocrats.  In  his  athletic  tastes,  his  fencing, 
his  rowing,  his  riding;  in  his  artistic  preferences 
for  fine  prints,  paintings,  porcelains;  above  all  in 
his  fastidious  selection  of  books  and  society  his 
essential  quality  appears.  Personally  he  had  little 
in  common  with  the  Victorian  Liberalism  with 
which  he  was  associated  in  politics.  His  diaries 
have  been  edited  with  much  discretion,  but  one 
divines  a  certain  scorn  for  all  its  leaders,  includ- 
ing Gladstone,  with  the  exception  of  Chamber- 
lain. Of  the  literary-social  quality  of  his  age, 
of  that  tolerant  gregariousness  which  Viscount 
Morley  details  so  delightfully  in  his  "Recollec- 
tions," Dilke  had  nothing. 

In  truth,  Sir  Charles  Dilke  was  little  of  a 
Victorian  Liberal.  The  opposition  between  him 
and  his  age  went  deeper  than  the  circumstances 
which  set  him  under  its  ban.  He  had  standards 
in  matters  other  than  sexual  morals — in  art,  in 
living,  in  government.  It  is  said  that  the  finest 
portrait  of  him  was  that  of  his  ancestor,  Sir 
Thomas  Wentworth,  who  died  in  1551.  This 
reversion  to  type  was  not  merely  physical:  in 
mind  and  taste  Sir  Charles  Dilke  was  a  man  of 
the  Renaissance.  He  was  a  belated  product, 
fashioned  after  the  model  drawn  by  Sir  Thomas 
Elyot  in  his  "The  Book  named  the  Governour," 
written  in  1531  for  the  education  of  such  as 
should  bear  authority  in  a  "weale  publike." 


444 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


Especially  does  this  Renaissance  quality  appear 
in  Dilke's  mastery  of  the  field  which  interested 
him  intensely,  that  of  foreign  affairs.  The  Euro- 
pean situation  at  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury was  a  reproduction  of  the  Italian  at  the  close 
of  the  fifteenth,  in  both  a  delicate  balance  of 
power  depending  on  an  infinite  number  of  details 
social,  political,  personal.  Sir  Charles  Dilke  was 
the  only  Englishman  of  his  time  who  learned  this 
situation,  as  Lorenzo  dei  Medici  learned  his — who 
took  pains  to  know  all  the  facts,  and  who  refused 
to  guess  at  the  answer.  One  can  imagine  what 
he  suffered  from  the  spectacle  of  the  intricate 
European  machine  mishandled  by  such  men  as 
England  appointed  to  this  service — from  the  indo- 
lence of  Lord  Granville,  the  frothy  ineptitude  of 
Gladstone,  the  cynical  stupidity  of  Lord  Salis- 
bury. He  saw  England  renounce  her  ideals  at 
the  Congress  of  Berlin,  drift  through  sheer  blun- 
dering into  the  greatest  and  least  excusable  preda- 
tory act  of  modern  political  history  in  Egypt,  and 
then  fling  away  her  only  means  of  safety  in  such 
a  mode  of  life  by  the  cession  of  Heligoland  to 
Germany.  Not  only  did  Dilke  know  the  facts  of 
his  world;  he  took  pains  to  learn  the  personal 
factors  of  the  problem.  Like  a  chess  player  he 
studied  his  opponents'  faces  and  minds,  and  saw 
their  characters  reflected  in  their  play.  He  was 
the  intimate  friend  of  Gambetta;  Herbert  Bis- 
marck was  often  his  guest;  he  visited  the  old 
Chancellor.  His  account  of  a  visit  to  Russia  in 
1870  reads  like  the  notebook  of  a  Florentine 
ambassador  of  the  Medici  in  its  swift  appraisal 
of  the  men  in  the  game. 

In  this  control  of  the  personal  element  of 
diplomacy  Sir  Charles  Dilke  had  the  enormous 
advantage  of  his  birth  and  training.  Professor 
Veblen  in  his  recent  book  on  "The  Nature  of 
Peace"  takes  not  a  little  delight  in  pointing  out 
how  the  affairs  of  the  world  in  the  present  crisis 
have  fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  "underbred 
common  run"  who  have  efficiency  and  force.  He 
points  out  that  this  is  "not  a  gentleman's  wafr." 
True.  The  "underbred  common  run"  fight  the 
war  with  a  technical  thoroughness  beyond  any- 
thing the  aristocrat  has  conceived.  Apparently 
they  cannot  make  peace.  With  an  undoubted 
will  to  peace  the  democracies  of  the  world  can 
only  assert  their  efficiency  by  making  war.  They 
have  no  means  of  sure  communication  with  each 
other,  no  system  of  guarantees  by  which  the  first 
steps  toward  peace  can  be  taken  in  mutual  confi- 
dence. Proletarians  and  Labor  Parties  make 
tentative  approaches  toward  each  other  through 
proclamations  from  Nottingham,  conferences  at 


Stockholm,  and  negotiations  at  Brest-Litovsk. 
Capitalists,  in  whose  supernational  selfishness  we 
had  so  much  relied,  hold  secret  parleys  at  Zurich ; 
but  to  distrust  of  the  foreigner  is  added  the 
mutual  distrust  of  classes  at  home,  and  such 
abortive  efforts  toward  peace  end  in  misunder- 
standing, repudiation,  and  prohibition.  The 
tragic  fact  of  the  world  today  is  that  the  nations 
have  lost  contact  with  each  other  and  are  fighting 
like  blind  men  in  the  dark.  No  wonder  that 
Lord  Lansdowne  remembers  that  diplomacy  was 
a  gentleman's  game,  and  urges  plausibly  that 
gentlemen  be  called  back;  to  retrieve  at  the 
council  table  the  errors  which  they  made  there. 

It  was  against  such  errors  that  Sir  Charles 
Dilke  warned  his  countrymen.  As  we  have  tried 
to  show,  he  was  preeminently  a  statesman  of  the 
transition, 

Wandering  between  two  worlds,  one  dead,. 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born. 

The  old  world  of  aristocratic  privilege  he  tried 
his  best  to  bury,  beginning  with  the  civil  list  of 
the  royal  family.  The  new  world  of  democracy 
he  tried  to  assist  into  being  by  every  means  which 
the  radical  midwifery  of  the  time  afforded.  He 
realized  that  the  internal  democratic  upheaval  in 
every  country  constituted  one  strong  temptation 
to  dying  autocracy  to  save  itself  by  throwing  the 
world  backward  a  century  or  two.  His  peculiar 
value  lay  in  the  fact  that  by  the  use  of  all  the 
resources  of  the  old  diplomacy,  the  transition 
might  have  been  accomplished  without  the  terrific 
catastrophe  of  universal  war.  The  freedom  of 
communication  with  the  governing  classes  of  the 
world  which  he  possessed  as  an  aristocrat,  the 
trust  in  the  people  which  he  held  as  a  democrat, 
supremely  fitted  him  for  this  task — a  democrat 
with  training  and  discipline  and  standards,  an 
aristocrat  whose  only  defence  of  privilege  was 
noblesse  oblige.  To  a  discerning  spectator  in  the 
House  of  Commons  during  the  years  from  1890 
to  1909  the  destiny  of  the  nation  and  indeed 
of  the  world  was  represented,  not  by  the  front 
benches  of  government  and  opposition,  not 
by  Gladstone  and  Campbell-Bannerman  and 
Asquith  and  Lloyd  George,  nor  by  Balfour  and 
Chamberlain  and  the  Cecils,  nor  yet  by  Redmond 
and  Dillon,  Keir  Hardy  and  John  Burns,  but 
by  the  quiet  white-haired  figure,  in  his  seat  below 
the  gangway,  always  present,  always  ready, 
always  powerless.  There  is  the  tragedy  of  Sir 
Charles  Dilke's  career,  the  tragedy  of  his  country 
and  of  the  democratic  world — the  triumph  of  the 

ROBERT  MORSS  LOVETT. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


445 


Ireland's  New  Writer  of  Fiction 

A  MUNSTER  TWILIGHT. 

THE  THRESHOLD  OF  QUIET.     By  Daniel  Corkery. 

Stokes;  $1.  and  $1.50. 

It  seems  as  if  the  circumstances  of  Irish  life 
were  not  favorable  to  the  development  of  the 
novel.  Ireland  has  failed  so  far  to  produce  a 
novelist  worthy  to  rank  with  the  best  of  her 
poets  and  dramatists,  and  we  know  that  the  great 
novels  of  the  world's  literature  have  been  written 
out  of  conditions  very  different  from  those  which 
prevail  here.  To  explain  the  process  of  literary 
evolution  which  has  resulted  in  success  in  the  most 
difficult  and  exacting  forms  of  literature,  and 
relative  failure  in  the  easiest  and  most  amorphous 
— there  is  a  task  for  our  critics  and  historians. 
The  short  story,  open  or  disguised,  is  the  invari- 
ably successful  medium  of  Irish  fiction,  and  it  is 
noteworthy  that  Mr.  James  Stephens,  our  great- 
est living  writer  of  fiction,  has  not  yet  essayed 
the  novel  proper.  "The  Crock  of  Gold"  and 
"The  Demi-Gods"  are  masterly  elaborations  of 
the  method  of  connecting  a  series  of  unrelated 
incidents  with  a  group  of  central  figures.  The 
episodes  are  in  themselves  independent  of  the 
narrative  as  a  whole,  although  the  genius  of  the 
author  raises  them  high  above  the  level  of  the 
commonplace  stories  of  conventional  humor  and 
sentiment,  which  are  the  stock  in  trade  of  so 
many  popular  Irish  story-tellers. 

Mr.  Daniel  Corkery  was  known  only  by  his 
occasional  contributions  to  Irish  periodicals  until 
1917,  when  he  published  his  first  book,  "A 
Munster  Twilight."  This  interesting  collection 
of  short  stories  at  once  showed  that  the  author 
was  entitled  to  more  serious  attention  than  is 
accorded  to  the  average  Irish  story-teller.  Writ- 
ing on  the  subject  of  "The  Peasant  in  Literature," 
Mr.  Corkery  has  defined  the  bulk  of  our  popular 
Irish  peasant  literature  as  "real  in  the  non-essen- 
tials and  very  untrue  in  the  essentials."  In  his 
"Munster  Twilight"  he  fulfills  the  conditions 
implied  by  that  judgment  upon  his  predecessors. 
The  book  must  be  classed  with  Padraic  Colum's 
"Wild  Earth"  and  Synge's  "Riders  to  the  Sea," 
two  works  excepted  by  Mr.  Corkery  from  the 
criticism  quoted.  .Mr.  Corkery  is  as  close  to  the 
spirit  of  "The  Shadow  of  the  Glen"  and  of  "The 
Playboy  of  the  Western  World"  as  an  identical 
feeling  and  intuition  can  bring  him.  He  knows 
his  Cork  and  Kerry  as  Synge  knew  the  hills  of 
Wicklow  and  West  Kerry  and  the  Aran  Islands, 
and  he  reveals  the  people  with  the  same  harsh 
humor  that  gives  its  savor  to  the  writing  of  the 


dramatist.  "The  Lady  of  the  Glassy  Palace" 
and  "Vanity,"  for  example,  treat  of  death  in  a 
manner  which  was  described  as  "brutality"  in 
Synge,  but  is  in  reality  a  manifestation  of  revolt 
in  both  authors  against  the  conventionally  lach- 
rymose pathos  of  the  "pleasant"  playwrights  and 
story-tellers.  "The  Wake"  also  may  be  com- 
mended to  those  who  desire  something  more 
true  than  the  jocosities  of  Lover,  or  the  Dick- 
ensian  variations  upon  deathbed  themes  which 
are  accepted  by  so  many  people  as  the  only  possible 
alternative.  Mr.  Corkery  can  evoke  the  grim 
humor,  as  well  as  the  pathos,  of  this  hackneyed 
situation  by  the  simple  but  difficult  process  of 
being  perfectly  honest.  This  story  of  the  indis- 
cretion produced  by  whiskey  in  a  mourner  who 
refers  to  the  composure  of  a  non-existent  corpse, 
the  wake  being  for  a  son  who  has  died  in 
America — well,  one  thinks  with  a  shudder  of  the 
pleasantries  which  the  older  novelists  would  have 
perpetrated.  It  is  hard  to  say  what  is  the  more 
admirable,  the  restraint  of  Mr.  Corkery,  or  his 
skill  in  pathetic  observation. 

The  most  conventional  (though  admittedly  in 
the  new  Irish  convention)  of  Mr.  Corkery 's 
stories  is  the  first,  "The  Ploughing  of  Leaca-na- 
Naomh,"  which  has  been  most  favorably  men- 
tioned by  the  reviewers,  captured,  as  usual,  by 
what  they  deem  "awfully  Celtic."  It  is  just 
such  a  story  as  Dermot  O'Byrne  might  have  told, 
in  his  enthusiasm  for  the  quality  of  mysticism  and 
highly  colored  imagination  which  fascinated  and 
impressed  him  in  Gaelic  Ireland.  But  Mr. 
Corkery  has  opportunities  and  powers  denied  to 
the  outside  observer,  and  in  every  other  chapter 
of  this  book  he  shows  that  he  can  use  them. 
"The  Return"  is  as  grotesque  and  weird  as  any- 
thing in  Lord  Dunsany's  "A  Dreamer's  Tales," 
but  is  at  the  same  time  informed  by  an  element 
of  Irish  humanity  which  has  consistently  escaped 
the  latter  writer.  So  long  as  he  preserves  this 
faculty  Mr.  Corkery  will  not  be  in  danger  of 
risking  his  talent  in  such  sterilities  as  mar  the 
later  work  of  Lord  Dunsany. 

"The  Child  Saint"  and  "The  Breath  of  Life" 
are  well  written,  but  do  not  come  up  to  the  high 
level  of  the  volume  as  a  whole,  the  level  which 
marks  it  off  from  its  companions,  where  we  expect 
to  find  such  things.  Not  since  "The  Land"  was 
published  has  the  relation  of  the  peasant  to  the 
soil  been  so  finely  expressed  in  prose  as  in 
that  almost  inarticulately  emotional  story,  "Joy," 
which  recounts  the  return  to  a  rich  farm  of  an 
old  man  who  had  been  forced  off  the  poor  land 


446 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


he  loved  into  the  city.  "The  Spanceled"  is 
another  notable  chapter,  which  inevitably  suggests 
Synge  in  its  challenging  tragedy,  developed  with 
the  directness  and  economy  of  means  shared  by 
both  writers.  On  the  other  hand  "The  Cry" 
could  have  been  conceived  only  by  Mr.  Corkery, 
who  shows  himself  capable,  indeed,  of  interpret- 
ing "the  peasant  in  literature."  In  the  end  we 
come,  as  the  author  himself  designed,  to  the  half- 
dozen  episodes  related  in  "The  Cobbler's  Den." 
In  a  sense  these  brief  comedies  and  tragedies  of 
the  people  are  the  most  striking  pages  in  "A 
Munster  Twilight."  Since  we  learned  to  know 
the  Old  Philosopher  in  "The  Crock  of  Gold," 
and  Patsy  McCann  in  "The  Demi-Gods,"  no 
more  delightful  group  of  human  beings  has  lived 
in  Irish  fiction  than  Maggie  Maw,  the  Blind 
Man,  and  John  Ahern,  in  whose  cobbler's  shop 
they  congregate  for  argument  and  gossip.  The 
effect  of  that  incredible  instrument  the  "con- 
nopium"  on  Maggie  Maw's  hearers  and  upon  the 
reader  alike  will  suffice  to  prepare  for  the  equal 
pleasure  of  the  succeeding  stories.  The  "con- 
nopium"  lingers  in  the  mind  like  the  lumps  in 
the  porridge  of  the  Old  Philosopher.  Fortunately 
it  occurs  in  the  first  of  a  series  of  charming  inci- 
dents, thereby  gaining  by  priority  where  the 
advent  of  successive  pleasures  might  have  obscured 
it  in  the  memory  of  the  hasty  reader. 

Now  Mr.  Corkery  has  given  us  a  novel  which 
critics  and  public  agree  in  accepting  as  the  most 
noteworthy  work  of  fiction  produced  in  Ireland 
for  many  years.  "The  Threshold  of  Quiet"  was 
written  before  "A  Munster  Twilight,"  but  the 
author  was  wise  to  offer  the  slighter  work  to  the 
public  first,  even  at  the  risk  of  being  expected  to 
repeat  himself  in  what  will  be  regarded  by  the 
majority  of  readers  as  his  second  book.  To  count 
upon  any  resemblance  between  the  two  is  to  pre- 
pare for  a  disappointment,  but  few  intelligent 
readers  will  refuse  the  author  the  careful  atten- 
tion which  his  previous  volume  entitled  him  to 
expect.  Having  gained  the  ear  of  the  public  by 
the  direct  charm  and  appeal  of  that  work,  he 
now  proceeds  to  unfold  a  leisured  narrative,  in 
the  confident  belief  that  we  are  sympathetically 
inclined  to  allow  ourselves  to  be  immersed  in  the 
quiet  stream  of  provincial  life  so  near  and  so 
dear  to  him.  Connoisseurs  of  the  picturesque 
phrase,  the  cultivators  of  literary  plots — not  plot- 
holders,  but  held  by  plots — will  be  rebuffed  by 
Mr.  Corkery's  disconcerting  indifference  to  the 
demand  for  the  dialectics  of  dialect,  and  for 


"a  good  story."  The  substance  of  his  novel  is 
as  tenuous  as  anything  in  the  later  works  of 
Henry  James;  his  manner  is  as  garrulous  and 
expansive  as  that  of  Dostoevsky.  But  his  sen- 
tences have  not  the  corresponding  subtlety  which 
makes  or  mars  Henry  James,  according  to  one's 
fancy.  "Swathed  in  relative  clauses  as  an  invalid 
in  shawls,"  is  not  the  description  that  can  be 
aptly  applied  to  them.  Mr.  Corkery  writes  a 
clear  and  forceful  prose  as  devoid  of  mannerism 
as  it  is  free  from  cliche;  his  style  is  as  fresh  and 
personal  as  his  conception  of  character. 

Reference  has  been  made  to  the  tendency  of 
Irish  fiction  to  resolve  itself  into  a  connected  or 
unrelated  series  of  episodes  or  incidents.  The 
purveyors  of  humorous  and  sentimental  novels 
for  the  libraries  alone  profess  to  tell  a  homogene- 
ous story,  and  they  are  rewarded  by  a  popularity 
denied  either  to  the  nouvelle,  as  such,  or  to  the 
prose  work  of  James  Stephens.  Although  Mr. 
Corkery  has  shown  in  "A  Munster  Twilight" 
his  ability  to  visualize  the  dramatic  or  humorous 
episode,  his  novel  is  innocent  of  all  such  effects. 
So  completely  has  he  emancipated  himself  from 
the  common  practice  that  one  can  easily  imagine 
the  impatient  admirer  of  Katharine  Tynan,  Jane 
Barlow,  George  Birmingham,  or  Seumas  Mac- 
Manus  turning  aside  from  "The  Threshold  of 
Quiet,"  with  a  complaint  that  it  lacks  incident, 
as  it  lacks  a  plot.  It  tells  no  story  like  "Spanish 
Gold" ;  it  relates  no  scenes  of  country  life,  in  the 
comic  or  sentimental  manner  of  Jane  Barlow  and 
Seumas  MacManus ;  it  eschews  the  amiable  ideal- 
izations of  Katharine  Tynan.  If  a  recent  parallel 
be  sought  it  will  be  found,  strange  to  say,  in 
"A  Portrait  of  the  Artist  as  a  Young  Man." 
Not  that  the  morbid  retrospection  and  analysis 
of  Mr.  James  Joyce  have  their  counterpart  in  the 
work  of  Mr.  Corkery;  but  both  writers  have 
given  their  books  the  inchoate  form  to  which  the 
Russian  novelists  have  reconciled  us.  The  former 
has  written  a  savage  and,  to  some  minds,  a 
shocking  indictment  of  Dublin;  the  latter  has 
gently  drawn  aside  the  curtain,  and  softly  illumi- 
nated the  quiet  and  obscure  corners  of  Cork. 

One  thinks  of  Chekhov  and  Dostoevsky  while 
reading  "The  Threshold  of  Quiet,"  for  only  in 
Russian  literature  does  one  find  the  portrayal  of 
such  secluded  and  uneventful  lives  as  drift 
through  these  pages,  as  they  drift  through  "The 
Cherry  Orchard"  or  "Uncle  Vanya."  The  mys- 
terious death  of  Frank  Bresnan  broods  over 
the  whole  book;  but  it  occurs  at  the  beginning, 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


447 


and  is  the  occasion  of  no  greater  suspense  in  the 
reader  than  was  Raskolnikov's  crime  in  Dostoev- 
sky's  masterpiece,  for  all  Mr.  Corkery's  skill  in 
allowing  the  truth  of  suicide  to  crystallize  slowly 
and  shyly  in  the  minds  of  the  circle  whose  exist- 
ence is  described.  As  in  the  case  of  "Crime  and 
Punishment,"  there  is  no  attempt  to  exploit  out- 
ward circumstance,  and  the  story  is  almost  purely 
cerebral,  so  carefully  does  the  author  restrict  its 
.  movement  to  what  is  passing  in  the  minds  of  his 
characters.  When  the  book  is  closed  all  one  has 
seen  happening  is  the  departure  of  Finnbarr 
Bresnan  for  America,  after  a  hesitation  as  to 
whether  he  had  not  a  vocation  for  the  priesthood ; 
the  tragic  ending  to  the  story  of  Stevie  Galvin 
and  his  brother;  the  crossing  of  the  "threshold 
of  quiet"  by  Lily  Bresnan  when  she  finally  feels 
free  to  enter  Kilvirra  Convent,  renouncing  life 
and  the  love  of  Martin  Cloyne.  Even  these  few 
dramatic  moments  are  not  developed,  but  just 
cause  a  slight  stir  of  the  deep  waters  of  con- 
sciousness in  which  these  lives  are  submerged. 

Yet  only  the  most  hasty  reader  will  fail  to 
succumb  to  the  appeal  of  the  book,  which  cap- 
tures the  mind  by  its  simplicity  and  sincerity, 
its  absence  of  factitious  interest.  Mr.  Corkery 
plunges  us  at  once  into  the  slow  current  of  these 
lonely  lives,  whose  struggle  for  peace  and  happi- 
ness is  no  less  intense  and  moving  because  it 
takes  place  on  a  plane  only  discernible  to  the 
intimate  comprehension  of  a  writer  whose  eyes 
are  fixed  on  the  truth  nearest  to  his  own  heart. 
The  high  lights  of  grand  tragedy  and  the  crude 
glare  of  melodrama  do  not  light  up  these  pages, 
steeped  in  tender  and  alluring  half  tones.  As  a 
genre  picture  of  provincial  society  in  Ireland, 
"The  Threshold  of  Quiet"  is  unique  in  its  serious 
realism,  from  which  the  ugliness  of  naturalism 
has  been  eliminated  without  detriment  to  its  fidel- 
ity. With  a  skill  that  amounts  to  genius  Mr. 
Corkery  avoids  the  falsity  and  mawkishness  of 
the  popular  idealizations,  while  preserving  the 
purity  at  which  they  aim.  A  great  deal  of  careful 
pruning  has  gone  to  the  creation  of  the  mood 
in  which  it  is  possible  by  the  merest  hints  and 
suggestions  to  obtain  effects  which  his  contem- 
poraries have  labored  and  spoiled.  The  religious 
note  is  particularly  delicate  and  beautiful,  spon- 
taneous and  reserved,  eloquent  but  never  didactic. 
It  is  a  remarkable  first  novel,  and  gives  promise 
for  the  future  work  of  Mr.  Corkery,  when  he 
finds  a  theme  worthy  of  his  great  powers  of  char- 
acterization and  analysis.  £RNEST  A< 


The  Two  Magics 

TOWARDS   THE   GULF.     By   Edgar   Lee   Masters. 
Macmillan;  $1.50. 

Mr.  Masters  is  a  welcome,  though  perplexing, 
figure  in  contemporary  American  poetry.  Wel- 
come, because  along  with  Mr.  Frost,  and  perhaps 
Mr.  Robinson  and  Mr.  Sandburg,  he  is  a  realist, 
and  because  a  vigorous  strain  of  realism  is  so  pro- 
foundly needed  in  our  literature  today — as  indeed 
it  has  always  been  needed.  Perplexing,  because 
his  relative  importance,  as  posterity  will  see  it,  is 
so  extraordinarily  difficult  to  gage.  Of  his 
welcome  there  can  be  no  question.  There  has 
been  a  disposition  among  poets  and  critics  of 
poetry  during  the  last  three  years  to  assume  that 
the  most  important  changes,  or  revolutions,  taking 
place  in  American  poetry  at  present  are  those  that 
regard  form.  The  Imagists  and  other  free  verse 
writers  have  found  their  encomiasts,  and  to  them 
the  renewed  vitality  of  American  poetry  has  in 
consequence  been  a  little  too  freely  ascribed.  No 
one  will  deny  that  the  current  changes  in  poetic 
form — the  earlier  Wind  revolt,  the  later  effort  to 
mint  new  forms  which  shall  be  organic — have 
their  value.  But  we  should  not  forget  that  of 
equal  and  possibly  greater  importance  has  been 
the  attempt  of  our  realists  to  alter  not  merely 
the  form  of  poetry  but  also  its  content.  What 
Mr.  Masefield  and  Mr.  Gibson  did  in  England, 
it  remained  for  Mr.  Masters  and  Mr.  Frost  to 
do  in  America.  The  influence  of  the  "Spoon 
River  Anthology"  and  "North  of  Boston"  can 
hardly  yet  be  estimated.  That  the  Imagists  did 
not  share  in  this  influence  was  perhaps  merely 
an  accident.  There  was  nothing  in  the  Imagist 
platform  to  prevent  it.  It  simply  happened  that 
the  Imagists  were  without  exception  lyric  poets, 
or  more  specifically,  poets  in  the  decorative  or 
coloristic  tradition.  While  they  were  still  ex- 
perimenting with  new  rhythms  as  the  vehicle  of 
expression  for  a  gamut  of  perceptions  and  sensa- 
tions which  differed  from  the  traditional  percep- 
tions and  sensations  of  poetry  only  by  being  a 
trifle  subtler  and  more  objective,  Mr.  Masters 
and  Mr.  Frost,  without  so  much  as  a  preliminary 
blast  of  the  trumpet,  suddenly  incorporated  into 
their  poetry  a  new  world — the  world  of  the  indi- 
vidual consciousness  in  its  complex  entirety.  At 
the  moment,  this  was  a  new  conception  of  the 
nature  of  poetry.  A  poem  was  not  to  be  a 
single  jewel  of  colorful  phrases,  but  the  jewel  in 
its  matrix.  Of  such  poetry,  it  is  readily  seen, 
the  appeal  would  be  not  merely  aesthetic,  but 


448 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


intellectual  and  emotional  also — in  the  richest 
sense,  human.  The  distinction  between  the  poetic 
and  the  non-poetic  vocabulary  was  broken  down, 
a  condition  which  has  obtained  conspicuously  only 
in  two  preceding  poetic  eras,  the  Chaucerian  and 
Elizabethan.  The  opportunity  for  a  transfusion 
of  vitality  from  our  tremendously  increased  prose 
vocabulary  to  the  comparatively  small  and  static 
poetic  vocabulary  was  unparalleled.  New  devel- 
opments of  form  were  involved  perhaps,  but  while 
the  immediate  effects  of  these  were  more  obvious, 
it  is  to  be  questioned  whether  they  were  as  far- 
reaching.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  no  poet  now 
writing  in  this  country  has  escaped  the  influence. 
In  its  healthily  acrid  presence  it  has  been  increas- 
ingly difficult  for  the  prettifiers,  the  airy  treaders 
of  preciosity,  the  disciples  of  sweetness  and  senti- 
ment, to  go  their  mincing  ways.  Most  of  them 
have  felt  a  compulsion  either  to  change  tone  or 
to  be  silent. 

In  view  of  the  importance  of  this  influence, 
therefore,  it  is  interesting  to  speculate  on  the 
nature  and  function  of  realistic  poetry;  and  the 
work  of  Mr.  Masters  furnishes  an  excellent 
opportunity.  To  say  that  such  work  as  this 
delights  us,  at  its  best,  because  it  is  human,  is 
after  all  somewhat  superficial.  In  a  broad  sense, 
even  the  most  treble  of  dawn-twitters  is  human. 
But  clearly  the  pleasure  it  affords  us  is  a  different 
sort  of  pleasure  from  that  afforded,  say,  by  a 
lyric  of  Becquer  or  Shelley.  It  has,  when  it  is 
good,  a  clearly  recognizable  magic ;  but  this  magic 
is  not  quite  of  the  same  character  as  that  we 
associate  with  "Kubla  Khan"  or  "The  Ode  to  a 
Grecian  Urn."  Matthew  Arnold  in  his  essay  on 
poetry  was  apparently  insensible  to  this  distinc- 
tion, for  at  least  one  of  his  famous  touchstone 
lines  belongs  rather  to  the  realistic  than  to  the 
lyric  category  of  magic.  The  line  of  Words- 
worth, "And  never  lifted  up  a  single  stone,"  cer- 
tainly does  not  appeal,  in  any  clear  way,  to  the 
sense  of  beauty;  its  felicity  is  of  a  different  sort. 
What  precisely  constitutes  this  second  sort  of 
verbal  magic  is  in  the  present  state  of  psychology 
perhaps  impossible  to  analyze.  At  most  we  can 
perceive  certain  relations  and  distinctions.  On  one 
plane,  the  mechanism  of  the  two  is  identical :  both 
depend  for  their  effect  on  the  choice  of  so  sharply 
characteristic  a  single  detail  that  a  powerful 
motor  reaction  will  ensue  and  complete  the 
sensory  pattern  in  its  entirety.  This  is  known 
as  Pavlov's  law.  But  here  begins  the  divergence, 


for  while  this  might  explain  the  quality  of  vivid- 
ness which  is  common  to  both,  it  appears  to  have 
no  bearing  on  the  fact  that  each  sort  of  vividness 
affects  the  reader  in  a  specifically  different  man- 
ner. The  first,  or  Shelley-Becquer  type  of  magic, 
appeals  to  what  is  indefinitely  called  the  sense  of 
beauty ;  the  second,  or  Masters-Frost  type,  appeals 
perhaps  to  the  sense  of  reality.  These  terms  are 
deplorably  vague.  Our  enjoyment  of  art  is  con- 
sequent upon  the  satisfaction  of  two  kinds  of 
hunger :  hunger  for  beauty  and  hunger  for  knowl- 
edge. Let  what  the  Freudians  call  an  emotional 
complex  be  formed  early  in  life  upon  the  frus- 
trated first  of  these  hungers,  and  we  get  a  lyric 
or  colorist  type  of  artist ;  upon  the  other,  and  we 
get  a  realist. 

Mr.  Masters  is  of  the  latter  type,  though  there 
are  traces  in  him  of  the  former  as  well.  The 
curious  thing  is  that  while  he  frequently  mani- 
fests a  vivid  desire  to  employ  the  lyric  kind  of 
magic,  he  nearly  always  fails  at  it ;  his  average 
of  success  with  the  realistic  magic  is  consistently 
very  much  higher.  He  is  essentially  a  digger- 
out  of  facts,  particularly  of  those  facts  which 
regard  the  mechanism  of  human  character.  In 
the  presence  of  richly  human  material — the  suf- 
ferings, the  despairs,  the  foolish  illusions,  the 
amazing  overweenings  of  the  individual  man  or 
woman — he  has  the  cold  hunger  of  the  micro- 
scope. Curiosity  is  his  compelling  motive,  not 
the  desire  for  beauty.  He  is  insatiable  for  facts 
and  events,  for  the  secrets  of  human  behavior. 
Consequently  it  is  as  a  narrator  that  he  does  his 
best  work.  He  is  essentially  a  psychological  story- 
teller, one  who  has  chosen  for  his  medium  not 
prose  but  verse,  a  tumbling  and  jostling  and  over- 
crowded sort  of  verse,  which,  to  be  sure,  fre- 
quently becomes  prose.  Was  Mr.  Masters  wise 
in  making  this  choice  ?  He  is  by  nature  extremely 
loquacious  and  discursive — it  appears  to  be  painful 
for  him  to  cut  down  to  mere  essentials — and  prose 
would  seem  to  be  a  more  natural  medium  for 
such  a  mind.  But  while  he  almost  always  fails 
to  compress  his  material  to, the  point  where  it 
becomes  singly  powerful,  it  is  only  the  fact  that 
he  uses  a  verse  form  which  compels  him  to  com- 
press at  all;  and  it  is  also  clear  that  at  his 
moments  of  keenest  pleasure  in  dissective  narra- 
tion he  can  only  experience  satisfaction  in  a  verse 
of  sharply  accentuated  ictus.  It  is  at  these 
moments  that  his  work  takes  on  the  quality  of 
realistic  magic,  the  magic  of  vivid  action,  dra- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


449 


matic  truthfulness,  muscular  reality.  We  are 
made  to  feel  powerfully  the  thrust  and  fecundity 
of  human  life,  particularly  its  animalism ;  we  are 
also  made  to  feel  its  struggle  to  be,  or  to  believe 
itself,  something  more.  It  is  in  the  perception 
and  expression  of  this  something  more  that  Mr. 
Masters  chiefly  fails,  not  because  he  is  not  aware 
of  it  (he  repeatedly  makes  it  clear  that  he  is, 
though  not  of  course  in  the  guise  of  sentimental- 
ity) but  because  at  this  point  his  power  and 
felicity  of  expression  abandon  him.  What  emo- 
tional compulsion  he  has  towards  self-expression 
lies  in  the  other  direction.  His  temperament 
might  be  compared  not  inexactly  to  that  of 
Hogarth,  the  Hogarth  of  "Marriage  a  la  Mode" 
and  "The  Rake's  Progress"  rather  than  of  the 
caricatures.  It  is  in  the  Hogarthian  type  of  magic 
that  he  is  most  proficient. 

Is  it  certain  however  that  this  proficiency  is 
sufficient  to  make  his  work  enduring?  There  is 
no  other  poet  in  America  today  whose  work  is  so 
amazingly  uneven,  whose  sense  of  values  is 
so  disconcertingly  uncertain.  While  in  some 
respects  Mr.  Masters's  intellectual  equipment  is 
richer  than  that  of  any  of  his  rivals,  it  has  about 
it  also  something  of  the  nouveau  riche.  Much 
of  his  erudition  seems  only  half  digested,  much 
of  it  is  inaccurate,  much  of  it  smells  of  quackery 
or  the  woman's  page  of  the  morning  paper. 
Much  of  it  too  is  dragged  in  by  the  heels  and  is 
very  dull  reading.  Moreover,  this  uncertainty — 
one  might  almost  say  unripeness — besets  Mr. 
Masters  on  the  aesthetic  plane  quite  as  clearly  as 
on  the  intellectual.  To  put  it  synaesthetically, 
he  appears  not  to  know  a  yellow  word  from  a 
purple  one.  He  goes  from  a  passage  of  great 
power  to  a  passage  of  bathos,  from  the  vividly 
true  to  the  blatantly  false,  from  the  incisive  to 
the  dull,  without  the  least  awareness.  In  "Songs 
and  Satires"  one  passed,  in  bewilderment,  from 
"Arabel,"  remarkably  sustained  in  atmosphere, 
vivid  in  its  portraiture,  skilful  in  its  use  of 
.suspense,  to  the  ludicrous  ineffectuality  of  the 
Launcelot  poem,  in  which  many  solemn  events 
were  unintentionally  comic.  In  the  new  book, 
"Towards  the  Gulf,"  one  passes,  with  the  same 
astonishment,  from  the  utter  falseness  and  pre- 
posterous anticlimax  of  the  "Dialogue  at  Perko's" 
to  the  intensity  and  magic  of  "The  Widow 
LaRue."  This  means  of  course  that  Mr.  Mas- 
ters is  not  in  the  thorough  sense  an  artist.  He 
does  not  know  the  effect  of  what  he  is  doing.  He 


is  indeed,  as  an  artist,  careless  to  the  point  of 
recklessness.  It  is  as  if  a  steam  dredge  should 
become  pearl  diver:  he  occasionally  finds  an 
oyster,  sometimes  a  pearl;  but  he  drags  up  also 
an  amazing  amount  of  mud.  His  felicities  and 
monstrosities  are  alike  the  accidents  of  tempera- 
ment, not  the  designs  of  art.  Hasty  composition 
is  repeatedly  manifest.  Six  months  more  of  reflec- 
tion would  perhaps  have  eliminated  such  poems 
as  "The  Canticle  of  the  Race"  (Mr.  Masters  is 
often  in  the  hands  of  demons  when  he  uses 
rhyme),  "The  Awakening,"  "In  the  Garden  at 
the  Dawn  Hour,"  "Dear  Old  Dick,"  "Towards 
the  Gulf,"  and  two  or  three  others;  would  have 
indicated  the  need  for  cutting  and  compression 
in  most  of  the  remainder;  and  would  have  dis- 
closed such  verbal  errors  as  "disregardless"  and 
"forgerer" — trifles,  indeed,  but  symptomatic. 

And  yet  on  the  whole  one  is  more  optimistic 
as  to  the  future  of  Mr.  Masters  after  reading 
his  book  than  at  any  time  since  the  appearance 
of  "Spoon  River  Anthology."  Bad  and  good  are 
still  confounded,  but  in  more  encouraging  pro- 
portions. From  "Widow  LaRue,"  "Front  ,the 
Ages  with  a  Smile,"  "Tomorrow  is  my  Birth- 
day," "Saint  Deseret"  one  gets  an  almost  unmixed 
pleasure.  In  these  one  feels  the  magic  of  reality. 
These  poems,  like  "Arabel"  and  "In  the  Cage," 
are  synthesized;  and  it  is  in  this  vein  that  one 
would  like  to  see  Mr.  Masters  continue,  avoiding 
the  pitfalls  of  the  historical,  the  philosophical,  the 
pseudo-scientific.  Will  he  yet  learn  to  employ, 
as  an  artist,  the  selection  and  compression  which 
in  the  "Spoon  River  Anthology"  were  forced 
upon  him  by  the  exigencies  of  the  case?  Will 
he  continue  at  the  same  time  to  develop  in  psycho- 
logical richness  and  in  his  sense  of  the  music  of 
sound  and  the  balance  of  form?  .  .  Whether 
he  does  or  not,  we  already  have  reason  to  be 
profoundly  grateful  to  him.  His  influence  has 
been  widespread  and  wholesome.  We  are  badly 
in  need  of  poets  who  are  unafraid  to  call  a  spade 
a  damned  shovel.  And  a  good  many  of  us  are 
too  ready  to  forget  that  realistic  magic  is  quite 
as  legitimate  in  poetry  as  lyric  magic,  and  quite 
as  clearly  in  the  English  tradition.  If  art  is  the 
effort  of  man  to  understand  himself  by  means  of 
self-expression,  then  surely  it  should  not  be  all 
ghosts  and  cobwebs  and  soul-stuff.  .  .  Mr. 
Masters  reminds  us  that  we  are  both  complex  and 

mortal. 

CONRAD  AIKEN. 


450 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


Reenter  Literary  Burlesque 

THE  HARLEQUINADE:  An  Excursion.  By  Dion 
Clayton  Calthrop  and  Granville  Barker.  Little, 
Brown;  $1.25. 

The  five  "episodes"  in  Messrs.  Calthrop  and 
Barker's  engaging  fantasy  are  five  glimpses  into  an 
alleged  history  of  the  Harlequin  tradition.  First 
we  see  Mercury,  Momus,  and  Charon  crossing 
the  Styx  ("the  most  interesting  place  in  spiritual 
geography")  and  setting  out  to  find  runaway 
Psyche — beginning  on  an  Olympian  Saturday 
"the  longest  week-end  on  record."  For  the  second 
scene  proves  to  be  a  fifteenth-century  Italian  pan- 
tomime, in  which  the  gods,  having  had  some  two 
thousand  years  to  acquire  histrionic  proficiency, 
reappear  respectively  as  Harlequin,  Clown,  and 
Pantaloon,  with  Psyche  long  since  found  and 
now  turned  into  Columbine.  Skipping  Pierrot 
and  Mr.  Rich  his  Harlequins,  the  gods  are  next 
playing  valet,  rustic  squire,  and  lawyer  in  an 
eighteenth-century  English  comedy  of  manners, 
which  Psyche,  as  a  chambermaid  fresh  from  the 
country,  deflects  into  reality — or  romance,  accord- 
ing to  your  view.  Finally  (westward  the  stars 
of  drama!)  the  down-at-heels  divinities,  reduced 
to  begging  for  stray  roles,  come  to  the  "old" 
Ninety-Ninth  Street  Theatre,  New  York — more 
exactly,  "Number  2613  of  the  five  thousand 
Attraction  Houses  controlled  by  the  Hustle  Trust 
Circuit  of  Automatic  Drama" — only  to  watch 
a  rehearsal  from  which  gramophones  labeled 
"Arthur"  and  "Grace"  have  quite  banished  the 
buskins.  It  is  too  much  for  Clown,  who  sets  his 
troupe  atumbling  in  the  good  old  way  and  with 
that  magic  dissolves  the  automatic  theatre  in  red 
fire.  Then  we  are  back  at  the  Styx :  it  is  Monday 
morning  on  Olympus. 

All  of  which,  of  course,  makes  no  very  schol- 
arly contribution  to  the  literature  about  the 
Harlequin  tradition.  Had  it  been  meant  to,  for 
that  matter,  it  would  doubtless  have  been  elab- 
orated as  a  pageant  like  "Caliban." 

But  there  is  another,  and  if  more  slender  a 
finer,  tradition  of  the  English  stage  to  which 
consciously  or  unconsciously  "The  Harlequinade" 
makes  a  very  genuine  contribution — the  burlesque 
of  literary  fashions  and  technical  means.  From 
Bottom  the  Weaver  and  "The  Knight  of  the 
Burning  Pestle"  to  the  Deputy  Sub-Inspector  of 
the  New  York  and  New  Jersey  Division  of  the 
Hustle  Trust  Circuit  may  seem  a  far  cry. 
And  the  landmarks  between  are  rare  enough, 
a  few  more  than  "The  Rehearsal"  and  "The 
Critic"  before  Victorian  taste  mistook  parody  for 
burlesque  and  encouraged  countless  punning  trav- 


esties, now  justly  forgotten.  Within  our  day, 
however,  the  stage  has  seen  more  frequent  revivals 
of  the  real  burlesque  spirit,  as  when  Mr.  Shaw 
tilted  at  the  Shakespeare  halo  in  "The  Dark  Lady 
of  the  Sonnets"  and  pilloried  the  critics  in 
"Fanny's  First  Play,"  or  when  Mr.  Barrie 
reduced  the  problem  formula  to  absurdity  in 
"A  Slice  of  Life."  Our  revues  mostly  incline  to 
the  easier  course  of  parody ;  yet  they  have  helped 
laugh  away  the  worst  excesses  of  the  dance  craze, 
the  "Follies"  once  burlesqued  themselves  and  the 
movies  together,  and  one  will  not  soon  forget 
Bert  Williams's  version  of  "Androcles  and  the 
Lion."  There  is  health  in  an  art  that  can  laugh 
at  itself.  And  there  must  be  some  justification 
for  Drama  League  enthusiasm  in  a  period  whose 
commercial  theatre  indulges  literary  burlesque. 

The  best  stage  burlesque  satisfies  two  demands, 
which  easily  become  contradictory:  it  must  estab- 
lish intimate  relations  with  the  audience,  and  it 
must  never  betray  any  consciousness  of  its  own 
humor.  "The  Harlequinade"  achieves  intimacy 
with  a  running  commentary  on  its  action  by  an 
announcer,  the  ingenuous  fifteen-year-old  Alice, 
who  is  very  much  in  earnest  about  the  whole  mat- 
ter and  who  is  continually  interrupted,  checked, 
or  corrected  from  the  other  side  of  the  proscenium 
by  her  fond  Uncle  Edward.  Between  them  they 
score  some  shrewd  hits  on  the  fashionable  audi- 
ence that  arrives  late  ("Some  of  'em  always  late," 
Uncle  Edward  tells  Alice.  "It's  their  dinner."), 
that  improves  the  intermission  (during  which 
Uncle  Edward  himself  sends  out  for  a  pint),  and 
that  has  certain  pronounced  tastes  ("Uncle,  the 
rest  of  it  isn't  a  very  nice  story.  Will  they 
mind?"  "They?  They'll  like  it  all  the  better." 
Or  again:  "And  don't  gabble.  This  ain't  the 
metaphysics,  which  they  can't  abear.  This  is" 
facts.  They  respect  facts.")  But  at  no  time 
does  either  of  these  slip  out  of  character  or  appear 
as  other  than  an  anxious,  businesslike  manager. 

And  the  players  themselves  keep  properly 
within  the  frame  thus  set  up.  The  skeptical 
philosopher  who  refuses  to  credit  his  senses  when 
he  comes  to  the  Styx,  the  archaic  mummery  of 
the  pantomime,  the  preposterous  point  of  honor 
in  the  high  comedy,  even  the  extravaganza  of  the 
automatic  rehearsal — all  are  veriest  reality  to  the 
actors.  When  the  Sub-Inspector  says  to  Clown, 

"Young  man,  if  this  were  a  performance,  you  would 
be  dealt  with  by  our  aesthetic  policewoman.  Vulgar 
comments  made  in  public  upon  works  of  art  are  now 
an  indictable  offence," 

Clown's  interruptions  have  not  been  vulgar;  they 
have  been  tragic.  And  it  is  not  horseplay  but 
tragic  necessity  for  Harlequin  to  leap  upon  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


451 


pink,  croaking  gramophones  on  their  green  stands. 
This  rehearsal  scene,  which  is  really  a  play  within 
a  play  within  a  play,  is  quite  in  the  Villiers- 
Sheridan  tradition. 

It  is  also  entirely  in  tradition  that  the  rehearsed 
piece  itself  should  be  less  funny  than  the  dia- 
logue of  the  onlookers.  "Love:  a  Disease" 
(author — "Number  Two  Factory  of  Automatic 
Dramaturgy;  Plunkville,  Tennessee")  is  much 
thinner  stuff  than  "A  Slice  of  Life"  and  might 
in  fact  have  come  from  the  racing  pen  of  Mr. 
Stephen  Leacock.  There  is  more  sting  in  the 
gossip  about  Theodor  B.  Kedger,  who  had  "made 
good"  manipulating  "wood-pulp  potatoes,  syn- 
thetic bread,  and  real  estate"  before  he  purchased 
all  the  theatres  ("both  of  the  Variety  and  of  the 
Monotonous  kind"),  bought  up  all  the  drama- 
tists "with  their  copyrights  present  and  future," 
paid  all  the  actors  to  stop  acting  ("which  was  in 
some  cases  a  needless  expenditure  of  money"), 
annexed  all  the  Cinema  and  talking-machine  inter- 
ests, and  began  to  experiment  "in  the  scientific 
manufacture  and  blending  of  drama."  Finally — 

no  less  than  twenty-three  factories  dot  the  grassy 
meads  of  America.  The  work  is  done  by  clerks  em- 
ployed at  moderate  salaries  for  eight  hours  a  dav. 
For  the  cerebration  of  whatever  new  ideas  may  be 
needed,  several  French  literary  men  are  kept  in  chains 
in  the  backyard,  being  fed  exclusively  on  absinthe  and 
caviare  sandwiches  during  their  periods  of  creative 
activity.  No  less  than  forty  different  brands  of  drama 
are  turned  out,  each  with  its  description  stamped 
clearly  on  the  can. 

"Do  the  public  like  the  stuff?"  asks  Clown. 
"They've  got  to  like  it,"  replies  the  Deputy 
Sub-Inspector.    "They  get  nothing  else." 

CLARENCE  BRITTEN. 


An  Imagist  Novel 

HONEYCOMB.    "Pilgrimage,"  III.    By  Dorothy  M. 
Richardson.     Knopf;  $1.50. 

What  happy  intuition  told  the  author  of 
"Pilgrimage"  to  issue  the  book  in  these  short 
installments?  The  process,  you  find  as  you  read 
this  volume,  the  third  of  the  series,  has  been 
almost  exactly  timed  to  your  capacity  of  assimila- 
tion. The  sweetish-sour  style  and  the  strange, 
sensitive  representations  of  a  young  English  girl's 
impressions  of  her  life  are  an  acquired  taste. 
"Pointed  Roofs,"  with  its  flickering  scenes  of  the 
German  school  where  the  girl  goes  as  governess, 
was  too  insubstantial  to  stir  the  mind.  "Back- 
water" might  even  have  repelled  you  with  its 
close  sultry  prison  of  the  home  to  which  she 
returns.  But  "Honeycomb"  suddenly  clarifies 


what  the  author  is  trying  to  do.  Her  idiom 
suddenly  seems  familiar,  and  the  novel  slant  at 
which  she  looks  on  life  captures  your  imagination 
as  a  genuine  artistic  creation,  and  not  as  that 
trick  which  it  might  have  seemed. 

The  particular  idiom  and  vision  of  this  writer 
are  the  same  as  those  of  the  makers  of  imagist 
verse.  Miriam,  the  girl,  sees  the  world  as  a 
stream  of  sensed  pictures,  in  hard  clear  outlines, 
where  the  form  is  more  significant  than  the  con- 
tent. In  "Honeycomb"  she  is  the  governess  in 
the  English  country  house  of  a  commonplace 
middle-class  family.  Nothing  happens,  outside  of 
the  children's  lessons  and  a  trip  or  two  to  town, 
except  the  arrival  of  quasi-smart  people  for  a 
week-end.  This  is  not,  however,  what  happens 
to  Miriam's  vivid  feeling.  People,  house,  and 
furnishings  dissolve  together  and  then  flow  back 
to  her  in  intense  forms  and  colors,  exciting  or 
depressing  the  reflections  of  her  brain.  The  story 
is  of  her  quick  impressions  and  the  racing  stream 
of  her  inner  thoughts,  her  puzzles  and  desires. 
Her  contact  with  people,  with  social  forms,  with 
everything  around  her  are  contacts  with  some- 
thing alive,  hurting  her,  doing  something  to  her. 
It  is  not  the  objective  facts  that  make  up  her  life, 
but  these  intensely  felt  pictures  of  what  goes  on 
around  her,  and  her  own  wondering  mind,  jump- 
ing from  idea  to  idea  as,  restless  and  rebellious, 
it  tries  to  burrow  its  way  out  of  its  squirrel-cage 
into  reality.  Nothing  could  be  more  uncannily 
real  than  these  quick  chains  of  thought  which  run 
through  Miriam's  mind.  Once  you  have  accli- 
mated yourself,  you  find  in  this  flow  between 
sensed  outer  picture  and  inner  reflection  the  very 
quality  of  experience,  caught,  with  a  precision  that 
makes  you  marvel.  At  least,  it  is  the  very  fibre 
of  sensitive  youth,  with  its  despair  of  happiness 
and  its  scorn  of  the  grubbing  world. 

She  toiled  along  feeling  dreadfully  tired ;  the  sounds 
of  her  boot  soles  on  the  firm,  sand-powdered  road 
mocked  her,  telling  her  she  must  go  on.  .  If  a 

victoria  came  along  and  in  it  a  delicate  old  gentleman 
who  had  a  large  empty  house  with  deep  quiet  rooms 
and  a  large  sunny  garden  with  high  walls,  and  wanted 
some  one  to  be  singing  and  happy  till  he  died,  she 
would  go.  .  .  They  would  share  the  great  secret, 
dying  of  happiness.  People  ought  to  be  able  to  die  of 
happiness  if  they  were  able  to  admit  how  happy  they 
were.  If  they  admitted  it  aloud  they  would  pass 
straight  out  of  their  bodies,  alive ;  unhappiness  was 
the  same  as  death,  not  suffering;  but  letting  suffering 
make  you  unhappy — curse  God  and  die,  curse  life,  that 
was  letting  life  beat  you:  letting  God  beat  you.  God 
did  not  want  that.  No  one  admitted  it.  No  one 
seemed  to  know  anything  about  it.  People  just  went 
on  fussing. 

And  a  "sensed  picture"  or  two : 

Her  eyes  caught  the  clear  brow  and  smooth  inno- 
cently sleeked  dark  hair  of  a  man  at  the  other  end  of 


452 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


the  table — under  the  fine  level  brows  was  a  loudly 
talking,  busily  eating  face — all  the  noise  of  the  world, 
and  the  brooding  grieving  unconscious  brow  above  it. 
All  the  other  forms  were  standing  or  moving  in  the 
gloom;  standing  watchful  and  silent,  the  gleaming 
stems  of  their  cues  held  in  rest,  shifting  and  moving 
and  strolling  with  uncolliding  ordered  movements  and 
little  murmurs  of  commentary  after  the  little  drama — 
the  sudden  snap  of  the  stroke  breaking  the  stillness, 
the  faint,  thundering  roll  of  the  single  ball,  the  click 
of  the  concussion,  the  gentle  angular  explosion  of 
pieces  into  a  new  relation  and  the  breaking  of  the 
varying  triangle  as  a  ball  rolled  to  its  hidden  destina- 
tion held  by  all  the  eyes  in  the  room  until  its  rumbling 
pilgrimage  ended  out  of  sight  in  a  soft  thud. 

It  must  have  been  passages  like  this  that  caused 
Wells  to  refer  to  Dorothy  Richardson's  novel 
as  futuristic.  Certain  passages,  like  Miriam's 
walk  on  Regent  Street,  are  pure  imagism,  exactly 
as  the  poets  write  it : 

Flags  of  pavement  flowing  along — smooth  clean  gray 
squares  and  oblongs,  faintly  polished,  shaping  and 
drawing  away — sliding  into  each  other.  .  .  I  am 
part  of  the  dense  smooth  clean  paving  stone  .  .  .  sun- 
lit; gleaming  under  dark  winter  rain;  shining  under 
warm  sunlit  rain,  sending  up  a  fresh  stony  smell  .  .  . 
always  there  .  .  .  dark  and  light  .  .  .  dawn,  steal- 
ing. .  . 

But  "Honeycomb"  is  not  verse  masquerading 
as  a  novel.  It  is  an  honest  narrative,  searching, 
living — fantastic  only  to  those  who  cannot  feel 
these  very  modern  ways  of  looking  at  the  world. 
The  author  has  simply  had  the  audacity  to  tell 
her  story  of  this  sensitive  girl,  neither  child  nor 
woman,  from  the  attitude  and  with  the  values 
that  those  gifted  young  poets  feel  who  have  made 
us  recognize  in  their  nai've,  cool  vision  of  beauty, 
and  in  their  sense  of  flowing  life,  new  vistas  of 
our  own.  And  she  has  had  the  genius  to  make 
out  of  her  few  materials  a  book  of  beauty  and 
truth.  It  is  not  only  the  very  essence  of  quivering 
youth,  but  of  youthful  femininity.  "Sex"  there 
is  none.  To  Miriam  men  are  scarcely  more  than 
a  distant  earthquake  registered  on  the  seismo- 
graph of  her  wonder  and  perfect  uncomprehend- 
ingness.  It  is  women  who  are  real  to  her  and 
intrigue  her — the  shimmering  loveliness  of  the 
fair  German  girls,  the  marrying  sisters  at  home, 
Mrs.  Corrie  and  her  gay  friends  from  London. 
Yet  Miriam  is  saturated  with  the  vague,  hidden 
sense  of  unawakened  virginity.  There  is  the 
tense  shrinking  from  life  and  yet  the  ardor  for 
life,  the  air  of  standing,  half-contemptuously  but 
stirred,  before  a  closed  door,  on  the  other  side  of 
which  is  an  obscure,  not  even  imagined  happiness. 
This  writer  knows  the  cruelty  of  life  as  well  as 
the  high,  clear,  clean,  fresh,  fair  things,  for  which 
her  Miriam  has  so  intense  a  love.  I  wonder  if  so 
completely  feminine  a  novel  as  "Pilgrimage"  has 
ever  been  written.  RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


THE  GREEK  ANTHOLOGY.  5  vols.,  Vol. 
III.  With  an  English  translation  by  W.  R. 
Paton.  The  Loeb  Classical  Library.  Put- 
nam; $1.50. 

This  third  volume  of  the  Greek  anthology 
contains  "the  declamatory  and  descriptive  epi- 
grams" of  Book  IX,  and  seems  to  be  richer  in 
the  former.  But  if  anything  were  needed  to 
prove  that  even  at  their  most  rhetorical  moments 
the  Greeks  had  the  poetic  evocative  word,  this 
collection  declares  it.  Even  the  epigrams  from 
the  "Stephanus"  of  Philippus,  which  were  writ- 
ten in  the  rhetorical  period,  are  rich  in  forceful 
clarity.  And  the  inscriptions  for  cups,  paintings, 
bas-reliefs,  and  baths,  with  which  the  volume 
concludes,  are  especially  pregnant.  Such  is  the 
nameless  lyric  line:  "The  Graces  bathed  here, 
and  to  reward  the  bath  they  gave  to  the  water 
the  brightness  of  their  limbs."  Mr.  Paton's 
translation  is  a  happy  one;  and  while  it  might 
be  desirable  to  have  such  a  volume  as  this  show 
more  evidences  of  scholarly  interest,  this  simple 
and  lovely  presentment  of  the  epigrams  is  a  valu- 
able addition  to  the  classical  library. 

THERE  Is  No  DEATH.  By  Richard  Dennys. 
Lane;  $1.25. 

The  ancient  superstition  which  forbids  speak- 
ing ill  of  the  dead  is  a  most  ungenerous  handicap 
for  critics  who  face  the  vast  output  of  posthum- 
ous verse.  Moreover,  the  friends  who  fondly 
publish  these  pale  lyrics  are  wont  to  confuse  a 
man's  character  with  his  literary  attainments. 
The  present  volume  is  no  exception.  It  is  pre- 
ceded by  a  preface  that  reads  like  a  funeral 
eulogy.  The  man  there  presented  seems  to  have 
been  an  interesting  person,  if  only  because  he  was 
privileged  to  work  with  Gordon  Craig  in  Flor- 
ence. But  the  verse  itself  shows  neither  the 
sensitive  artist  nor  the  keen  philosopher.  It  has 
a  kind  of  stereotyped  sweetness,  but  little  music, 
and  it  is  quite  barren  of  the  startling  phrase  that 
is  the  true  poet's  lightning.  "It  was  ...  the 
world  with  its  duties  and  conventions  that  mainly 
vexed  his  spiritual  nature,"  writes  the  author  of 
the  prefatory  note.  "People  offended;  people 
requiring  answers  to  their  letters  .  .  . "  The 
verse  does  not  betray  a  spiritual  nature  so  lightly 
scratched,  but  that  may  be  because  it  seems  to  be 
quite  lacking  in  any  spiritual  quality.  It  is  such 
verse  as  might  easily  be  written  by  any  young  man 
whose  education  and  comfortable  living  permitted 
him  to  appreciate  his  pleasant  hours.  It  is  mark- 
edly the  production  of  youth,  for  it  echoes  youth's 
sweet  melancholy,  plays  smilingly  with  despair. 
The  dignity  of  death  cannot  of  itself  be  expected 
to  enhance  the  simple  artifice  of  the  amateur. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


453 


A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  DISCOVERY:  From 
the  Earliest  Times  to  the  Founding  of  Colo- 
nies on  the  American  Continent.  By  Hendrik 
Willem  van  Loon.  McKay;  $1.50. 
Dr.  van  Loon  has  written  and  drawn  that 
rare  thing — a  real  book  about  real  events  for  real 
children.  Both  in  the  prose,  which  is  at  once 
simple  and  rich,  and  in  the  posterish  drawings, 
done  in  colored  inks  with  a  match,  there  is  style, 
spirit,  charm,  and  a  genuine  and  unobtrusive 
humor.  The  book  is  nowhere  tainted  with  the 
self-conscious  sophisticating  patronage  which  has 
infected  so  much  of  contemporary  juvenile  litera- 
ture, and  only  once  or  twice  does  it  stray 
into  the  palpably  "improving."  Yet  it  contains 
much  accurate  and  interesting  information  which 
the  child  will  not  find  in  his  school  histories, 
presented  with  a  running  commentary  of  wise 
observation  and  seasoned  reflection.  The  author 
meets  his  reader  easily,  as  man  to  man,  and  tells 
his  story  so  naturally  that  he  communicates  his 
own  enthusiasm  for  the  muse  of  history,  whom 
his  colleagues  of  the  textbooks  are  smothering  in 
documents.  He  concludes  with  a  gentle  satirical 
dig  at  the  Puritans  and  their  college,  where  "by 
attending  lectures,  with  great  patience  and  indus- 
try I  gradually  learned  to  draw  pictures  with  a 
fair  amount  of  success."  One  closes  the  book 
wishing  he  had  continued  his  narrative  into  recent 
times  and  shown  us  the  romance  of  polar  explora- 
tion; one  desires  his  picture  of  Andree's  balloon, 
his  comment  on  Dr.  Cook. 

In  a  foreword  "to  all  grown-ups"  (in  which 
all  children  will  take  delight)  Dr.  van  Loon 
offers  his  book  as  "an  historical  appetizer." 
Happy  that  adult  who  refreshes  a  jaded  palate 
with  this  cocktail:  he  may  be  tempted  to  let  the 
subsequent  repast  include  the  author's  more  ambi- 
tious efforts  in  Dutch  history  and  navigation. 

LE  MORTE  DARTHUR  OF  SIR  THOMAS 
MALORY  AND  ITS  SOURCES.  By  Vida  D. 
Scudder.  Dutton;  $3.50. 

The  title  might  well  indicate  a  typical  erudite 
product  of  research,  heavily  weighted  with  foot- 
notes and  intended  for  a  few  special  students. 
But  from  the  nature  of  the  author's  previous 
work  we  are  not  surprised  to  find  that  the  book 
"makes  no  claim  to  explore  new  territory,  but 
it  hopes  to  fill  the  modest  function  of  guide  to  a 
lovely  country  which  is  too  rarely  visited  except 
by  pioneers."  After  the  years  of  minute  research 
by  many  scholars  "it  would  seem,"  says  Miss 
Scudder,  "that  the  time  is  ripe  for  interpretive 
study."  To  the  general  reader  who  knows  King 
Arthur  and  his  Table  Round  only  through  Ten- 
nyson and  perhaps  through  occasional  ventures 
into  Malory  himself,  this  study  will  prove  a  gate- 
way to  the  vast  and  fascinating  territory  that  lies 


beyond.  A  mere  summary  of  the  research  of  the 
last  half  century  in  this  field  is  badly  needed. 
But  Miss  Scudder  has  given  us  far  more  than  a 
mere  summary.  She  has  given  us  insight  into  the 
meaning  of  Malory's  redaction,  both  as  a  social 
document  and  as  a  work  of  art.  And  in  tracing 
Malory's  complex  sources  she  presents  a  fresh 
and  significant  revelation  of  the  whole  life  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  Miss  Scudder  possesses  a  method 
and  point  of  view  which  have  been  all  too  little 
represented  in  the  past  generation  of  American 
scholarship.  But  there  are  signs  of  a  speedy 
return,  at  least  in  aim  if  not  at  once  in  accom- 
plishment, to  this  method,  which  is  so  character- 
istic of  French  criticism.  Miss  Scudder's  book 
is,  then,  not  only  a  fascinating  guide  for  the 
general  reader;  it  is  a  model  for  a  more  enlight- 
ened and  humane  scholarship. 

THE  PRESIDENT'S  CONTROL  OF  FOREIGN 
RELATIONS.  By  Edward  S.  Corwin.  Prince- 
ton University  Press;  $1.50.. 

The  prominence  assumed  by  questions  of  for- 
eign policy  since  Wood  row  Wilson  went  to 
Washington  has  prompted  one  of  the  professors 
of  politics  at  Princeton  to  bring  together  in  a 
small  volume  the  main  historical  incidents  illus- 
trating the  powers  of  the  President  in  the  diplo- 
matic field,  together  with  the  most  instructive 
discussions  which  these  incidents  have  aroused. 
Of  the  three  parts  into  which  the  book  is  di- 
vided, one  reproduces  the  historic  debate  of 
"Pacificus"  (Hamilton)  and  "Helvidius"  (Mad- 
ison) in  1793,  and  another  an  almost  equally 
important  discussion  by  Senators  Spooner  and 
Bacon  in  1906;  in  the  third  the  author  considers 
at  some  length  the  agencies  of  diplomatic  inter- 
course, the  making  of  treaties  and  executive 
agreements,  and  the  President's  powers  in  rela- 
tion to  war-making.  The  problems  discussed  are 
mainly  such  as  have  arisen  from  (a)  the  insuffi- 
ciency of  the  provisions  of  the  Constitution, 
without  construction,  to  afford  the  national  gov- 
ernment its  putative  complete  sovereignty  in  the 
handling  of  foreign  affairs,  and  (b)  the  fre- 
quent overlapping  of  the  powers  bestowed  by 
the  Constitution  upon  Congress,  the  Senate,  and 
the  President.  "The  gaps  ...  in  the  con- 
stitutional delegation  of  powers  to  the  national 
government,  affecting  foreign  relations,  have  been 
filled  in  by  the  theory  that  the  control  of  foreign 
relations  is  in  its  nature  an  executive  function 
and  one,  therefore,  which  belongs  to  the  Presi- 
dent in  the  absence  of  specific  constitutional  pro- 
vision to  the  contrary."  The  difficulty  arising 
from  overlapping  of  powers  has  been  met  by 
attributing  to  the  respective  holders  of  such 
powers  full  constitutional  discretion  in  their  dis- 
charge— in  other  words,  by  converting  a  legal 


454 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


complication  into  a  question  of  practical  states- 
manship, to  be  solved  by  negotiation  and  com- 
promise. The  author's  analysis  of  the  constitu- 
tional restrictions  upon  the  President's  control  of 
our  foreign  policy,  notwithstanding  the  enormous 
growth  of  that  control  since  1789,  is  especially 
worthy  of  mention.  The  treatise  is  so  heavily 
documented  as  to  become  practically  a  commen- 
tary on  a  series  of  texts — presidential  messages, 
congressional  debates,  judicial  decisions,  and  dip- 
lomatic correspondence.  Its  form  is  therefore 
hardly  such  as  to  appeal  to  the  general  reader. 
Yet  one  may  venture  the  hope  that  our  awakened 
interest  in  foreign  affairs  and  foreign  policy  will 
bring  books  of  this  character  into  hands  that  in 
other  days  would  hardly  have  been  open  to  re- 
ceive them. 

A  HISTORY  OF  ARCHITECTURE.     By  Fiske 

Kimball  and  G.  H.  Edgell.  Harpers;  $3.50. 

This  is  the  first  of  a  series  of  handbooks  on 
the  fine  arts  prepared,  in  the  words  of  the  pub- 
lishers' announcement,  "with  reference  to  class 
use  in  the  higher  institutions  of  learning,  and 
they  also  provide  authoritative,  comprehensive, 
and  interesting  histories  for  the  general  reader." 
Their  raison  d'etre  dwells  largely  in  the  fact 
that  by  reason  of  archaeological  researches  during 
the  past  twenty  years,  and  the  changed  temper 
of  criticism  toward  the  fine  arts  in  their  relation 
to  the  evolution  of  civilization,  most  existing 
textbooks  on  these  subjects  are  now  relatively 
obsolete.  An  examinaation  of  this  history  of 
architecture  would  appear  to  justify  the  claims 
made  for  it  by  the  publishers.  It  is  a  work  of 
scholarship  free  from  tediousness,  pedantry,  or 
special  pleading,  full  of  detailed  information,  yet 
with  perspective  values  kept  well  in  hand.  The 
index,  glossary,  and  bibliographical  notes  are  full 
and  specific ;  the  periods  are  well  summarized  and 
their  chronology  tabulated;  the  text  illustrations 
are  numerous  and  well  selected,  including  a  grati- 
fyingly  large  number  of  clearly  rendered  cross 
sections  and  plans. 

Because  the  book  deals  with  architecture  in  all 
its  important  manifestations  from  prehistoric 
times  to  the  year  of  Our  Lord  nineteen  hundred 
and  eighteen,  the  necessity  for  compression,  and 
even  for  repression,  was  imposed ;  but  the  authors 
have  performed  their  task  so  well  that  the  sense 
of  this  is  seldom  apparent,  and  never  painfully  so. 
Like  all  skilled  performers  they  do  their  difficult 
feats  smiling.  The  book  must  have  been  a  hard 
one  to  write,  but  it  is  easy  to  read. 

The  portion  of  the  book  which  deals  with  the 
Middle  Ages  (Chapters  VI-IX)  is  the  work  of 
Mr.  Edgell.  It  embraces  a  survey  of  Christian 
architecture  from  early  Byzantine  to  the  dawn 
of  the  Renaissance.  The  author  succeeds  in 


making  clear  the  various  phases  of  that  evolution 
which  culminated  in  the  most  superb  temples  to 
a  Living  God  the  world  has  ever  seen.  The  fact 
that  the  theatre  of  this  evolution — what  Mr. 
Cram  calls  "Heart  of  Europe" — is  today  the 
place  of  Armageddon,  and  that  the  finest  of  these 
masterpieces,  Rheims  and  Amiens,  are  under  fire 
by  German  cannon,  gives  a  particular  poignancy 
to  the  reading  of  this  part  of  the  book. 

One  looks  with  especial  interest  to  the  resume 
and  appraisement  of  American  architecture ;  here 
the  critical  faculty  is  fatally  apt  to  betray  its 
limitations  of  vision,  for  a  mist  of  familiarity 
renders  the  present  far  more  obscure  than  any 
past  which  has  left  recoverable  images.  This 
chapter,  the  work  of  Mr.  Kimball,  begins  very 
properly  with  the  Maya  architecture  of  Yucatan. 
The  author  discusses  the  Toltec  and  Aztec 
remains  in  Mexico  and  devotes  a  paragraph  to 
Peru,  with  its  magnificent  and  mysterious  ter- 
raced strongholds  of  a  vanished  and  voiceless 
civilization.  The  widely  different  phases  of 
Colonial  architecture  are  well  described,  traced 
each  to  its  source,  and  their  characteristics  intel- 
ligently differentiated.  The  Classic  Revival 
receives  in  turn  some  attention,  while  the 
remainder  of  the  essay  is  given  over  to  the 
discussion  of  our  later  and  latest  architectural 
phases  from  Richardson  to  Frank  Lloyd  Wright. 
One  rejoices  in  a  view  of  the  Woolworth  Build- 
ing from  an  unusual  angle,  though  that  beautiful 
obelisk  would  be  represented  as  a  matter  of 
course.  But  it  warms  the  critical  heart  to  find 
justice  done  to  Sullivan,  in  a  very  true  and 
penetrating  analysis  of  his  unique  contribution 
to  an  architecture  of  democracy ;  and  it  was  both 
just  and  gracious  to  include  in  even  this  brief 
history  of  American  architecture  the  name  of 
Harvey  Ellis,  who  although  he  wrote  his  name 
scarcely  at  all  in  stone  and  iron,  aroused  to 
thought  and  to  endeavor  so  many  young  men  in 
the  Middle  West.  It  may  be  said  that  the  author 
acquits  himself  with  credit  in  this  essay,  and  brief 
as  it  is  there  is  no  better  resume  of  American 
architecture  extant. 

CHILD    WELFARE    IN    OKLAHOMA.     An 
Inquiry  by  the  National  Child  Labor  Com- 
mittee   for    the    University    of    Oklahoma. 
Direction   of    Edward    N.    Clopper.      Pub- 
lished by  the  Committee,  New  York ;  75  cts. 
This  inquiry  proves  to  apply  not  only  to  local 
conditions    in   the   state   of    Oklahoma,    but    to 
problems   of   current   national    importance.      In 
this  country  the  great  mass  of  laws  governing 
the  welfare  and  protection  of  children  is  practi- 
cally uncorrelated,   is  full  of   discrepancies  and 
loopholes,  is  about  as  unstandardized,  in  fact,  as 
any  group  of  laws  that  you  will  find.     There 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


455 


is  a  growing  feeling  among  those  concerned  with 
progressive  legislation  that  specialization  must 
cease  and  cooperation  begin,  and  that  to  be  effect- 
ive the  laws  of  each  state  should  be  brought 
together  in  a  children's  code.  Four  states  have 
already  done  thist  but  without  sufficient  previous 
study  of  existing  conditions  and  administration. 
In  Oklahoma,  however,  a  state-wide  survey  has 
been  made  of  all  the  conditions  governing  child 
welfare,  and  the  reports  of  the  investigators  are 
now  published  in  one  volume.  They  cover  the 
fields  of  public  health,  recreation,  education,  child 
labor,  agriculture,  juvenile  courts  and  probation, 
institutional  care  of  children,  home  rinding,  poor 
relief,  parentage  and  property  rights;  and  a 
chapter  is  added  on  the  administration  of  the 
existing  laws.  Among  the  most  interesting  recent 
findings  are  those  dealing  with  the  problem  of 
farm  tenancy.  But  the  really  interesting  feature 
of  the  book  is  that  it  constitutes  the  first  state- 
wide survey  of  the  kind  that  has  been  made  in 
this  country,  and  thereby  sets  a  notable  precedent 
for  action  in  other  states. 

PEACEFUL  PENETRATION.     By  A.  D.  Mc- 
Laren.    Button;  $1.50. 

Long  before  1914  the  world  was  aware  of 
a  well  planned  and  cleverly  directed  campaign 
for  the  extension  of  German  influence  in  both 
European  and  non-European  countries.  Mer- 
chants, commercial  travelers,  bank  employees, 
journalists,  missionaries,  travelers,  teachers, 
clerks,  waiters — these  were  but  some  of  the 
agents  employed  in  the  grand  propaganda  of 
Deutschtum.  An  immediate  object  was  the 
expansion  of  industry  and  trade,  especially 
through  the  stimulation  of  a  taste  and  a  demand 
for  German-made  goods.  But  there  were  other 
and  deeper  purposes.  German  "Kultur"  was  to 
be  planted  throughout  the  world ;  minor  states 
and  peoples  were  to  be  drawn  into  the  orbit  of 
Germany;  the  national  life  of  great  countries 
like  England  and  the  United  States  was  to  be 
honeycombed  with  alien  influences;  commercial 
and  cultural  penetration  was  to  be  made  to  pre- 
pare the  way  for  political  influence.  The  scheme 
was  largely  the  work  of  the  Pan-Germans.  But 
the  Kaiser  himself  was  behind  it.  "Thousands 
of  your  fellow  countrymen,"  he  declared  to  his 
people  on  the  occasion  of  the  twenty-fifth  anni- 
versary of  the  founding  of  the  Empire,  "are  liv- 
ing in  all  parts  of  the  world;  German  wares, 
German  knowledge,  German  business  energy 
traverse  the  ocean.  The  earnest  duty,  then, 
devolves  upon  you  to  form  a  strong  link  with 
this  Greater  Empire,  binding  it  to  the  Empire 
at  home."  Since  the  outbreak  of  the  present  war 
the  insidiousness  of  the  work  of  the  advance 
agents  of  the  Wilhelmstrasse  has  been  revealed 


from  many  quarters,  and  the  extent  and  charac- 
ter of  the  German  efforts  to  prepare  the  world 
for  German  dominance  have  been  a  continual 
source  of  astonishment.  In  his  "Peaceful  Pene- 
tration" Mr.  McLaren,  an  Australian  who  lived 
for  many  years  in  Berlin,  gives  a  very  good, 
although  admittedly  but  partial,  account  of  these 
efforts.  He  tells  us  that  his  book  would  have 
been  written  had  there  been  no  war,  because  he 
had  long  been  studying,  in  Australia  and  else- 
where, the  workings  of  the  German  propagandist 
machine;  the  war,  he  says,  revealed  to  him  and 
other  observers  a  good  many  things,  but  con- 
firmed more.  After  a  crisp  discussion  of  what 
peaceful  penetration  is  and  means,  he  writes  in 
an  interesting  way  of  the  "sleuth-hounds" 
employed  in  the  Imperial  espionage,  and  espe- 
cially of  the  founder  of  the  modern  German  secret 
service,  Stieber.  He  describes  the  actual  work- 
ings of  the  German  agents  in  the  British  domin- 
ions and  elsewhere,  and  gives  an  extended,  and 
unfavorable,  estimate  of  the  German  as  a  colo- 
nist. In  a  brief  chapter  he  tells  what  Germany's 
"pressing  to  the  East"  means  for  Australia.  The 
book  cannot  be  characterized  as  profound;  in 
some  aspects  it  is  decidedly  superficial.  Yet  it 
is  commendably  temperate  and  it  states  in  an 
interesting  way  many  facts  of  great  moment 
which,  if  not  new,  are  at  least  unfamiliar  to  a 
large  part  of  the  reading  public. 

THE  SIGNIFICANCE  OF  THE  PROTESTANT 
REFORMATION.  By  Lynn  H.  Hough.  The 
Abingdon  Press;  50  cts. 
PROTESTANTISM  IN  GERMANY.  By  Kerr 
D.  MacMillan.  Princeton  University  Press; 
$1.50. 

Both  books  contain  series  of  lectures  delivered 
during  1917,  a  four-hundredth  anniversary  year 
in  Lutheran  annals.  The  first,  a  sketchy,  brochure- 
like  book  of  four  chapters,  is  an  easy-flowing 
narrative  of  overdrawn  generalities  about  the 
Reformation,  spending  its  space  to  show  that  the 
sixteenth  century  opened  with  the  individual  sub- 
merged because  of  the  prevailing  ecclesiastical 
attitude  and  closed  with  the  individual  having 
emerged  to  assert  his  "place  in  the  sun" — Luther's 
achievement.  The  second,  the  L.  P.  Stone 
Foundation  lectures  at  Princeton,  in  its  introduc- 
tion makes  the  modest  claim  to  be  the  only  work 
in  English  covering  the  development  of  the 
territorial  system  of  Lutheran  Church  govern- 
ment. This  development  from  the  Reformation 
ideal  of  the  universal  priesthood  of  believers  to 
the  conviction  that  it  was  the  duty  of  the  layman 
to  receive  religion,  like  sanitation,  from  above, 
is  intelligently  and  interestingly  traced,  first  in 
Luther's  own  thought,  then  more  fully  in  the 
thought  of  the  leaders  of  the  following  centuries. 


456 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


The  entering  wedge  for  this  development  was 
Luther's  belief  that  individual  Christians  did  not 
have  equal  rights  in  the  conduct  of  church  affairs, 
but  differing  rights  according  to  the  estate  in 
which  God  placed  them.  Of  course  God  had 
placed  the  prince  at  the  top! 

The  author  of  this  book  however  fails  in 
appreciation  of  the  social  factors  that  interplay 
in  all  religious  movements — as,  for  instance,  his 
undervaluation  of  the  social  significance  of  the 
Peasants'  War,  in  which  Luther  directed  con- 
cerning the  Peasants,  "Stab,  beat,  and  strangle 
them,  whoever  can."  Likewise,  his  conclusion 
that  had  the  German  states  taken  the  superior 
Calvinistic  system  of  church  government,  abso- 
lute monarchy  could  not  have  developed,  reveals 
a  strange  lack  of  consideration  for  the  social 
milieu  that  led  to  the  divergent  characteristics 
of  Lutheranism  and  Calvinism.  His  derogatory 
statement  that  "most  modern  German  theology 
is  not  theology  but  psychology,"  bespeaks  his 
dearth  of  interest  in  the  psychosociological  as  a 
force  in  religious  and  historical  development. 

DISASTERS:  and  the  American  Red  Cross 
in  Disaster  Relief.     By  J.  Byron  Deacon. 
HOUSEHOLD  MANAGEMENT.     By  Florence 
Nesbitt.     Russell  Sage  Foundation;  75  cts. 
each. 

These  two  titles  in  the  "Social  Work  Series" 
published  by  the  Russell  Sage  Foundation  will 
be  of  hardly  less  interest  to  the  socially-minded 
public  than  to  professional  workers.  Mr.  Dea- 
con's account  of  Red  Cross  methods  in  disaster 
relief  was  fortunately  just  ready  for  printing 
when  news  came  of  the  Halifax  accident,  and 
its  proof  sheets,  which  were  sent  to  the  Canadian 
Commission  in  charge  of  the  rehabilitation  of  that 
city,  had  immediate  occasion  to  prove  their  use- 
fulness. Having  followed  one  of  the  policies 
advocated  in  the  book — that  of  a  permanent 
committee  of  emergency  relief,  with  preparations 
made  in  advance — the  Boston  Chapter  was  able 
to  have  supplies  and  experts  on  the  way  to  Hali- 
fax within  a  few  hours  after  the  catastrophe 
occurred.  That  the  Red  Cross  organization  has 
fairly  won  its  recognized  position  of  leadership 
in  relief  work  is  largely  due  to  its  further  policy  of 
never  assuming  more  authority  than  is  freely 
granted  by  the  local  agencies,  and  to  its  success  in 
consolidating  and  coordinating  the  various  relief 
forces  which  spring  up  spontaneously  in  any 
emergency.  A  frequent  situation  which  requires 
tactful  handling  is  caused  by  independent  com- 
mittees of  well-intentioned  people  "characterized 
by  their  simple,  abiding  faith  in  the  efficacy  of 
cash  and  food  and  clothes  to  meet  all  human 
needs  whatsoever."  Extended  experience  has 


shown  this  natural  impulse  toward  indiscrimi- 
nate giving  to  be  "always  futile  and  usually 
demoralizing,"  and  a  few  general  principles  as 
to  methods  of  procedure  have  been  adopted:  the 
unit  of  relief  is  the  family;  relief  should  be  pro- 
portioned to  need,  not  to  loss;  close  cooperation 
with  the  family  and  the  community  is  necessary 
for  the  restoration  of  normal  living  conditions  as 
soon  as  possible.  The  repetition  in  successive 
chapters  of  the  principles  which  apply  to  all  situa- 
tions demanding  relief,  although  for  the  general 
reader  it  detracts  somewhat  from  the  interest  of 
the  book,  probably  justifies  itself  to  the  profes- 
sional, who  may  thus  refer  quickly  to  a  specific 
chapter  in  a  given  emergency. 

Under  cover  of  a  rather  misleading  title  Miss 
Nesbitt  in  "Household  Management"  offers  us  a 
glimpse  into  the  housekeeping  difficulties  of  the 
poorer  families,  largely  foreign  born,  in  our  big- 
ger cities.  To  give  any  acceptable  help  to  the 
struggling  homeworker  in  her  effort  to  make 
inadequate  funds  yield  the  maximum  of  health 
and  happiness  to  her  family,  the  visiting  social 
worker  must  be  equipped  with  resourcefulness 
based  on  wide  experience,  with  unlimited  tact, 
and  with  a  friendly  willingness  to  distinguish 
between  essential  standards  in  home-making  and 
comparatively  unimportant  details.  The  chapters 
devoted  to  dietary  standards  and  choice  of  foods 
will  be  especially  useful  to  workers  who  find 
their  dietetic  training  unequal  to  the  present-day 
demands  for  conservation. 

THE  WAR  AND  THE  BAGDAD   RAILWAY. 
By  Morris  Jastrow,  Jr.     Lippincott;  $1.50. 

This  is  much  more  than  just  an  admirable 
economic  and  historical  study,  for  it  gives  a 
genuine  orientation  in  the  present  political  welter 
of  cross  purposes.  Most  economic  and  his- 
torical studies,  even  when  as  carefully  docu- 
mented and  as  engagingly  written  as  this 
book  of  Professor  Jastrow's,  are  mere  studies 
in  vacuo.  Too  often  the  sincere  student's  timid- 
ity before  generalization,  out  of  fear  of  losing 
his  objective  and  authoritative  tone,  prevents 
him  from  drawing  the  wider  conclusions.  Pro- 
fessor Jastrow,  although  he  marshals  his  bibliog- 
raphies with  care  and  gives  the  full  historical 
background  that  clusters  around  the  story  of  the 
great  highway  from  the  East  to  the  West,  does 
not  hesitate  to  draw  the  moral.  Historically, 
the  Bagdad  Railway  represents  "the  last  act  in 
the  process  of  reopening  the  direct  way  to  the 
East  which  became  closed  to  the  West  by  the 
fall  of  Constantinople  in  1453."  And  the  in- 
stinctive reaction  of  all  the  Western  powers 
against  its  control's  passing  into  the  hands  of  any 
one  power — as  Germany,  who  never  seems  to 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


457 


learn  the  significant  lessons  of  history,  planned 
that  it  should — was  a  legitimate  reaction.  It 
was  based  on  sound  historical  tradition.  For 
the  whole  lesson  from  the  past  of  Asia  Minor  is 
simply  that  the  highway  must  be  kept  open — to 
all  nations.  And  that  history  "voices  a  warning 
to  the  West  that  the  reopening  of  the  highway 
must  not  be  used  for  domination  over  the  East 
but  for  cooperation  with  it;  not  for  exploiting  the 
East,  but  for  a  union  with  it."  In  a  word,  one 
more  irrefutable  argument  is  presented  for  that 
kind  of  internationalization  which  only  an  effec- 
tive league  of  nations  can  make  possible.  And, 
incidentally,  one  more  irrefutable  argument  for 
the  defeat  of  Germany's  medieval  ambitions. 
"The  War  and  the  Bagdad  Railway"  is  an  illu- 
minating, invaluable  book,  a  product  of  the  best 
type  of  humanistic  scholarship. 

A  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES  SINCE 
THE  CIVIL  WAR.  By  Ellis  Paxson  Ober- 
holtzer.  Vol.  I.  Macmillan ;  $3.50. 

The  remarkable  revolutions,  social  and  eco- 
nomic, through  which  the  people  of  this  country 
have  passed  since  Lee  surrendered  at  Appomat- 
tox  justify  such  a  work  as  this  proposes  to  be — 
a  history  of  our  country  in  recent  times.  Not 
only  the  importance  of  the  subject  attracts  both 
writer  and  reader,  but  the  absence  of  critical 
work  in  this  field  of  history  calls  for  research 
and  constructive  study.  Five  volumes  will  prove 
rather  a  small  canvas  for  such  a  subject. 

In  this  first  installment  Dr.  Oberholtzer 
undertakes  to  describe  the  circumstances  and  con- 
ditions of  American  life  at  the  beginning  of  the 
period.  Here  he  has  competitors  in  Rhodes's  two 
thick  volumes  on  the  Reconstruction  period  and 
in  Emerson  Fite's  "Industrial  Conditions  during 
the  Civil  War" ;  but  neither  of  these  competitors 
has  presented  the  facts  in  quite  so  impressive  and 
satisfactory  a  manner  as  the  present  author.  The 
portrayal  of  the  prostrate  South  at  the  end  of  the 
war  is  certainly  unequaled  in  the  literature  of 
the  subject. 

At  the  same  time  the  story  of  the  complex, 
extravagant,  and  wildly  competitive  economic 
life  of  the  North  is  adequately  treated.  Rail- 
road building  across  the  Western  prairies,  pros- 
pecting for  oil  in  the  Pennsylvania  coal  region, 
emigration  to  the  mining  states  and  territories, 
the  effects  of  constantly  falling  prices  on  agri- 
culture, and  the  hustle  and  hurry  of  life  in  the 
cities  of  the  East  all  receive  due  attention.  The 
far  West  of  1866,  the  Oregon  and  California 
problems,  the  Chinese  question,  and  the  ruthless 
conduct  of  a  new  class  of  frontiersmen  are 
brought  under  critical  observation  if  not  under 
critical  analysis. 


Of  Andrew  Johnson  and  his  policy  of  healing 
the  nation's  wounds  there  is  also  much  that  chal- 
lenges interest.  We  are  made  to  see  what  a  dif- 
ference of  temper  in  men  placed  high  in  authority 
may  do  for  a  people.  Johnson  endeavored  to  do 
exactly  what  Lincoln  was  beginning  to  do 
when  the  assassin  removed  him  from  his  task. 
Everybody,  both  then  and  since,  praises  Lincoln ; 
while  few  in  1866  and  not  many  in  later  years 
had  any  but  words  of  bitter  condemnation  for 
Johnson.  The  difference  lay  largely  in  their 
manner  of  doing  things,  though  one  must  not 
forget  that  the  people  themselves  changed  their 
position  after  Lincoln's  death  and  before  John- 
son had  time  to  develop  his  policies. 

Perhaps  the  author  has  failed  somewhat  in  his 
treatment  of  Sumner  and  Thaddeus  Stevens,  or 
it  may  be  that  he  has  reserved  these  interesting 
figures  for  the  succeeding  volume.  At  any  rate  it 
would  have  been  well  in  this  first  installment  to 
show  what  the  real  purposes  of  those  bitterest 
of  enemies  of  the  "accidental  president"  were.  It 
was  the  conflict  of  political  and  social  purposes 
which  led  to  the  disastrous  experiences  of  the 
spring  of  1868 — which  permeated  economic  life 
and  party  organizations.  The  distressing  cor- 
ruption of  public  life,  of  business  organizations, 
and  even  of  the  courts  of  justice  is  sadly 
described.  But  all  this  does  not  stand  out  in 
ugly  proportions  as  in  Rhodes's  work.  It  is 
rather  the  inventive  genius,  the  rich  commercial 
life,  and  the  buoyant  optimism  of  a  people  who 
have  just  spent  nearly  a  million  lives  and  a  third 
of  their  total  wealth  in  a  fight  over  the  idea  of 
national  unity,  that  interests  Mr.  Oberholtzer. 
Nor  may  the  reviewer  quarrel  with  the  author 
about  this.  Undoubtedly  it  is  the  constructive, 
the  imaginative,  and  the  forward-looking  men 
that  require  attention  from  the  historian. 

The  method  of  this  work  is  that  of  descrip- 
tion. Analysis  and  close  scrutiny  of  men  and 
movements  are  not  conspicuous.  The  reader  is 
brought  into  touch  with  American  life  through 
quotations  from  newspapers,  addresses  of  public 
men,  speeches  in  Congress,  and  resolutions  of 
labor  organizations;  or,  where  quotations  fail, 
indirect  discourse  is  resorted  to.  The  idea  of 
the  author  is  to  write  the  history  of  the  time  as 
nearly  as  possible  in  the  language  and  thought 
of  the  men  of  the  time.  The  reader  might  well 
imagine  himself  listening  to  the  contemporaries 
of  Johnson  and  Sumner  as  they  discussed  public 
measures  or  quarreled  about  the  Southern  prob- 
lem. Deliberate  judgments  of  the  merits  of 
questions,  of  the  right  or  wrong  in  the  conduct  of 
men,  seldom  appear  in  these  pages.  It  is  not 
the  purpose  of  the  author  to  explain  things,  but 
simply  to  narrate  events. 


458 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


THE     DEMOCRATIZING     OF     KNOWLEDGE     DE- 

mands  first  of  all  that  the  sources  of  knowledge 
be  made  as  accessible  as  possible.  Important 
sources  continue  to  elude  the  public  collectors 
of  books  and  manuscripts,  and  to  owe  their 
belated  discovery  to  the  initiative  of  private  col- 
lectors. It  is  therefore  encouraging  that  private 
collectors  appear  more  and  more  to  feel  them- 
selves under  an  obligation  in  this  matter — that 
they  increasingly  recognize  themselves  rather  as 
trustees  than  as  irresponsible  owners.  A  recent 
instance  was  that  of  a  private  collection  of 
rare  first  editions,  chiefly  in  the  field  of  English 
literature,  whose  inheritor  is  reported  to  have 
sacrificed  something  like  a  hundred  thousand 
dollars  rather  than  dispose  of  it  through  the 
commercial  channels,  accepting  instead  an  offer 
made  on  behalf  of  the  University  of  Texas. 
Although  there  are  more  accessible  shelves  than 
those  of  a  university  library  in  Austin,  at  least 
the  collection  is  not  to  be  scattered,  absorbed  by 
other  private  collectors,  and  for  another  genera- 
tion withheld  from  students.  In  the  same  direc- 
tion lies  the  decision  lately  made  by  the  St.  Louis 
Academy  of  Science,  which  has  now  deposited  its 
valuable  collection  of  some  25,000  volumes  in 
the  St.  Louis  Public  Library.  Private  societies, 
it  is  true,  have  usually  been  less  selfish  than  indi- 
viduals with  their  accumulations,  as  well  as  more 
competent  to  make  profitable  use  of  them;  yet 
too  frequently  the  value  of  such  libraries  is  more 
potential  than  real — the  value  of  an  "uncut" 
book.  Learned  societies  early  recognized  that  the 
results  of  scholarship  are  public  property;  the 
next  step  is  to  recognize  that  the  sources  of  schol- 
arship should  be  available  to  all. 


A    VIGOROUS     OPPOSITION     HAS    OFTEN     BEEN 

called  the  soul  of  an  efficient  government.  But 
a  vigorous  opposition  does  not  mean  a  merely 
noisy  opposition,  and  still  less  a  merely  petulant 
one.  Senator  Sherman,  who  has  recently  been 
making  himself  ridiculous  by  his  speeches  attack- 
ing the  Administration,  has  apparently  reached 
that  point  in  intellectual  development  where  he 
believes  that  a  combination  of  Billy  Sunday  slang, 
cheap  vulgarity,  and  the  employment  of  a  few 
catch-words  like  "Socialism,"  "the  reds,"  and 
"anarchy"  will  impress  the  public  as  great  states- 
manship. "It  is  a  bunch  of  economic  fakers, 
howling  dervishes,  firebrands  and  pestilent  fiends 
of  sedition  that  he  [the  President]  has  around 
him."  And  then  he  goes  on  to  particularize: 
Secretary  Baker  is  "a  half  pacifist" ;  Postmaster 
General  Burleson  is  "a  State  Socialist,"  as  is 
also  Secretary  Wilson  (of  Labor)  ;  John  H. 
Walker,  a  member  of  the  President's  Mediation 
Commission  "does  not  preach  direct  action  in 


Washington,  but  he  practices  it  at  home";  Mr. 
Creel  "has  abused  the  Constitution,  and  the 
fathers  who  wrote  it";  A.  C.  Townley,  who  is 
described  as  having  been  "taken  up"  by  the 
Administration,  "in  reality  represents  pro-German 
influence";  Louis  F.  Post,  Assistant  Secretary 
of  Labor,  is  a  single-taxer,  and  "it  would  serve 
his  purpose  if  all  the  millionaires  were  destroyed 
and  nothing  but  the  vagrant  and  the  proletariat 
remained."  One  can  only  hope  that  the  Repub- 
lican Party  leaders  are  embarrassed  by  this  kind 
of  incredibly  petty  "spell-binding."  Senator 
Lodge  can  still  attack  with  dignity  and  adroit- 
ness the  policies  he  does  not  admire.  In  fact 
is  it  not  true  to  say  that  the  Administration  is 
strengthened  rather  than  hindered  by  the  kind 
of  opposition  represented  by  Senator  Sherman? 

•          •          • 

ORDINARILY  PUBLIC  OPINION  WOULD  IGNORE 
this  partisan  childishness  as  just  a  depressing  sur- 
vival of  bad  taste  and  that  small-minded  orator- 
ical demagoguery  which  since  the  war  has  some- 
how lost  its  ancient  appeal.  But  the  reason  it 
cannot  be  ignored  is  that,  for  all  its  absurd 
flamboyance,  it  is  symptomatic.  Fissures  have 
already  begun  to  appear  in  our  "sacred  union" 
of  political  parties — and  there  is  a  fall  campaign 
coming.  Consequently  it  is  the  duty  of  all  those 
who  sincerely  support  the  liberal  international 
policies  of  President  Wilson  to  do  all  in  their 
power  to  clarify  the  opposition  and  make  it 
definite.  That  opposition  has  two  legitimate 
sides,  both  of  which  have  little  to  do  with  ordi- 
nary partisan  politics  of  Democrat  versus  Repub- 
lican, as  we  understand  partisan  politics  in 
America.  Unfortunately  there  is  danger  that  these 
two  aspects  of  legitimate  opposition  will  be  hope- 
lessly confused.  In  so  far  as  the  opposition  con- 
cerns itself  with  criticism  of  the  conduct  of  the 
war — shipping,  aeroplane  production,  munitions, 
and  so  on— it  is,  when  it  is  honest  and  gives  no  aid 
to  the  enemy,  to  be  encouraged.  A  wise  govern- 
ment welcomes  all  sincere  criticism  which  aids  it 
towards  ever  greater  efficiency.  But  this  kind  of 
criticism  should  not  be  confused  with  the  attack 
on  President  Wilson's  distinctive  international 
purposes — a  league  of  nations,  progressive  dis- 
armament if  possible,  removal  of  the  economic 
barriers  and  jealousies  between  nations,  a  genuine 
democratic  peace,  issues  that  cut  right  across  all 
conventional  party  lines.  Here,  again,  the  oppo- 
sition has  a  perfect  right  to  express  its  views 
— however  distressing  such  expression  may  be  for 
the  more  liberal  element  among  our  cobelliger- 
ents — and  to  try  to  win  public  opinion  to  what  it 
believes  should  be  the  national  policy.  Only 
thus  can  it  be  fought  in  the  open,  and  (we  trust) 
defeated  in  fair  battle.  What  will  be  intolerable 
however  will  be  a  confusion  in  which  we  shall 
have  to  listen  to  speeches  of  this  sort:  "The 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


459 


Administration  has  fallen  down  on  its  job  of 
conducting  the  war,  and  therefore  after  the 
war  we  must  have  a  high  tariff  to  protect  our 
worlcingmen,"  which,  of  course,  is  precisely  like 
saying,  "The  sum  of  the  squares  of  two  sides 
of  a  right-angled  triangle  is  equal  to  the  square 
of  the  hypotenuse,  and  therefore  red  is  preferable 
to  green  as  a  color."  Yet  it  is  just  this  vicious 
kind  of  confusion  which  seems  already  to  be  fore- 
shadowed. Right  now  the  duty  of  the  liberal 
supporters  of  President  Wilson  is  to  help  clarify 
the  opposition  so  that  the  contest  between  those 
who  believe  in  a  new  international  order  and 
those  who  cynically  cling  to  the  old  may  be  a 
contest  which  has  some  vital  relation  to  our 
everyday  politics.  This  is  not  a  question  of  mere 
party  lines  at  all.  It  is  a  contest  between  those 
who  believe  that  President  Wilson's  high  demo- 
cratic purposes  are  possible  of  attainment,  and 
those  who  think  that  this  war  is  like  all  other 
wars  and  that  after  it  is  over  the  old  international 
anarchy  of  jealous  and  competitive  states  will  be 
restored. 

•          •          • 

A  DELIGHTFUL   EXAMPLE  OF  THAT   FLEXIBIL- 

ity  of  mind  which  is  one  of  the  principal  charms 
of  our  contemporary  press  was  recently  given  by 
the  New  York  "Globe"  in  its  comments  on  Mr. 
Randolph  Bourne's  article  "Traps  for  the  Un- 
wary," published  in  these  pages  on  March  28. 
Now  to  change  one's  mind  is  of  course  no  longer 
considered  a  mark  of  intellectual  instability.  We 
have  successfully  learned  Emerson's  lesson  about 
that  "hobgoblin  of  little  minds,"  and  in  a  chang- 
ing world  changing  opinions  are  an  indication  of 
vigor.  But  we  must  confess  that  the  intellectual 
world  in  which  the  "Globe"  appears  to  have  its 
being  changes  with  a  bewildering  rapidity  which 
is  somewhat  difficult  to  follow.  Clinging  to 
literary  standards  with  a  dogmatic  stubbornness 
is  not  exactly  an  amiable  trait,  yet  what  are  we 
to  believe  when  a  newspaper  throws  over  all 
its  standards  between  twelve  o'clock  and  three 
o'clock  of  the  same  day?  Mere  provocative 
caprice?  Perhaps,  but  surely  the  demands  upon 
the  intellectual  agility  of  that  newspaper's  readers 
are  somewhat  severe.  In  its  early  "news  extra" 
edition  of  April  5  the  "Globe"  said  editorially, 
"Mr.  Bourne  contrasts  much  of  the  work  here 
[in  America],  literary  and  dramatic,  with  the 
craftsmanship  displayed  in  M.  Copeau's  season 
of  French  dramatic  art  in  the  Theatre  du  Vieux 
Colombier.  It  is  a  legitimate  contrast,  and  one 
that  cannot  be  too  forcibly  drawn  for  our  writers. 
We  must  get  over  defending  and  attacking  the 
artificial  and  dry-rotted  conventions  of  passing 
society,  as  they  are  mirrored  in  the  'genteel,'  and 
ignore  it.  Then  the  open  road  will  lie  before 
our  artists  and  writers."  Naturally  on  reading 
this  we  were  gratified  that  our  contributor  should 


receive  such  favorable  mention.  Alas!  that  pleas- 
urable emotion  was  short-lived.  For  the  "final" 
edition  firmly  took  away  with  the  left  editorial 
hand  what  had  been  so  generously  bestowed  with 
the  right.  No  longer  was  Mr.  Bourne  the  wise 
and  shrewd  commentator  on  current  literary 
tendencies.  On  the  contrary,  so  remarkable  was 
the  metamorphosis  between  the  crowded  study 
hours  of  twelve  and  three  that  he  was  now 
pictured  as  an  intellectual  minnow  swimming  in 
a  shallow  pool.  The  illumination  of  those  three 
hours  of  ratiocination  went  even  further,  and 
we  are  awed  at  the  mighty  editorial  conferences 
which  must  have  taken  place  during  them.  No 
longer  must  great  art  of  the  present  be  "an 
expression  of  the  fulness  of  life  today."  The 
mellow  philosophy  of  the  "final"  edition  expressed 
it  differently:  "It  isn't  true  that  the  great  art 
of  the  past  has  been  an  expression  of  life,  if  by 
fulness  is  meant  completeness  of  revelation  and 
absence  of  convention.  Convention  has  always 
ruled.  The  definition  of  taboo  has  changed,  but 
not  the  fact  of  taboo."  This  would  have  been 
confusing  enough,  in  view  of  the  earlier  amiabil- 
ity of  the  "Globe,"  if  the  following  rather  bitter 
remark  left  no  doubt  that  the  newspaper  had 
undergone  a  change  of  conviction  great  as  it 
was  sudden:  "The  creative  spirit  of  our  times 
functions  feebly  largely  because  it  is  pestered  and 
discouraged  by  gadflies  developed  out  of  filth 
who  think  parasitism  is  all  there  is  to  life."  We 
confess  we  should  be  glad  to  answer  the 
"Globe,"  except  that,  unfortunately,  these  light- 
ning changes  of  editorial  opinion  make  the  task 
seem  one  of  supererogation.  Can  we  be  sure 
that  by  the  time  our  reply  is  written  the  "Globe" 
will  not  once  more  have  changed  its  mind?  We 
admit  that  we  have  not  the  "Globe's"  technique 
of  celerity  in  evolving  new  literary  philosophies — 
that  we  sometimes  cling  to  our  opinions  for  a 
whole  day.  Evidently  newspapers  are  not  bound 
by  any  such  conventional  demands  for  consistency. 
Certainly  it  is  a  convenient  freedom.  We  should 
be  indeed  sorry  to  learn  that  there  was  anything 
so  ordinary  as  a  mere  difference  of  editorial 
opinion  in  the  office  of  the  "Globe,"  for  we 
should  then  be  forced  to  abandon  our  admiration 
for  that  newspaper's  intellectual  versatility. 

THE  AMERICAN  BOOKSELLERS'  ASSOCIATION 
will  hold  their  annual  convention  May  14,  15,  and 
16.  They  have  postponed  accepting  an  invitation 
to  Boston,  on  the  ground  that  Boston  offers 
too  many  "distractions"  for  a  gathering  intent 
upon  complying  with  the  government's  require- 
ment that  conventions  in  war  time  serve  a  useful 
purpose.  Therefore — New  York!  Will  Father 
Knickerbocker  now  amend  his  estimate  of  Boston 
as  "a  state  of  mind"  to  read  "a  distracted  state 
of  mind"? 


460 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


BRIEFER  MENTION 


From  Franklin  and  Woolman,  through  the 
journalizing  New  Englanders,  to  William  Dean 
Howells,  our  literature  has  been  fortunate  in  the 
readiness  with  which  its  makers  have  discoursed 
about  themselves.  Few  have  been  so  charmingly 
loquacious  as  Mr.  Howells.  His  latest  work  of 
this  kind,  "Years  of  My  Youth,"  originally  pub- 
lished two  years  ago,  has  recently  appeared  in  an 
illustrated  edition  uniform  with  his  other  books 
(Harpers;  $2.50).  The  illustrations  are  valuable 
even  for  American  readers,  picturing  as  they  do  a 
workaday  section  of  America,  southern  Ohio,  that 
has  been  alien  ground  to  most  novel  readers.  Espe- 
cially alien  is  that  drab  democratic  individualistic 
Ohio  River  country  of  a  time  that  was  warming  to 
the  bloody  solution  of  the  slavery  problem.  Mr. 
Howells  presents  a  faithful  picture  fully  and  vividly, 
so  fully  and  vividly  that  the  professional  historian 
will  value  his  account.  The  slavery  struggle  at 
least  once  came  to  the  very  heart  of  the  family 
circle : 

"These  uncles  had  grown  up  in  a  slave  state,  and  they 
thought,  without  thinking,  that  slavery  must  be  right ;  but 
once  when  an  abolition  lecturer  was  denied  public  hearing 
at  Martin's  Ferry,  they  said  he  should  speak  in  their  mother's 
house ;  and  there,  much  unaware,  I  heard  my  first  and  last 
abolition  lecture,  barely  escaping  with  my  life,  for  one  of 
the  objections  urged  by  the  mob  outside  was  a  stone  hurled 
through  the  window,  where  my  mother  sat  with  me  in  her 
arms." 

In  the  new  dispensation  following  the  war,  the 
federal  principle,  as  developed  in  American  history, 
will  doubtless  play  an  important  part.  For  this 
reason  the  thinking  American,  who  is  not  perhaps 
very  easy  to  find,  will  wish  to  know  more  about 
the  growth  of  the  federal  principle  than  he  presum- 
ably knows  now;  and  for  this  reason  he  may  care 
to  browse  in  a  new  life  of  Calhoun — "The  Life  of 
John  Caldwell  Calhoun,"  by  William  M.  Meigs 
(Neale;  boxed,  $10.).  Only  the  professional  his- 
torian will  care  to  read  every  word  of  this  two- 
volume,  934-page  book.  Mr.  Meigs's  point  of  view, 
in  dealing  with  so  delicate  a  subject,  is  happily  that 
of  a  man  who,  entering  sympathetically  into  an  idea 
in  his  eager  youth,  now  sees  its  inadequacy.  We 
are  therefore  assured  both  sympathy  and  judgment. 
It  is  the  first  "full-length"  portrait  of  Calhoun,  who 
is  revealed  as  an  interesting  figure  and  a  great  man 
with  clearly  defined  limitations.  It  is  also,  inci- 
dentally, a  history  of  battles  long  ago  that  should 
be  vividly  present  to  the  intelligent  American  patriot. 

"Journalism  for  High  Schools,"  by  Charles  Dillon 
(Lloyd  Adams  Noble;  $!.)»  is  a  generously  illus- 
trated and  "documented"  handbook  that  seems  a 
little  uncertain  whether  it  is  addressed  to  teachers 
or  to  pupils.  The  point  is  important  because  the 
pages  which  urge  the  adoption  of  some  journalistic 
instruction  in  the  high  school  contain  several  argu- 
ments calculated  to  make  the  student  feel  that  the 
whole  project  is  only  a  cunning  device  to  promote 
discipline  and  protect  thin-skinned  teachers  from 
anonymous  "roasts."  A  disproportionate  emphasis 
upon  censorship  unfits  the  book  for  the  use  of 
pupils.  On  the  other  hand,  it  contains  much  that 
is  too  elementary  to  be  of  value  to  any  teacher 
intelligent  enough  to  be  entrusted  with  so  exacting 
a  subject.  The  author  presupposes  the  expropria- 


tion of  the  school  paper  as  a  laboratory — a  confisca- 
tion demanding  some  delicacy  and  perhaps  not  worth 
while,  for  the  American  pupil  usually  resents  any 
invasion  of  his  precious  "activities"  and  there  seems 
to  be  a  growing  doubt  among  teachers  of  journalism 
as  to  whether  the  laboratory  method  is  valuable 
enough  to  justify  the  hard  work  it  enforces  from 
the  instructor.  Meanwhile  Mr.  Dillon's  plea  for 
making  elementary  English  instruction  vital  through 
contacts  with  the  everyday  demands  upon  written 
expression  is  a  sound  one;  and  the  teacher  expected 
to  provide  such  instruction  will  find  in  this  book 
some  very  useful  material,  doubly  useful  for  its 
practical  hints  if  he  be  called  upon  to  create  or 
maintain  a  school  paper.  He  should  not  let  it  be 
forgotten  however  that  the  language  has  nobler 
uses  than  those  of  journalism. 

Mrs.  R.  Clipston  Sturgis  has  a  very  jolly  way  of 
reflecting  grandmotherhood  in  her  "Random  Reflec- 
tions of  a  Grandmother"  (Houghton  Mifflin;  $!.)• 
No  sit-by-the-fire-and-knit  ancestress  is  she,  but  a 
modern  of  the  moderns,  and  gifted  with  a  very 
charming  way  of  writing  about  her  houseful  of 
three  generations.  She  is  in  many  ways  however  a 
most  baffling  modern  grandmother.  Her  sense  of 
humor  is  delightfully  apparent,  and  yet  she  actually 
says  in  sober  seriousness  that  Boston  "is  really  the 
only  place  outside  England  in  which  any  one  of 
intelligence  would  be  willing  to  live,  and  I  am  not 
unmindful  of  my  privileges."  Now  the  question  is, 
was  she  trying  to  take  us  in?  Literature  very 
rarely  presents  so  clearly  the  point  of  view  of 
contracted  cosmopolitanism  for  which  the  author 
stands.  She  is  completely,  unconsciously,  delight- 
fully of  her  class  and  of  its  standards.  Her  outlook 
is  a  completed  product,  almost  a  work  of  art. 

Trust  problems  have  been  reviewed  from  various 
angles,  including  in  their  range  the  wise  and  the 
foolish,  not  to  mention  the  hysterical.  The  grow- 
ing mass  of  literature  on  the  subject  testifies  to  the 
general  interest  in  the  problem.  The  present  work, 
"The  Trust  Problem,"  by  J.  W.  Jenks  and  W.  E. 
Clark  (Doubleday,  Page;  $2.),  is  a  thorough  revision 
and  enlargement  of  an  earlier  book,  and  as  it  is 
based  on  first-hand  investigation,  with  all  its  facts 
reexamined  to  square  them  with  contemporary 
changes,  the  volume  has  special  value  in  this  new 
form. 

Cavalry,  except  on  the  far  fringes  of  the  war,  has 
been  robbed  of  its  historic  and  picturesque  utility. 
But  the  horse  and  pony  and  mule  have  played  no 
inconsiderable  part  in  that  desperate  economy  that 
has  made  modern  warfare  possible.  It  is,  however, 
of  the  place  that  the  small  horse  occupies  in  our 
normal,  domestic  economy,  where  his  latest  cham- 
pion maintains  that  he  may  easily  become  a  rival 
to  the  horse,  and  in  the  increasing  use  of  this 
breed  in  our  sports  and  out-door  recreation,  that 
Frank  Townend  Barton  has  written  with  such 
knowledge  and  enthusiasm  in  "Ponies  and  All 
About  Them"  (Dutton;  $3.).  Moreover,  with 
the  decline  of  racing  on  these  shores  and  the  se- 
questration of  polo  in  our  society  as  a  game  to  be 
indulged  in  only  by  the  rich,  the  chief  appeal  of 
such  a  painstaking  volume  will  be  to  the  American 
breeder  and  horse-lover.  Yet  it  is  a  volume  that 
should  be  in  the  library  of  all  animal-friends,  serv- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


461 


ing  a  practical  as  well  as  an  educative  purpose. 
While  the  time  is  still  distant  when  "the  game  of 
kings"  will  become  widely  indigenous  (the  polo 
pony,  as  in  India,  drawing  the  family  dog-cart  be- 
tween games),  still  there  is  a  need  for  wider  in- 
terest than  is  now  bestowed  on  this  attractive  breed. 
How  many  of  American  riders  acquired  the  rudi- 
ments of  a  good  seat  and  hands  on  the  pony  of 
their  childhood!  As  for  the  Shetland,  because  of 
his  docility  and  endurance  he  is  and  will  continue 
to  be  par  excellence  the  child's  mount.  An  enthu- 
siastic veterinarian  like  Mr.  Barton  takes  stock 
of  all  the  characteristic  and  ideal  points  of  the 
small  horse,  imparts  valuable  hints  regarding  con- 
formation of  the  different  types  that  will  be  ap- 
preciated by  breeders,  and  includes  indispensable 
chapters  on  anatomy,  care  and  management,  and 
diseases.  The  illustrations,  especially  of  famous 
perfect  types  of  the  various  breeds,  are  well 
chosen.  Needless  to  say,  a  book  of  this  definitive 
nature,  in  these  parlous  times,  could  only  have 
found  an  author  and  a  publisher  across  the  Atlantic. 

"The  Human  Side  of  Birds"  (Stokes;  $1.60)  is 
the  latest  member  of  a  series  of  books  by  Royal 
Dixon  designed  to  demonstrate  the  remarkable  intel- 
ligence of  plants  and  animals,  the  older  volumes 
being  "The  Human  Side  of  Plants"  and  "The 
Human  Side  of  Trees."  As  the  titles  suggest,  the 
books  are  popular  in  treatment;  the  author  has 
simply  collected  from  his  own  observation  and  all 
manner  of  other  sources  the  facts  that  point  in 
the  desired  direction.  Many  excellent  photographic 
illustrations  help  out  the  text.  The  author  tells 
of  "feathered  artists,"  "policemen  of  the  air," 
"dancers,"  "feathered  athletes,"  "scavengers  and 
street  cleaners,"  "courts  of  justice,"  "bird  actors  and 
their  theatres"  and  other  winged  people,  emphasiz- 
ing the  human  element  so  vigorously  that  one  fears 
at  times  that  he  finds  it  where  it  isn't.  Alice  E. 
Ball's  book,  "A  Year  with  the  Birds"  (Dodd, 
Mead;  $3.),  is  a  very  different  kind  of  thing — a 
long  series  of  pictures  illustrated  with  verses,  chiefly 
by  "A.  E.  B."  Like  the  plates  in  Chapman's  "Bird 
Life,"  the  plates  of  the  present  book  are  excellent 
sketches  so  skilfully  drawn  and  colored  that  they 
are  more  useful  for  identification  than  any  other 
kind  of  illustration — more  useful,  even,  than  bird 
skins  would  be.  With  scarcely  any  exceptions,  the 
plates  are  either  as  good  as  any  others  or  better. 
Mr.  T.  Gilbert  Pearson  rightly  remarks,  "I  should 
like  to  see  the  book  in  the  hands  of  every  Junior 
Audubon  Society  member  and  every  school-child  in 
America."  It  has  all  the  requisites  of  a  gift  book, 
even  unto  the  price,  which  is  three  dollars. 

Among  the  indirect  gains  resulting  from  the  war 
will  be  a  largely  increased  variety  in  our  repertoire 
of  menus  and  a  more  intelligent  interest  in  the  value 
of  food.  Housewives  and  teachers  of  cookery  who 
for  years  have  been  trying  to  interest  their  circles  in 
attractive  recipes  to  relieve  the  monotony  of  the  con- 
ventional American  combinations,  and  have  been 
meeting  with  but  half-hearted  encouragement,  are 
now  fortified  by  the  conservation  campaign.  The 
result  is  a  vigorous  crop  of  cookery  books.  "Wheat- 
less  and  Meatless  Days"  (Appleton;  $1.25)  by 
Pauline  D.  Partridge  and  Hester  M.  Conklin — one 


a  housewife  and  the  other  a  practical  teacher — is  a 
well  chosen  collection  of  recipes,  at  the  same  time 
simple  in  the  making  and  inexpensive.  "Savings 
and  Savoury  Dishes"  (Macmillan;  65  cts.),  which 
was  originally  published  by  the  Patriotic  Food 
League  of  Scotland  to  meet  the  needs  of  small  house- 
holders on  war-reduced  incomes,  contains  many  old- 
country  recipes  and  customs  worthy  of  emulation 
here.  Although  such  provocative  names  as  Toad-in- 
the-Hole,  Pot  Haggis,  and  Cornflour  Shape  disguise 
dishes  more  or  less  familiar  to  us,  the  book  contains 
much  we  can  learn  and  more  we  can  practice  in  the 
way  of  economies  neglected  during  our  fat  years. 
"War-Time  Bread  and  Cakes,"  by  Amy  L.  Handy 
(Houghton  Mifflin;  75  cts.),  is  made  up  of  recipes 
for  combining  various  kinds  of  flour  that  may  be 
substituted  for  white  flour.  The  recipes  have  been 
carefully  worked  out  in  the  author's  kitchen  and 
should  be  welcomed  by  the  housewife  who  has 
lately  been  tending  toward  the  use  of  baker's  bread 
because  of  the  difficulty  of  making  a  satisfactory 
loaf  from  war-time  flours.  The  recipes  in  the 
"Economy  Cook  Book,"  by  Maria  Mcllvaine  Gill- 
more  (Dutton;  $1.),  are  designed  to  carry  out  the 
plans  of  the  Food  Administration  by  reducing  the 
use  of  wheat,  meats,  sweets,  and  fats.  The  book 
includes  much  of  our  new-found  wisdom  in  con- 
servation and  will  prove  a  useful  kitchen  handbook. 
The  present  condition  of  the  food  supply  is  treated 
simply  and  readably  in  Mary  S.  Rose's  "Everyday 
Foods  in  War  Time"  (Macmillan;  80  cts.),  which 
explains  the  nutritive  values  of  our  common  foods 
and  makes  suggestions  for  adapting  them  to  the 
household  menu.  Dora  Morrell  Hughes  gossips 
about  "Thrift  in  the  Household"  (Lothrop,  Lee  & 
Shepard;  $1.25)  in  very  practical  fashion  and  man- 
ages to  include  a  surprising  number  of  suggestions 
for  economy  and  better  management  that  will  be 
new  to  many  housewives. 

A  less  specialized  book,  which  is  destined  to  super- 
sede many  of  the  standard  old  cook  books  as  a 
household  favorite,  is  "Caroline  King's  Cook  Book" 
(Little,  Brown;  $1.50).  The  author  reduces  the 
whole  subject  matter  of  cookery  to  a  few  funda- 
mental processes  and  basic  formulae,  which  can  be 
elaborated  at  will  to  emulate  the  most  complicated 
lists  of  recipes.  It  is  a  method  of  treatment  that 
will  prove  illuminating  to  the  experienced  house- 
keeper and  reassuring  to  the  beginner. 

In  "Diabetic  Cookery"  (Dutton;  $2.)  Rebecca  W. 
Oppenheimer  presents  a  valuable  handbook  of  recipes 
successfully  used  in  the  treatments  at  Carlsbad  and 
Neuenahr,  with  diet  tables  and  a  list  of  places 
where  specially  prepared  foods  may  be  secured.  The 
volume  is  fully  supplied  with  information  to  make  it 
practical  for  use  in  the  home,  and  it  should  be 
valuable  to  anyone  who  has  to  solve  the  problem  of 
a  diabetic  dietary. 

"The  Child's  Food  Garden,"  by  Van  Evrie  Kil- 
patrick  (World  Book  Co.;  48  cts.),  is  a  useful 
little  book  which,  can  be  put  direct  into  the  hands 
of  children  in  the  grammar  grades  to  teach  them 
how  to  start  a  garden  and  how  to  take  care  of  it. 
The  instructions  are  simple  and  definite  enough  to 
be  of  use  to  adult  amateurs  who  have  forgotten,  if 
they  ever  knew,  how  to  help  things  grow. 


462 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


An  Important  Book  on  the  Russian 
Revolution 

Russia's  Agony 

By  ROBERT  WILTON 

Svo.    With  illustrations  and  maps.    $4.80  net. 

"Mr.  Wilton  was  The  Times  correspondent  at  Petro- 
grad,  and  he  has  here  given  us  what  is  probably 
the  best  account  yet  written  in  English  of  the  Rus- 
sian Government  and  army  immediately  before  the 
revolution,  of  that  amazing  event  itself,  and  of  the 
outlook  in  Russia  as  it  appeared  to  him  at  the  end 
of  last  year." — The  Times  (London). 

"This  elaborate,  informing,  and  thoroughly  reliable 
contribution  to  recent  Russian  history  is  welcome 
now." — Spectator. 

A  Russian  Schoolboy 

By  SERGE  AKSAKOFF.  Translated  from  the  Rus- 
sian by  J.  D.  Duff,  Fellow  of  Trinity  College,  Cam- 
bridge. Svo.  $2.40  net. 

This  is  the  third  and  last  section  of  Aksakoff's 
memoirs,  the  two  earlier  volumes  being — 

A  RUSSIAN  GENTLEMAN.     $2.40  net. 

YEARS  OF  CHILDHOOD.    $3.40  net. 

"As  a  piece  of  literature  it  is  a  sheer  delight ; 
as  a  document  revealing  the  Russian  spirit  it  is  of 
singular  value  at  the  present  time." — Daily  Graphic. 

Leaves  from  an  Officer's 
Notebook 

By  CAPT.  ELIOT  CRAWSHAY-WILLIAMS 
Author  of  "Across   Persia." 

With  8  illustrations.    Svo.    $3.40  net. 

"One    of    the    most    original,    wise,    and    at    times 

amusing  books  of  soldiers'  confessions." — Daily  News, 

The  Wheat  Problem 

Based  on  Remarks  Made  in  the  Presidential 
Address  to  the  British  Association  at  Bristol 
in  1898. 

Revised,  with  an  answer  to  various  critics,  by  SIR 
WILLIAM  CROOKES,  O.M.,  F.R.S.  Third  Edition. 
With  Preface  and  Additional  Chapter,  bringing  the 
Statistical  Information  Up  to  Date,  and  a  Chapter  on 
Future  Wheat  Supplies  by  Sir  R.  Henry  Rew,  K.C.B., 
and  an  Introduction  by  Lord  Rhondda. 

Crown  Svo.     $1.25  net. 

A  warning  by  Professor  Crookes  issued  in  1898, 
that  England  was  in  danger  from  a  shortening  of 
her  wheat  supply  is  reproduced  in  this  book,  together 
with  a  review  of  conditions  in  1916,  showing  how  it 
has  been  justified.  It  presents  not  only  an  English 
problem  but  treats  of  the  world  problem. 

Last  Lectures  of 
Wilfrid  Ward 

Being  the  Lowell  Lectures,  1914,  and  Three  Lectures 
Delivered  at  the  Royal  Institution,  1915. 

Edited  with  an  introductory  study,  by  MRS.  WIL- 
FRID WARD.  With  portrait.  Svo.  $4.00  net 

"These  final  chapters  from  his  pen  bring  before 
us  again  a  strong,  sane,  and  lovable  man  in  whom 
religion  was  as  real  and  important  as  in  Newman 
himself." — Glasgow  Herald. 


Longmans,  Green  &  Co.,  Publishers 

Fourth  Avenue  and  Thirtieth  Street,  NEW  YORK 


NOTES  AND  NEWS 


Norman  Angell,  who  has  written  on  "Internation- 
alism as  the  Condition  of  Allied  Success"  for  this 
issue  of  THE  DIAL,  is  an  English  publicist  whose 
contributions  to  the  discussion  of  universal  peace 
have  won  him  a  world-wide  reputation.  His  more 
important  books  are:  "The  Great  Illusion,"  1910; 
"War  and  the  Essential  Realities,"  1913;  "The 
Foundations  of  International  Polity,"  1914;  "The 
World's  Highway,"  1915;  "America  and  the  New 
World  State,"  1915;  "Why  Freedom  Matters," 
1916.  Mr.  Angell's  residence  is  in  London,  but  he 
is  at  present  lecturing  in  this  country. 

Robert  H.  Lowie,  who  contributes  a  plea  for  the 
study  of  the  history  of  science,  is  the  author  of 
"Culture  and  Ethnology,"  which  is  reviewed  in  this 
issue.  For  some  years  Dr.  Lowie,  who  is  now  at 
the  University  of  California,  was  one  of  the  cura- 
tors of  the  American  Museum  of  Natural  History, 
New  York,  and  he  has  edited  various  scientific 
journals.  His  earlier  books  were  chiefly  devoted 
to  the  social  life  of  the  American  Indian. 

Guy  Nearing  was  graduated  from  the  Univer- 
sity of  Pennsylvania  in  1911  and  published  a  volume 
of  verse,  "The  Far  Away"  (Putnam),  last  year. 
He  is  now  in  the  United  States  Army. 

The  other  contributors  to  this  number  have  previ- 
ously written  for  THE  DIAL. 


Ralph  D.  Paine's  "With  the  Fighting  Fleets"  is 
soon  to  be  published  by  the  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

Little,  Brown  &  Co.  have  postponed  issuing  "The 
Cradle  of  the  War,"  a  book  about  the  Balkans  by 
H.  Charles  Woods,  until  later  in  the  year. 

"Britain  after  the  Peace:  Revolution  or  Recon- 
struction," by  Brougham  Villiers,  is  announced  by 
T.  Fisher  Unwin,  Ltd.,  of  London. 

The  Four  Seas  Co.  have  taken  over  Conrad 
Aiken's  "Earth  Triumphant,"  originally  published 
by  the  Macmillan  Co. 

Henry  Holt  &  Co.  announce  "Alsace-Lorraine 
under  German  Rule,"  by  Charles  Downer  Hazen, 
author  of  "Europe  Since  1815." 

The  Christopher  Publishing  House,  Boston,  an- 
nounce a  book  dealing  with  the  continuity  of  life, 
"Insight,"  by  Mrs.  Emma  C.  Cushman. 

Isaac  Pitman  &  Sons,  2  West  45th  Street,  New 
York,  have  assumed  the  American  agency  for  the 
scientific  and  technical  books  issued  by  Whittaker 
&  Co.  of  London. 

Alfred  A.  Knopf  announces  "Prophets  of  Dis- 
sent," a  volume  of  essays  on  Tolstoi,  Strindberg, 
Nietzsche,  and  Maeterlinck  by  Professor  Otto 
Heller,  of  Washington  University,  St.  Louis. 

Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  have  nearly  ready  J.  E. 
Hutton's  "Welfare  and  Housing:  A  Practical  Rec- 
ord of  War-Time  Management"  and  John  Clarke's 
"The  School  and  Other  Educators." 

Robert  H.  Dodd  announces  the  early  publication 
of  a  new  and  enlarged  edition  of  Benjamin  F. 
Thompson's  "History  of  Long  Island,"  of  which 
there  has  not  been  a  new  edition  since  1843. 

Forthcoming  volumes  under  the  John  Lane  im- 
print include:  "Illusions  and  Realities  of  War," 
by  Francis  Grierson;  "Memorials  of  a  Yorkshire 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


463 


Parish,"  by  J.  S.  Fletcher;  "Anglo-Irish  Essays," 
by  John  Eglinton;  and  "French  Literary  Studies," 
by  T.  B.  Rudmose-Brown,  of  the  University  of 
Dublin. 

The  early  May  publications  of  Robert  M. 
McBride  &  Co.  include:  "Interned  in  Germany," 
by  H.  C.  Mahoney;  "Patenting  and  Promoting 
Inventions,"  by  M.  H.  Avram;  and  "Finding  the 
Worthwhile  in  the  Southwest,"  by  Charles  Francis 
Saunders. 

The  Macmillan  Co.  recently  took  over  the  book 
business  of  the  Outing  Publishing  Co.  The  price 
of  the  "Outing  Hand  Books"  has  been  raised  from 
80  cts.  to  $1.  each,  and  that  of  the  "Adventure 
Library"  from  $1.  to  $1.25  a  volume. 

Owing  to  a  misunderstanding,  the  "Spring  Educa- 
tional List"  published  in  THE  DIAL  for  April  11 
included  the  "Complete  United  States  Infantry 
Guide,"  arranged  by  Major  James  K.  Parsons,  and 
ascribed  it  to  the  wrong  publisher.  It  was  published 
in  1917  by  the  J.  B.  Lippincott  Co. 

The  Putnams  announce  two  publications  of  the 
Cambridge  University  Press:  "Materials  for  the 
Study  of  the  Babi  Religion,"  compiled  by  Edward 
G.  Browne,  and  "The  Book  of  Joshua"  (in  the 
Revised  Version),  with  introduction  and  notes  by 
G.  A.  Cooke,  an  addition  to  "The  Cambridge  Bible 
for  Schools  and  Colleges." 

William  E.  Keily,  Public-Utility  Relations,  72 
West  Adams  Street,  Chicago,  Illinois,  desires  to 
purchase  Vol.  Ill  of  the  "Journal  of  the  American 
Electrical  Society,"  which  consists  of  the  fifth  annual 
number  and  bears  the  date  1880.  He  will  appreci- 
ate any  information  calculated  to  help  him  in  his 
search  for  an  available  copy. 

Late  April  issues  of  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  included : 
"Europe's  Fateful  Hour,"  by  Gugielmo  Ferrero; 
"Japan  at  First  Hand,"  by  Joseph  I.  C.  Clarke; 
"Beyond  the  Rhine,"  by  Marc  Henry;  "Out 
There,"  a  play  by  J.  Hartley  Manners;  and  "Tales 
of  Wartime  France,"  French  short  stories  trans- 
lated by  William  L.  McPherson. 

New  additions  to  Boni  &  Liveright's  "Modern 
Library"  are:  "Bertha  Garlan,"  by  Arthur 
Schnitzler;  Voltaire's  "Candide,"  with  an  introduc- 
tion by  Philip  Littell;  "Irish  Fairy  and  Folk  Tales," 
by  W.  B.  Yeats;  Gissing's  "The  Private  Papers  of 
Henry  Ryecroft,"  with  an  introduction  by  Paul 
Elmer  More;  Max  Beerbohm's  "Zuleika  Dobson," 
with  an  introduction  by  Francis  Hackett;  a  selec- 
tion of  short  stories  from  Balzac;  and  two  volumes 
of  reproductions,  from  Rodin  and  from  Beardsley. 
The  Century  list  for  May  contains,  in  addition 
to  Professor  Ross's  "Russia  in  Upheaval":  "The 
Wonders  of  Instinct,"  chapters  in  the  psychology 
of  insects,  by  Jean  Henri  Fabre;  "The  Roots  of 
the  War,"  a  survey  of  European  history,  1870-1914, 
by  William  Stearns  Davis;  "Flashes  from  the 
Front,"  war  correspondence  by  Charles  H.  Grasty, 
with  a  foreword  by  General  Pershing;  "Keeping 
Our  Fighters  Fit,"  by  Edward  Frank  Allen ;  "The 
War-Whirl  in  Washington,"  by  Frank  Ward 
O'Malley;  and  two  novels — "The  Happiest  Time  of 
Their  Lives,"  by  Alice  Duer  Miller,  and  "Caste 
Three,"  by  Gertrude  M.  Shields. 


WHERE    HE 


SOULS  of  MEN 


ARE  CAI  LING 


By  LIEUT.  CREDO  HARRIS 

—a  vivid  chapter  from  the 
battle  front  of   France- 
more  strange,  more  pow- 
erful than  fiction. 


All  Bookstores  $1.35  net 


BRITTON    PUBLISHING    COMPANY 


464 


THE    DIAL 


[May  9 


'Gertie  Swartz 

Fanatic  or  Christian? 

By  Helen  R.  Martin 

Author  of  "Those  Fitzenbergera" 

Is  it  Christian  to  spend  money  to 
make  workmen  happy — or  is  it  merely 
fanaticism?  That  is  the  problem  that 
a  Pennsylvania  Dutch  family  has  to 
face  when  the  head  of  the  house  dies. 
It  is  a  problem  that  makes  this  a  most 
entertaining  story  of  contrasting  types 
and  conflicting  wills  against  the  quaint 
background  of  local  speech. 

NET,  $1.40 

Aliens 

By  William  McFee 

Author  of  "Casuals  of  the  Sea" 

The  author  of  the  1916  literary 
event,  "Casuals  of  the  Sea,"  has  re- 
written this  exceptional  study  of  a  sin- 
ister personality.  The  most  interesting 
feature  of  the  book  is  the  central  fig- 
ure, who  never  comes  directly  before 
the  reader  yet  the  effect  of  his  physi- 
cal and  moral,  or  better,  perhaps, 
immoral  influence,  never  escapes  the 
story. 

It  is  an  interesting  commentary  on 
founding   a  family  (in   the   English 
sense).   The  fascination  of  suspense  is 
enriched  by  a  splendid  humor. 
NET,  $1.50 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  CO. 
GARDEN  CITY,  NEW  YORK 


LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS 


[The  following  list,  containing  116  titles,  includes 
books  received  by  THE  DIAL  since  its  last  issue.] 


FICTION. 

The  Threshold  of  Quiet.    By  Daniel  Corkery.     12mo, 

310  pages.     Frederick  A.  Stokes  Co.     $1.50. 
Professor  Latimer's  Progress.     A  Novel  of  Contem- 
poraneous   Adventure.       Illustrated,     12mo,     347 
pages      Henry  Holt  &  Co.     $1.40. 
Drift.    By  Mary  Aldis.    Illustrated,  12mo,  355  pages. 

Duffield  &  Co.     $1.50. 
The  Statue  in  the  Wood.     By  Richard  Pryce.     12mo, 

379  pages.     Houghton  Mifflin  Co.     $1.50. 
Peasant    Tales    of   Russia.      By   V.    I.    Nemirovitch- 
Dantchenko.    Translated   by  Claud  Field.    Illus- 
trated,  12mo,   185   pages.     Robert  M.   McBride   & 
Co.     $1.25. 

The    Secret   of   the   Marnet     How    Sergeant   Fritsch 

Saved    France.      By    Marcel    Berger    and    Maude 

Berger.     12mo,  361  pages.     G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 

$1.50. 

The   High  Romance.     By  Michael  Williams.     12mo, 

350  pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     $1.60. 
Mrs.    Marden's    Ordeal.      By   James   Hay,    Jr.     With 
frontispiece,   12mo,   307  pages.     Little,  Brown  & 
Co.     $1.50. 
Lord  Tony's  Wife.     By  Baroness  Orczy.     12mo,   332 

pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1.35. 
The  Son  Decides.    By  Arthur  Stanwood  Pier.     Illus- 
trated,  12mo,   223    pages.     Houghton  Mifflin   Co. 
$1.35, 
The  Imprisoned   Freeman.     By   Helen    S.   Woodruff. 

12mo,  411  pages.     George  Sully  &  Co.     $1.35. 
Gossamer  to  Steel.    By  Janet  Payne  Bowles.     12mo, 

221  pages.     Dunstan  &  Co.,  New  York.     $1.25. 
The  Thunders  of  Silence.     By  Irvin  S.  Cobb.     Illus- 
trated,   12mo,    61    pages.      George    H.    Doran    Co. 
50  cts. 

The  Panama  Plot.  By  Arthur  B.  Reeve.  With 
frontispiece,  12mo,  326  pages.  Harper  &  Bros. 
$1.40. 

The    Devil    to    Pay.      By    Frances    Nimmo    Greene. 

12mo,  285  pages.    Charles  Scribner's  Sons.    $1.35. 

The   Spy   in  Black.     By   J.    Storer  Clouston.      12mo, 

306  pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1.35. 
The  Wire  Devils.     By   Frank   Packard.      12mo,    318 

pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1.35. 
On   Two   Frontiers.     By   George   T.   Buffum.      Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  375  pages.   Lothrop,  Lee  &  Shepard 
Co.     $1.35. 

Tarzan  and  the  Jewels  of  Opar.  By  Edgar  Rice 
Burroughs.  Illustrated,  12mo,  350  pages.  A.  C. 
McClurg  &  Co.  $1.35. 

The  Diamond  Cross  Mystery.     By  Chester  K.  Steele. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  295  pages.     George  Sully  &  Co. 
$1.25. 
Green    and   Gay.      By    Lee    Holt.      12mo,    313    pages. 

John  Lane  Co.     $1.40. 
His  Job.     By   Horace  Bleackley.      12mo,    310   pages. 

John  Lane  Co.     $1.40. 

Kathleen's  Probation.     By  Joslyn  Gray.     Illustrated, 

12mo,  228  pages.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons.    $1.25. 

Making;  Good  with  Margaret.     By  E.  Ward  Strayer. 

Illustrated,    12mo,    268    pages.      George    Sully    & 

Co.     $1.25. 

It's  Mighty  Strange.     By  James  A.  Duncan.      12mo, 

319  pages.     The  Stratford  Co.     $1.50. 
The  Voice  of  the  Big  Firs.     By  Agnette  Midgarden 
Lohn.    With  frontispiece,  12mo,  428  pages.     Pub- 
lished by  the  author,  Fosston,  Minn. 
Some  Honeymoon.     By  Charles  Everett  Hall.     Illus- 
trated,   12mo,    280    pages.      George    Sully    &    Co. 
$1.25. 

THK  WAR. 

Face  to  Face  with  Kaiserism.  By  James  W.  Gerard. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  380  pages,  George  H.  Doran 
Co.  $2. 

The  Navy  as  a  Fighting  Machine.  By  Rear  Admiral 
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THEY  THE  CRUCIFIED 
AND  COMRADES 

By 
Florence  Tabor  Holt 

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468  THE     DIAL  [May  9,  1918 


"AN  AMERICAN  BRITLING."— New  York  Sun 

PROFESSOR  LATIMER'S  PROGRESS 

Anonymous.    Illustrated,  $1.40  net. 
•> 

The  sentimental  journey  of  an  American  professor  on  whose  soul  the  war  has  come 
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VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  767 


MAY  23,  1918 


CONTENTS 


ARTIST  AND  TRADESMAN Lord  Dunsany 

THE  PUBLIC  LIBRARY  AND  THE  PUBLIC 

NEED  Babette  Deutsch 


Leslie  Nelson  Jennings 
Kenneth  Macgowan  . 
Edward  Shanks    . 

Clara  Shanafelt  . 
Harold  Stearns  . 
Louis  Untermeyer  . 


473 


475 
477 
478 
480 


481 
482 
483 

485 
486 
487 
489 


IN  DEDICATION    .     .     .     Verse     .     . 

A  GORDON  CRAIG  FROM  BROADWAY     . 

OUR  LONDON  LETTER 

DESIRABLE  RESIDENTIAL  NEIGHBOR- 
HOOD   Verse  .  . 

LA  PEUR  DE  LA  VIE 

A  NOVELIST  TURNED  PROPHET     .     . 

THE  RICH  STOREHOUSE  OF  CROCE'S 

THOUGHT /.  E.  Spingarn  .  . 

OUR  ENEMY  SPEAKS Randolph  Bourne 

THE  "SAGE  AND  SERIOUS"  POET     .     .     R.  E.  Neil  Dodge    . 

MAY  SINCLAIR,  SENTIMENTALIST     .     .     Herbert  J.  Seligmann 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 490 

The  Virgin  Islands  of  the  United  States  of  America. — The  Language  of  Color. — 
Furniture  of  the  Olden  Time. — Ninety-Six  Hours'  Leave. — Two  Summers  in  the 
Ice  Wilds  of  Eastern  Karakoram. — A  Cycle  of  Sonnets. — Sonnets,  and  Other 
Lyrics. — The  Psychology  of  the  Future. — A  Year  of  Costa  Rican  Natural  History. 
— Hugo  Grotius. — Over  Here. — Forecasting  the  Yield  and  the  Price  of  Cotton. — 
South-Eastern  Europe. — On  the  Headwaters  of  the  Peace  River. — A  Soldier's 
Memories. 

CASUAL  COMMENT 496 

BRIEFER  MENTION 498 

COMMUNICATION 500 

The   Oxford   Method    in   English   Instruction. 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 501 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS    .     .  ,  503 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


Contributing  Editors 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 


CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  KENNETH  MACGOWAN 

ROBERT  DELL  HENRY  B.  FULLER  CLARENCE  BRITTEN 

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Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
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472 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23,  1918 


Mary    S.    Watts'  New    Novel 

(Third  Edition  Now  Ready) 

THE  BOARDMAN  FAMILY 


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IN  THE  FOURTH  YEAR 

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Ready  in  June 

"THE  DARK  PEOPLE": 
RUSSIA'S  CRISIS 

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III.    Second  Edition.    $1.50 

CO-OPERATION :  THE  HOPE 
OF  THE  CONSUMER 

By  Emerson  P.  Harris 

The  Failure  of  Middlemanism,  Reasons  and  the 
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WHAT  IS  NATIONAL  HONOR  ? 

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jfortnirrfjtlp  Journal  of  Criticism  and  SDiscussion  of  Hitrraturc  and 


Artist  and  Tradesman 


Thank  you  very  much  for  your  kind 
letter  and  please  thank  the  Dunsany 
Dramatic  Circle  from  me:  tell  them  I 
am  most  grateful  to  them  for  their  appre- 
ciation, a  thing  denied  to  so  many  poets 
during  their  lifetime.  It  is  indeed  most 
generous  of  them,  for  there  is  no  law  to 
compel  any  one  to  pay  the  simple  debt  of 
appreciation,  if  it  is  indeed  due,  and  almost 
immemorial  custom  would  support  them  in 
not  paying  it — yet.  When  a  poet  is  dead 
his  death  certificate  is  regarded  as  a  kind 
of  invoice,  and  people  say,  "Now  we  must 
give  him  the  thanks  that  we  owe  him." 
Even  your  letter  too  might  well  have  come 
at  such  a  time,  for  it  was  written  on  the 
day  on  which  I  had  long  expected  to  go  to 
the  front,  in  which  I  was  disappointed 
only  at  the  last  moment. 

Well,  you  ask  me  for  "advice  to  aspir- 
ing playwrights" ;  so  I  will  try  to  do  as  you 
please  out  of  common  gratitude,  although 
I  would  sooner  not,  for  it  is  presumptuous 
of  me  to  offer  advice  and  really  I  know 
nothing  of  the  stage.  I  know  that  my 
dreams  have  got  on  to  the  stage,  but  that 
is  not  because  I  knew  anything  of  its  rules 
but  because  the  march  of  dreams  is  irre- 
sistible, the  mightiest  things  on  earth. 

Now  there  are  two  kinds  of  playwrights 
(indeed  all  writers  are  divided  into  two 
kinds,  quite  distinct) — tradesmen  and 
artists. 

The  first  are  the  more  numerous,  the 
more  rich;  they  are  the  rulers  of  the  time. 
(I  mean  by  tradesmen  the  men  whose  in- 
spiration is  money.)  To  them  I  would 
say,  "Try  painting  pieces  of  lead  yellow 
and  selling  them  in  the  street  as  gold 
bricks."  Money  can  be  made  that  way 
and  it  is  money  they  need.  I  know  it  is  an 
old  trick,  but  no  older  nor  more  trans- 
parent than  theirs;  above  all  it  is  more 
honest  to  sell  lead  for  gold  than  to  sell 
stale  phrases  as  thought,  and  false  con- 


ventions as  emotion.  They  are  the  men 
whose  disinterested  purpose  is  to  "provide 
what  the  public  wants,"  they  always  pla- 
giarize the  play  that  pleased  the  basest 
part  of  the  mind  of  the  greatest  number 
last  year.  But  because  the  public  ate 
oranges  in  the  gutter  last  night,  it  does 
not  want  the  peel  (with  a  few  chemicals 
added)  put  before  it  as  marmalade  for- 
ever. 

But  the  artists  are  the  rulers  of  the 
generations.  They  are  the  only  people  to 
whom  it  is  worth  giving  advice,  and  the 
only  people  who  don't  need  it.  So  what 
can  I  say  to  them?  Merely  idle  thoughts 
as  they  run  through  my  mind. 

A  play  is  made  of  sincerity,  with  that, 
kink  in  its  tail  that  we  call  the  dramatic, 
and  style.  One  can  say  nothing  of  style 
except  that  a  man's  own  style  is  the  only 
one  for  him  to  write  in;  it  grows  with  him 
and  changes  with  him  and  is  a  part  of  him. 
One  can't  write  in  another  man's  style — 
that  is  his  job :  it's  like  trying  to  do  your 
own  plumbing,  which  may  annoy  the 
plumber  and  in  any  case  isn't  a  bit  like 
plumbing  when  it  is  done.  Style  is  the 
expression  of  your  own  sincerity.  There 
is  not  one  Truth  in  the  world,  nor  one 
world.  In  one  drop  of  water  there  are 
many  heavens  reflected,  according  to  where 
you  stand  and  look  at  it.  In  the  same  way 
many  truths  shine  on  the  human  mind  and 
are  reflected  back  by  it.  One  man  says, 
"Russia  is  like  this";  another  says,  "It  is 
like  that" ;  and  another  says,  "It  is  like 
another  thing" — all  speaking  the  truth  as 
they've  seen  it.  And  the  fool  writes  a 
book  called  "Russia  as  it  Really  Is,"  think- 

*  A  letter  written  to  the  Dunsany  Dramatic  Circle  in 
response  to  a  request  for  advice  to  "aspiring  playwrights." 
In  writing  THE  DIAL,  granting  permission  to  publish  the 
letter  (a  permission  previously  granted  by  its  owner),  Lord 
Dunsany  explained  the  tardiness  of  his  reply  as  follows:  "I 
was  in  the  Hindenburg  Line  at  the  time  and  the  place  was 
not  propitious  to  the  mood  of  letter-writing,  which  comes 
of  leisure ;  and  we  occupied  our  leisure  there  in  eating,  sleep- 
ing, and  discussing  subjects  like  the  creation  of  the  world 
and  modern  politicians  and  how  to  keep  flies  out  of  jam." 


474 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


ing  there  can  be  only  one  manifestation  of 
one  thing  to  all  the  world  forever. 

Sincerity  is  a  great  force  in  all  work 
and  is  too  great  a  light  to  be  hidden  under 
any  bushel.  (I  get  near  truisms  now.) 
All  men  have  sincerity  and  it  flashes  forth 
from  their  work.  The  man  that  tries  to 
cheat  you  on  the  race  course  and  the  man 
that  writes  advertisements  of  poisonous 
drugs  have  sincerity:  their  sincere  purpose 
is  to  get  your  money,  and  this  purpose  is 
seen  in  their  style  just  as  the  same  purpose 
is  seen  in  the  tradesman's  play,  with  his  eye 
all  the  while  on  the  box-office. 

The  message  of  most  modern  plays  is 
"Give  Me  Money."  But  the  message  of 
a  work  of  art  is  too  complex  to  be  put 
into  a  few  words  or  into  a  few  sentences, 
or  into  words  any  shorter  than  the  length 
of  the  work  itself  even  if  it  is  an  epic. 
There  are  millions  who  would  say  of  Ham- 
let, "What  is  it  all  about?"  and  expect  to 
be  told  in  half  a  minute  what  it  took 
Shakespeare  himself  many  months  to 
write. 

I  am  not  my  own  master  till  this  war 
is  won,  and  being  often  interrupted  I  find 
it  difficult  to  write  a  consecutive  letter. 
But  the  gist  of  my  impertinence,  for  it  is 
impertinent  to  offer  advice  to  artists,  is 
sincerity  of  purpose  and  the  certainty  that 
the  worker's  purpose  is  revealed  in  every 
work.  I  mean  let  them  not  call  grass 
purple  if  they  think  it  green — in  order  to 
appear  daringly  original;  or  green  if  they 
think  it  purple — in  order  to  please  the 
public  who  believe  it  to  be  green.  An 
artist  in  fact  must  be  true  to  his  own 
inspiration — 

And  it  must  follow  as  the  night  the  day 
Thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any  man. 

I  think  you  can  only  have  seen  my  "Five 
Plays"  (Kennerley).  Of  these  "The 
Glittering  Gate"  is  without  beauty,  being 
written  in  cockney  dialect;  "The  Lost  Silk 
Hat"  is  frivolous;  and  "King  Argimenes," 
though  it  has  a  pleasant  beginning — a 
king  in  rags  gnawing  a  bone — rather  falls 
away  from  that  inspiration  and  does  not 
climb  up  as  it  should  to  a  great  climax, 
or  in  stage  parlance  "a  good  curtain."  Yet 
there  are  certainly  things  in  it  I  like  myself, 
such  as  "the  tear-song,  the  chaunt  of  the 


low  born"  (the  words  have  a  pleasant 
sound  to  me  as  I  recall  them)  and  "who- 
ever be  thy  gods,  whether  they  punish 
thee  or  whether  they  bless  thee."  Yes, 
that  is  in  a  new  and  unknown  country  right 
enough  where  people  speak  like  that,  and 
it  is  in  an  unknown  country  that  I  laid 
the  play.  But  the  construction  is  bad, 
though  the  atmosphere  is  all  right.  It  was 
a  very  early  play  and  I  had  the  inspiration 
of  a  king  sitting  on  the  ground  in  rags  eat- 
ing his  bone,  and  built  the  play  on  that, 
which  is  rather  like  building  a  roof  and  the 
house  afterwards — but  you  do  in  America, 
don't  you?  Then  there  is  "The  Golden 
Doom,"  rather  slight  I  fear;  but  there  cer- 
tainly is  a  truth  in  that,  the  very  little  hav- 
ing its  share  in  events  as  much  as  the  very 
great,  as  an  inch  of  a  rope  is  as  important 
as  a  mile  of  it.  I  liked  the  start  of  that  play, 
I  remember — the  feeling  of  oppression,  al- 
most of  doom,  and  the  sentry  sighing,  "I 
would  that  I  were  swimming  down  the 
Gyshon,  on  the  cool  side,  under  the  fruit- 
trees."  But  there  is  only  one  of  the  five 
with  which  I  am  content.  I  love  the  "Gods 
of  the  Mountain."  "And  the  doom  found 
him  on  the  hills  at  evening" — I  remember 
how  that  pleased  me,  and  the  despairing 
cry  "Rock  should  not  walk  in  the  evening." 

But  I  have  two  plays  better  than  that, 
a  four-act  tragedy  and  a  rather  short  three- 
act  one;  and  a  one-act  play  about  equal  to 
it — all  unacted  yet  and  unprinted;  and  a 
two-act  play  called  "The  Tents  of  the 
Arabs"  ("Plays  of  Gods  and  Men." 
Luce),  perhaps  a  little  more  poetical  than 
dramatic,  which  was  acted  in  Paris  and 
Manchester;  and  a  three-act  comedy;  and 
another  one-act  play;  besides  two  one-act 
plays  that  I  don't  care  for  and  don't  wish 
staged. 

Please  bow  for  me  to  the  Circle  that 
has  honored  me  and  say  that  if  ever  their 
fancies  have  found  pleasure  in  playing  by 
strange  seas  to  which  I  have  led  them  for 
a  moment,  your  letter  has  well  repaid  me. 

Yours,  and  theirs,  gratefully, 


DUNSANY. 


Ebrington  Barracks 

Londonderry 

Ireland. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


475 


The  Public  Library  and  the  Public  Need 


Greece  fell  because  she  did  not  know 
the  difference  between  a  museum  and  a 
bank.  This  illuminating  diagnosis  of  Pro- 
fessor Zimmern's  applies  not  merely  to 
the  ancient  world;  it  also  has  a  significance 
for  contemporary  America.  All  over  the 
country  are  store-houses  of  information, 
but  these  public  libraries  are  in  the  nature 
of  the  Greek  "liturgy,"  monuments  of 
local  interest.  In  hardly  any  sense  are 
they  national  banks  of  thought.  For 
the  gold  standard  of  intellectual  life 
is  scientific  knowledge,  and  its  currency 
should  be  available  not  merely  to  the  stu- 
dent preparing  his  thesis  in  solitary  en- 
thusiasm, but  likewise  to  the  citizen 
working  for  a  healthy  government,  to  the 
business  man  who  wants  knowledge  of 
other  men's  experience,  to  that  too  large 
majority  of  our  population  which  has  not 
had  any  organized  learning  since  the 
meagre  offering  of  the  public  schools. 
Who  will  maintain  that  our  libraries  now 
successfully  perform  all  of  these  functions? 

There  are,  of  course,  isolated  instances 
of  libraries  which  accomplish  great  things. 
Two  typical  examples  are  the  Business 
Branch  of  the  Newark  Public  Library, 
established  by  John  Cotton  Dana  over  ten 
years  ago,  and  the  Carnegie  Library  of 
Pittsburgh,  which  is  said  by  one  of  its 
former  workers  to  be  "twenty  years  ahead 
of  its  public." 

The  Newark  Public  Library  has  had 
the  advantage  of  a  gradual  growth  that 
other  libraries,  such  as  the  one  in  New 
York,  which  is  the  largest  in  the  country, 
have  lacked.  The  Newark  library,  de- 
veloping with  its  city,  has  been  able  to 
make  itself  an  integral  part  of  civic  life. 
It  circulates  not  merely  books  but  pictures 
and  exhibits  of  all  sorts,  to  the  great  bene- 
fit of  the  schools.  These  loan  collections 
are  distinct  from  the  exhibitions  continually 
maintained  for  the  visiting  public.  But  it 
is  the  Business  Branch  that  is  of  signal 
importance.  This  is  located  in  the  very 
core  of  the  business  district.  Within  a 
radius  of  three  blocks  are  nearly  all  the 
offices  of  this  city  of  400,000.  As  the 
library  meets  the  needs  of  its  clientele  in 


point  of  location,  so  it  answers  them  in 
the  arrangement  of  its  interior  and  in  the 
complete  flexibility  of  its  system.  It  was 
started  on  the  assumption  that  a  vital  need 
of  business  is  access  to  unbound  literature 
of  no  more  than  immediate  value.  The 
twelve  years  of  its  history  have  meant  the 
rich  accumulation  of  material  of  this 
nature:  directories,  domestic  and  foreign, 
of  localities,  and  of  trades  and  professions ; 
reports  of  the  New  York  Stock  Exchange 
and  of  transactions  in  local  securities; 
maps  of  all  sizes  and  descriptions — rural 
delivery  maps,  soil  maps,  local  and  general 
atlases — books  and  periodicals  dealing 
with  business  administration;  and  techni- 
cal books  and  journals  accessible  to  the 
Branch  through  two  daily  deliveries  from 
the  Technical  Department  of  the  Main 
Library.  The  large  maps  are  arranged 
on  labeled  shade  rollers;  the  smaller  ones1 
in  a  vertical  file,  so  that  they  are  as  con- 
venient as  cards  in  a  catalogue.  Pam- 
phlets crowd  the  open  shelves.  These  are 
classified  by  strips  of  colored  paper,  which 
indicate  each  leaflet's  alphabetical  and  topi- 
cal place.  At  the  information  desk  an 
attendant  is  ready  to  give  assistance  either 
in  the  Branch  itself  or  by  telephone.  From 
its  alluring  show-window  to  the  small  room 
holding  its  free  typewriter,  the  Branch  pre- 
sents a  serviceable  attraction  to  the  busi- 
ness men  of  this  growing  city.  It  repre- 
sents to  them  what  the  consulting  engineer 
is  to  a  huge  plant,  or  a  consulting  physi- 
cian to  a  troubled  practitioner.  Last  year 
the  cost  of  the  Branch  was  only  four  per 
cent  of  the  total  expenditure,  but  its  value 
to  its  clientele  is  probably  inestimable. 

Similarly,  the  Carnegie  Library  of  Pitts- 
burgh attempts  to  make  itself  an  aggres- 
sive social  force.  It  does  not  limit  itself 
to  any  single  group  in  the  community,  but 
spreads  a  network  over  the  city — in  fac: 
tories,  schools,  homes,  and  civic  centres. 
Altogether  it  has  over  two  hundred  agen- 
cies, only  eight  of  which  are  conventional 
branch  libraries.  Cooperation  between  the 
schools  and  the  library  is  probably  closer 
in  Pittsburgh  than  in  any  other  city  of  its 
size.  Not  merely  are  the  children  taught 


476 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


to  use  the  library,  but  the  library  provides 
college  classes,  study  groups,  and  clubs 
with  elaborate  reference  material,  even  to 
the  extent  of  printed  bibliographies.  In 
a  community  largely  immigrant,  hetero- 
geneous, and  diffident,  it  is  an  educative 
instrumentality  of  the  first  order. 

Yet  such  instrumentalities  are  shining 
exceptions.  For  too  long  a  period  the 
library,  like  a  sinking  ship,  has  provided 
for  women  and  children  first.  Unless  ade- 
quate steps  are  taken,  the  library  will  ful- 
fill the  analogy  and  go  down.  Indifference 
to  its  potentialities  of  service  to  students 
and  business  men  is  largely  due  to  the 
lack  of  coordination.  There  is  neither 
coordination  between  the  libraries  in  dif- 
ferent cities,  nor  between  the  libraries  and 
the  public,  and  occasionally  it  is  lacking 
within  a  given  library  itself.  The  result  is 
general  dissatisfaction,  and  a  steady  drain 
of  its  best  workers  into  other  professions, 
with  a  mortal  effect  upon  the  institution. 

Typical  of  the  general  chaos  is  the  fact 
that  each  library  has  not  merely  its  own 
system  of  administration,  but  an  employ- 
ment system  peculiar  to  itself.  This  varies 
from  the  libraries  where  the  Director  ad- 
ministers the  finances  and  does  the  hiring 
and  firing  as  well,  to  those  which  chafe 
under  civil  service.  In  some  cases  the 
apprenticeship  system  is  in  effect,  which 
means  that  the  librarian  does  the  work  of 
the  job  above  and  receives  the  salary  of 
the  job  below.  Frequently  library  school 
graduates  are  preferred  for  promotion  to 
librarians  in  good  standing  who  have  no 
library  school  diploma.  This  confusion  is 
intensified  by  the  lack  of  standard  training. 

Adelaide  R.  Hasse,  Chief  of  the  Eco- 
nomics Division  of  the  New  York  Public 
Library,  declares:  "A  corporation  main- 
tained for  the  sole  purpose  of  doing  busi- 
ness directly  with  the  public  is  confined  in 
the  selection  of  its  personnel  largely  to 
schools  whose  curriculum  is  confessedly 
weakest  in  exactly  those  subjects  most 
vitally  required  by  the  corporation."  The 
average  librarian  is  schooled  to  be  a  com- 
bination filing-clerk  and  social  uplifter. 
A  library  cannot  be  run  without  efficient 
filing-clerks.  The  circulation  department 
can  doubtless  be  run  best  by  people  who 
make  efficient  sociologists.  Neither  of 


these  types  of  workers,  however,  is  desir- 
able in  the  reference  departments.  There 
the  need  is  for  men  as  well  as  women 
(ability  as  a  librarian  has  not  yet  been 
proven  a  sex-link  characteristic)  who  are 
capable  of  scholarly  research  and  sym- 
pathetic collaboration.  There  are  a  few 
such  people  in  the  library  today,  but  they 
are  either  underpaid  or  undervalued,  and 
sometimes  both. 

Indeed,  the  salary  question  is  a  fair 
indication  of  the  difficulty  faced  by  the 
library  today.  The  circle  is  a  vicious  one : 
the  library  cannot  function  properly  until 
the  public  opens  the  purse-strings;  the 
public  will  not  grant  money  until  it  recog- 
nizes the  library  as  a  necessity.  It  is 
widely  acknowledged  that  librarians  are 
generally  unable  to  live  upon  their  salaries 
without  substantial  aid  from  outside 
sources.  Library  school  graduates  are 
probably  as  highly  paid  as  any  in  the  pro- 
fession. The  University  of  Illinois  Li- 
brary School  estimates  that  the  Salary  of 
its  average  woman  graduate  is  $1175  a 
year,  according  to  answers  to  a  question- 
naire sent  out  to  the  graduates  of  1916. 
Pratt  statistics  for  1917  declare  that  there 
are  more  graduates  earning  $1200  than 
any  other  single  figure,  and  there  are  as 
many  earning  only  $900  as  are  earning 
$1500.  The  average  salaries  paid  in 
1917  in  the  Circulation  Department  of  the 
New  York  Public  Library  range  from  the 
salary  of  the  Junior  Assistant  at  $581  to 
that  of  the  Branch  Librarian  at  $1283. 
The  Director  of  one  of  the  foremost 
libraries  in  the  country  has  written:  "I 
shall  .  .  .  have  to  confess  that  I  am 
ashamed  of  the  salaries  paid -at  this  insti- 
tution, and  as  a  matter  of  pride  do  not 
wish  to  call  attention  to  the  present  un- 
satisfactory conditions  of  employment.  I 
hope  and  am  doing  my  best  to  improve 
matters  as  rapidly  as  possible."  In  fact 
the  problem  became  so  acute  that  last 
March  saw  the  initiation  of  the  Library 
Employees'  Union,  with  the  object  of 
standardizing  jobs  and  salaries  and  en- 
couraging promotion  from  the  ranks  (that 
is,  from  among  librarians  not  necessarily 
graduated  from  the  library  school) .  Many 
librarians  conceive  this  affiliation  with  the 
A.  F.  of  L.  as  a  stain  upon  the  dignity  of 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


477 


their  profession.  But  when  many  others 
in  the  field  are  doing  so-called  "practice" 
work  at  the  wage  of  a  factory  hand  or  a 
department-store  clerk,  it  is  difficult  to 
view  this  underpaid  and  unstandardized 
job  as  a  profession  at  all. 

Standardization  may  eventually  prove 
to  be  the  solution  of  many  of  the  problems 
which  both  the  public  and  the  library  have 
to  face.  In  a  statement  made  before  the 
American  Library  Association  in  June, 
1917  its  committee  declared  that  standard- 
ization is  the  necessary  preliminary  to 
certification,  which  librarians  desire  as  the 
means  of  ranking  them  on  an  equal  plane 
with  teachers  as  regards  service  and  pay. 
Libraries  could  be  standardized  with 
respect  to  income,  population  served,  and 
the  lines  of  work  undertaken.  Library 
service  could  be  standardized  by  the  intro- 
duction of  at  least  a  reasonable  uniformity 
of  titles,  a  statement  of  duties,  regulated 
hours  of  service,  salaries  and  pensions, 
promotion  schedules,  efficiency  records,  and 
certification.  The  arguments  for  certifi- 
cation are,  first  of  all,  the  arguments  for 
economy.  Secondly,  it  would  prevent  the 
continuance  of  the  spoils  system,  of  which 
Boston  has  recently  shown  a  glaring  ex- 
ample. By  ranking  the  librarian's  work  with 
that  of  the  doctor  and  the  lawyer  it  would 
protect  both  the  profession  and  the  public. 
Moreover  it  would  prevent  an  extended 
application  of  civil  service  to  libraries,  and 
yet  permit  a  pension  system  from  public 


funds.  Finally,  certification  would  imply 
the  library's  definite  relation  to  the  other 
educational  agencies  of  the  state.  The 
two  strongest  arguments  against  it  are  that 
it  would  injure  library  extension,  and  that 
it  would  not  be  flexible  enough  to  meet 
local  requirements.  But  these  seem  to  be 
outweighed  by  the  evidence  in  its  favor. 
And  in  working  out  the  details  these  prob- 
lems would  get  due  consideration. 

Standardization  means  a  long  step 
toward  complete  governmental  control  of 
the  library.  In  a  democracy  such  a  con- 
trol presents  no  terrors  to  those  who  set 
high  value  on  the  independent  intellectual 
life.  In  its  purpose  the  library  is  al- 
ready a  public  institution;  no  one  questions 
that  it  ought  to  come  into  more  popu- 
lar use.  And  in  the  long  run,  of  course, 
popular  use  will  mean  popular  control.  In 
fact  a  nationalized  library  would  function 
not  very  differently  from  a  national  bank. 
It  would  mean  a  federal  reserve  of  infor- 
mation, on  which  each  locality  could  draw 
as  need  dictated.  Neither  the  militant 
concern  of  the  librarians  nor  the  efforts 
of  library  administrators,  however,  can 
achieve  this  end  without  active  popular 
interest.  The  public  must  appreciate  the 
library  as  its  own  instrument — not  a  liter- 
ary museum,  but  a  bank  where  intellectual 
currency  may  be  "lent,  borrowed,  issued, 
and  cared  for,"  to  promote  social  inter- 
course and  accomplishment. 

BABETTE  DEUTSCH. 


In  Dedication 


It  is  well  that  we  have  come  to  question  these 

Lip-protestations,  and  have  grown  beyond 
The  need  of  crying  our  uncertainties 

Down  every  quiet  hour.     There  is  a  bond 
In  these  near  moments  of  our  voicelessness. 

If  all  were  said,  what  would  there  then  remain 
To  fill  a  winter's  evening,  or  confess 

In  subtle  ways  that  make  all  meanings  plain? 

We  have  stood  together  at  the  little  door 
And  looked  across  the  threshold  into  clear 

Amazing  spaces  where  the  four  winds  are. 
What  can  we  ask  of  understanding  more! 
Our  silences  are  such  as  lovers  hear — 

Like  music  heard  through  portals  left  ajar. 

LESLIE  NELSON  JENNINGS. 


478 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


A  Gordon  Craig  from  Broadway 


Perhaps  you  expect  such  things  of  the 
German  theatre.  The  fact  remains  that, 
outside  Germany,  it  has  not  been  the  suc- 
cessful commercial  managers  of  Europe, 
but  theorists  like  Appia  and  Craig,  who 
have  attempted  to  set  down  practical,  revo- 
lutionary, and  far  reaching  principles  of 
stage  production.  But  now  America  has 
at  last  contributed  its  volume  of  original 
theory,  and  the  author  turns  out  to  be  a 
man  who  like  Fuchs,  author  of  "Die 
Revolution  des  Theatres,"  is  an  actual 
worker  in  the  actual  theatre  and  like 
Hagemann,  author  of  "Die  Regie,"  an 
actual  director  and  producer.  More  than 
that,  our  American  theorist  happens  to  be 
a  successful  Broadway  manager.  He  is 
also  something  else.  For  his  name  is  Ar- 
thur Hopkins. 

His  book,  "How's  Your  Second  Act?" 
(Philip  Goodman,  New  York),  is  danger- 
ous. It  demolishes  any  theatregoer's 
interest  in  the  99-95/100  per  cent,  pure  rot 
which  passes  for  the  art  of  production  in 
America.  It  also  leaves  a  critic  in  peril 
of  being  absurdly  ecstatic.  Here  is  a 
little  book — of  about  seven  thousand 
words — with  all  the  larger  laws  of  the 
theatre  written  plain.  Here  is  a  complete 
aesthetic  theory  set  down  by  a  practical 
Broadway  manager  in  the  words  of  a 
Claire  Briggs  "regular  fellow."  This 
Broadway  manager  recognizes  the  import- 
ance of  the  economic  organization  of  the 
theatre  and  the  criminal  power  for  evil  in 
our  theatrical  system.  He  stands  for  syn- 
thetic, unified  production — everything  in 
one  key — and  tells  us  how  to  get  it,  in 
fact  how  he  has  got  it.  More  than 
that,  he  understands  modern  scientific 
psychology  well  enough  to  recognize  the 
application  of  Freudian  theories  of  the 
unconscious  to  the  theatre;  to  grasp  why 
the  truth  of  "thought  through  emotion" 
is  nowhere  more  important  that  in  the 
playhouse.  This  is,  roughly,  the  nature 
and  content  of  "How's  Your  Second  Act?" 

Here — extracted  from  Mr.  Hopkins's 
chapter  on  what  he  calls  "unconscious  pro- 
jection"— is  the  essence  of  America's  first 
contribution  to  theatrical  theory: 


It  has  frequently  been  said  of  my  productions, 
that  they  conveyed  a  certain  sustained  illusion  that 
seemed  not  to  be  of  the  theatre  .  .  .  Complete 
illusion  has  to  do  entirely  with  the  unconscious 
mind.  .  .  The  conscious  mind  should  play  no 
part.  The  theatre  is  always  seeking  unanimous 
reaction.  It  is  palpably  evident  that  unanimous 
reaction  from  conscious  minds  is  practically  impos- 
sible. Seat  a  dozen  people  in  a  room,  present  any 
problem  which  you  ask  them  consciously  to  solve, 
and  you  will  get  nearly  as  many  different  reactions 
as  there  are  people;  but  place  five  thousand  people 
in  a  room  and  strike  some  note  or  appeal  that  is 
associated  with  an  unconscious  idea  common  to  all 
of  them,  and  you  will  get  a  practically  unanimous 
reaction.  In  the  theatre  I  do  not  want  the  emotion 
that  rises  out  of  thought,  but  the  thought  that 
rises  out  of  emotion.  The  emotional  reaction  must 
be  secured  first. 

The  problem  now  arises:  "How  can  we  in  the 
theatre  confine  ourselves  to  the  unconscious  mind?" 
The  hypnotist  has  supplied  us  with  the  answer: 
"Still  the  conscious  mind."  The  hypnotist's  first 
effort  is  to  render  inoperative  the  conscious  mind 
of  the  subject.  With  that  out  of  the  way  he  can 
direct  his  commands  to  an  undistracted  unconscious 
mind  and  get  definite  reactions.  The  subject  has 
no  opportunity  to  think  about  it. 

In  the  theatre  we  can  secure  a  similar  result 
by  giving  the  audience  no  reason  to  think  about  it, 
by  presenting  every  phase  so  unobtrusively,  so  free 
from  confusing  gesture,  movement,  and  emphasis, 
that  all  passing  action  seems  inevitable,  so  that  we 
are  never  challenged  or  consciously  asked  why.  .  . 

This  method  entails  sweeping  readjustments.  To 
begin  with,  author,  director,  scene  designer,  and 
actor  must  become  completely  the  servants  of  the 
play.  Each  must  resist  every  temptation  to  score 
personally.  .  .  It  must  all  be  inevitable,  im- 
personal, and  untrammelled.  It  requires  a  com. 
plete  surrender  of  selfishness.  In  fact,  it  demands 
of  everyone  the  honest  rigidity  of  the  true  artist, 
who  will  stoop  to  nothing  because  it  is  effective 
or  conspicuous  or  because  "it  goes." 

It  is  the  opposite  of  all  that  has  become  tradi- 
tional in  the  theatre. 

It  is  rather  a  pity  Mr.  Hopkins  couldn't 
have  given  up  one  of  his  productions  this 
season — "The  Rescuing  Angel,"  Billie 
Burke's  vehicle,  for  choice — and  have 
built  up  his  book  to  the  regulation  tome 
with  a  thorough  description  and  analysis 
of  the  various  means  he  has  employed  in 
his  productions  to  obtain  what  he  calls 
"unconscious  projection."  It  would  have 
been  much  more  interesting  to  have  des- 
cription of  the  special  low  couches  and 
chairs  and  stools  which  Mr.  Hopkins  and 
Mr.  Robert  E.  Jones  have  devised  for  use 
close  to  the  footlights  than  to  see  Billie 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


479 


Burke  sitting  on  them.  This  doubtless 
seems  a  small  matter,  but  out  of  such 
ingenuity  springs  a  genuinely  natural  and 
yet  well  pointed  movement  of  the  players. 
In  a  Hopkins  production  there  are  a  score 
of  such  elements  that  deserve  description 
and  analysis;  the  playgoer  would  benefit — 
and  the  rival  producer — and  the  playgoer 
again.  Three  quarters  of  our  progress  in 
production  has  been  individual  experimen- 
tation and  selection;  three  sixteenths  has 
been  learned  by  personal  contact.  A  great, 
great  deal  of  this  waste  labor  could  be 
saved  by  intelligent  and  open  discussion. 

Hopkins  himself,  even  at  this  stage  of 
his  progress,  could  learn  much  by  it.  While 
he  described  and  explained  the  system  of 
shallow  and  carefully  balanced  settings 
by  which  he  secures  a  certain  repose  essen- 
tial to  the  cultivation  of  the  unconscious, 
he  might  come  upon  a  realization  of  the 
fact  that  consciousness  of  this  bare  balance 
may  distract  a  certain  part  of  his  audience 
unless  the  design  has  somewhere  in  it  one 
unsymmetrical  touch  so  subtly  placed  as  to 
lull  that  small  minority  without  disturbing 
the  rest. 

If  he  went  further  into  the  acting  prob- 
lems than  such  excellent  statements  as 
uThe  true  test  of  a  performance  is  the  ease 
with  which  it  is  accomplished,"  he  might 
note  that  an  actor  may  accomplish  his  ef- 
fect with  ease  and  sureness — with  the  ease 
and  sureness,  for  instance,  of  Lionel  Atwill 
in  Mr.  Hopkins's  own  productions  of  "The 
Wild  Duck"  and  "Hedda  Gabler"— and 
yet  accomplish  an  effect  quite  alien  to  the 
part  he  plays.  There  have  been  some 
striking  things  about  Mr.  Hopkins's  spring 
productions  of  Ibsen  with  Mme.  Nazi- 
mova :  the  actress's  creation  of  Hedwig, 
the  etched  quality  of  the  figures  in  "The 
Wild  Duck,"  and  the  strikingly  exotic  qual- 
ity of  everything  in  "Hedda  Gabler."  You 
must  admit  these  things  while  you  criticize 
the  basically  wrong  conceptions  of  Hial- 
mar  and  Gregers  in  "The  Wild  Duck"  and 
of  Tesman  in  "Hedda."  And  while  you 
abuse  Mr.  Hopkins  for  allowing  any 
exigency  on  earth  to  make  him  exhibit  the 
horrible  old-fashioned,  weak,  moulding- 
painted  setting  which  struck  the  wrong 
note  at  the  'very  start  of  "The  Wild 
Duck,"  and  while  you  point  out  that  a 
genuine,  middle-class,  small-town  "Hedda" 


— for  once — might  be  really  illuminating, 
you  must  recognize  the  beautiful,  unreal, 
and  grotesquely  entertaining  flavor  of  this 
"Hedda,"  keyed  to  Nazimova's  peculiar 
conception  of  the  leading  part.  You  must 
recognize  the  thrill  which  Hopkins  and 
Jones  threw  into  the  expected  and  dis- 
counted suicide  by  having  Hedda,  after  she 
had  closed  the  curtains  behind  her,  sud- 
denly reappear  framed  against  the  grave- 
black  inner  side  of  those  hangings,  visible 
for  the  first  time  as  she  held  them  back. 

But  you  must  recognize  just  as  surely 
the  sin  of  Hopkins  in  letting  an  actor  like 
Lionel  Atwill,  skilled  technically  as  he  is, 
play  his  parts  each  night  more  and  more 
for  the  laughter  and  applause  that  were 
in  them.  Atwill's  performance,  described 
by  Hopkins  himself,  would  make  an  excel- 
lent addition  to  the  producer's  statement: 
"It  is  quite  essential  for  the  reaction  that  I 
seek  that  we  never  do  anything  for  the 
benefit  of  the  audience." 

If  Hopkins  wrote  such  a  technical  text- 
book, he  could  put  in  a  score  more  of  im- 
portant things — important  to  himself  as 
much  as  to  the  next  producer.  He  might 
describe  his  mellow,  sculpturesque  over- 
head lighting  and  yet  reflect  on  the  dis- 
turbing fact  that,  beautiful  as  it  is,  it  strikes 
you  as  beautifully  unnatural  unless  some 
grand  parlor  or  hotel  or  bar  supplies  an 
excuse  for  "indirect"  chandeliers  high 
above  as  a  supposititious  source  of  the 
light.  With  the  little  table  lamp  of  "The 
Wild  Duck"  and  white  reflecting  walls,  this 
lighting  played  havoc  with  the  illusion  of 
the  various  times  of  day  and  weather 
called  for  in  the  play. 

But  such  a  book  would  include  too 
descriptions  of  unapproachable  settings 
like  those  schemed  out  by  Hopkins  and 
Jones  for  "The  Devil's  Garden,"  and  the 
hotel  corridor  of  "Good  Gracious  Anna- 
belle."  It  would  picture  a  great  many 
perfect  ensembles  from  the  days  of  the 
now  forgotten  "Steve,"  in  which  Arnold 
Daly  appeared,  to  the  quite  as  much  for- 
gotten "Deluge"  of  last  fall.  It  would 
form  a  record  of  work  unique  in  our  com- 
mercial theatre.  But,  in  the  last  analysis, 
it  could  only  point  and  illumine  the  unique 
and  thoughtful  essence  of  Hopkins's  little 

KENNETH  MACGOWAN. 


480 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


Our  London  Letter 


I  do  wish  that  literary  persons — including 
professors,  critics,  publishers,  and  similar  rabble — 
could  be  induced  to  admit  that  Shakespeare  is 
a  poet  and  to  live  up  to  their  admission.  When 
I  want  to  read  Flecker  or  Brooke  or  Housman 
or  even  Swinburne  or  Tennyson,  I  can  read 
them  in  pleasantly  bound  and  printed  volumes 
of  a  convenient  size  with  nothing  to  take  my 
attention  away  from  the  poetry.  But  if  I  want 
to  read  Shakespeare,  I  may  get  any  sort  of  an 
edition.  Some  are  for  the  waistcoat  pocket  and 
look  like  diaries  of  engagements.  Others  are 
decorated  with  portraits  of  famous  actors,  depicted 
in  flagrante  delicto — that  is,  in  the  very  act  of 
cutting  and  recasting  the  plays  to  their  own 
taste.  I  knew  one  edition  that  solemnly  showed 
all  the  cuts  and  alterations  made  by  Sir  Henry 
Irving,  and  there  are  some  that  reproduce  all 
the  misprints  of  the  folios  and  take  an  especial 
pride  in  adding  the  misprints  of  the  quartos 
wherever  it  is  possible.  These  are  by  way  of 
being  eccentricities,  I  own;  the  most  common 
form  of  decoration  is  notes — critical,  biographi- 
cal, historical,  moral,  psychological,  and  merely 
childish.  I  however  like  my  Shakespeare  neat. 
I  want  an  edition  with  a  sensible  text,  produced 
by  an  editor  who  is  not  in  a  fever  to  tell  me 
why  he  has  adopted  the  emendation  "  'a  babbled 
of  green  fields"  and  who  can  refrain  from  telling 
me  that  "since  sweets  and  beauties  do  themselves 
forsake"  means  that  they  change  for  the  worse. 

This  tirade  is  drawn  from  me  by  the  latest — 
and,  I  think,  the  last — volume  of  the  Arden 
Shakespeare,  which  contains  the  sonnets  and  "A 
Lover's  Complaint."  But  I  mean  no  disrespect 
to  the  Arden  Shakespeare.  Why  complain  of  a 
potato  because  it  is  not  a  lily?  And  the  Arden 
Shakespeare  is  an  admirably  complete  and 
scholarly  edition,  very  useful  and  filling  a  felt 
want.  But  I  shall  never  read  Shakespeare  in  it. 
I  doubt  whether  anyone  could  who  took  anything 
more  than  a  scholar's  interest  in  him.  I  open 
the  book  at  random  and  on  page  48  I  discover 
lines  3-14  of  Sonnet  XLIV  and  lines  1-4  of 
Sonnet  XLV.  I  also  find  three  textual  notes  and 
30  lines  of  elucidative  and  philogical  notes,  in 
small  type  and  double  columns.  You  cannot 
enjoy  the  sonnets  when  your  eye  is  constantly 
besought  to  leave  the  verse  in  order  to  learn 
that  the  word  "liberty"  in  Shakespeare  has  a 
meaning  which  varies  "from  the  privilege  of 


dispensing  with  conventions  to  license  in  the 
worst  sense."  But  having  emitted  that  last  com- 
plaint, I  have  done.  There  is  much  to  be  said 
for  the  Arden  Shakespeare,  and  I  wish  I  had 
the  whole  of  it. 

And  Mr.  C.  Knox  Pooler  has  performed  a 
really  remarkable  feat  in  producing  an  edition 
of  the  sonnets  with  an  introduction  that  is  neither 
dull  nor  silly.  He  knows  as  well  as  any  that 
all  over  the  world  there  is  a  horde  of  cranks 
and  anti-cranks  prepared  to  leap  out  on  any 
editor  of  the  sonnets  whose  foot  slips  for  a 
moment.  So  he  details  one  after  another  all 
the  different  theories  in  a  cool,  dry  way  which 
hardly  indicates  whether  he  believes  in  any  one 
of  them  more  than  in  another.  His  account  of 
the  Mary  Fitton  theory  is  very  good;  and  there 
is  an  interesting  citation  of  Lady  Newdigate, 
who  declares  that  Mary's  reputation  as  a  dark 
beauty  is  derived  solely  from  the  griminess  of  her 
effigy  in  the  family  monument  at  Cawsbury.  He 
concludes  with  the  admirable  decision  that 
"hitherto,  no  theory  or  discovery  has  increased 
our  enjoyment  of  any  line  in  the  sonnets  or 
cleared  up  any  difficulty."  But  there  is  one 
theory  that  he  has  not  quoted. 

I  refer  to  the  theory  which  was  enunciated 
by  Mr.  T.  W.  H.  Crosland  in  his  recent  book 
"The  English  Sonnet"  (Dodd,  Mead;  $3.).  In 
his  prefatory  note  Mr.  Crosland  announced  with 
pomp  that  "the  theory  as  to  the  true  origin  of 
the  sonnets  of  Shakespeare  is  ...  new." 
One  wondered  helplessly  in  reading  it  who  in 
the  world  Mr.  W.  H.  was  now.  But  the  ex- 
planation, when  one  reached  it,  was  the  simple, 
sensible,  but  nevertheless  unexpected  story  that 
follows : 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  when  Shakespeare  set  out  on 
his  sonnet-writing,  he  was  absolutely  care-free  so 
far  as  his  affections  were  concerned,  and  the  first 
twenty-six  sonnets  have  no  more  to  do  with  heart- 
unlocking  in  the  sense  insisted  upon  by  the  biogra- 
phists  than  they  have  to  do  with  the  binomial  theorem. 
We  shall  go  further  and  submit  that  until  he  wrote 
Sonnet  144 — that  is  to  say,  until  he  came  virtually 
to  the  end  of  his  sonnet  performance — he  had  no  clear 
conception  of  any  plot  or  story  which  the  sonnets 
should  unfold,  and  that  Sonnet  144  was  written  out 
of  an  endeavour  to  give  some  showing  of  a  relation 
to  the  hundred  and  forty-three  pieces  which  precede 
it,  and  help  the  reader  to  imagine  that  he  had  been 
perusing  a  set  tale.  In  other  words,  "the  story  of 
the  sonnets,"  such  as  it  is,  was  evolved  fortuitously 
out  of  the  writing  and  sequence  of  the  pieces,  and 
the  sonnets  were  not  written  out  of  a  story,  personal 
or  impersonal. 

Besides  this,  Mr.  Crosland  drops  the  nonchalant 
remark  that  "Mr.  W.  H.  .  .  .  was  a  fig- 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


481 


ment,  set  up  to  provoke  talk."  Now  I  am  not 
sure  that  I  can  accept  even  this  theory  whole- 
heartedly; but  I  do  maintain  that  it  may  very 
well  increase  our  enjoyment  of  the  sonnets  and 
clear  away  a  great  many  difficulties.  It  seems 
to  me  unlikely,  for  instance,  that  Shakespeare's 
sonnets  to  the  young  man  who  was  unwilling  to 
marry  have  anything  like  their  surface  signifi- 
cance. The  young  man  cannot  have  been  any- 
thing more  than  a  peg  on  which,  by  way  of  a 
convention  of  passionate  friendship,  Shakespeare 
hung  his  otherwise  unrelated  poetical  inspirations. 
But  I  find  it  equally  impossible  to  believe  that 
the  sonnets  written  to  the  unfaithful  lady  have 
not  a  much  closer  relation  to  actual  events.  This 
does  not  mean  that  the  sonnets  to  the  friend 
are  insincere  and  those  to  the  mistress  sincere; 
but  they  are  certainly  on  different  planes  of  sin- 
cerity. And  if  this  disparity  of  tone  be  once 
admitted,  there  is  an  end  at  once,  I  think,  of  the 
notion  that  the  whole  sequence  is  a  connected 
confession  or  the  account  of  any  definite  episode 
in  Shakespeare's  life.  It  seems  to  me  much  more 
probable  that  Shakespeare  wrote  sonnets  because 
he  wanted  to  write  sonnets  and  that  he  now  used 
actual  incidents,  now  built  on  a  convention,  just 
as  he  felt  inclined  and,  finally,  that  he  collected 
all  together  simply  because  they  were  all  sonnets. 

The  poetical  imagination  is  a  very  strange 
thing.  Sonnet  CXLIV  is  a  definite  and  a  delib- 
erate attempt  to  unite  the  young  man  ("the 
better  angel")  and  the  mistress  ("the  worser 
spirit")  in  a  common  relation  to  the  life  of 
the  poet.  But  Mr.  Crosland's  suggestion  that 
this  is  designed  to  give  a  narrative  interest  to 
the  whole  sequence  is  a  little  crude.  Shake- 
speare may  have  imagined  for  purposes  of  poetry 
an  intrigue,  which  he  knew  did  not  exist,  between 
mistress  and  friend.  He  may  even  have  imagined 
the  situation  arising,  though  the  mistress  and 
friend  had  never  met,  merely  out  of  the  contrast 
between  his  own  presentation  of  the  friend  and 
that  of  the  mistress.  I  do  not  know,  and  I  am 
not  trying  to  solve  the  insoluble.  I  am  merely 
trying  to  demonstrate  how  hard  the  solution  is. 
Poetic  inspiration  springs  from  deep  and  mys- 
terious sources,  and  it  is  impossible  to  predicate 
a  negative  concerning  it. 

But  one  thing  does  leap  to  the  eye  from  an 
impartial  rereading  of  the  sonnets  and  that  is, 
how  absurd  it  is  to  judge  Shakespeare  as  an 
Elizabethan.  The  fact  that  other  poets  of  the 
era  wrote  sonnet  sequences  is  even  more  irrel- 
evant than  the  fact  that  other  poets  wrote  plays 


in  blank  verse.  There  is  no  Elizabethan  sequence 
which  approaches  this — not  even  "Astrophel  and 
Stella" — for  vigor,  variety,  mastery  of  words, 
and  sheer  magic  of  personality.  The  things  in 
which  Shakespeare  transcends  all  poets  are  so 
much  more  important  than  those  which  he  has  in 
common  with  the  Elizabethans  that  his  epoch 
seems  perfectly  unimportant.  I  do  not  put  this 
forward  as  a  new  idea  or  even  an  idea  which 
was  worth  restating  for  its  intrinsic  merits.  I 
mention  it  as  a  matter  of  interest  simply  because 
it  sprang  up  in  my  mind  quite  spontaneously 
while  I  was  reading  the  sonnets  again,  and  be- 
cause for  a  moment  its  unassailable  truth  seemed 
to  me  to  make  it  shine  with  novelty. 


EDWARD  SHANKS. 


London,  May  8,  JQl8. 


Desirable  Residential 
Neighborhood 

Up  and  'down  the  street 

In  stolid,  impassive  rows, 

With  long  pious  faces 

And  decorous  door-steps 

That  look  like  folded  hands  in  mitts, 

The  houses  of  the  sixties  and  the  seventies 

Solemnly  regard  each  other: 

Staid  brick  houses  with  iron  embroideries, 

And  drab  wooden  houses  with  cupolas 

And  jig-saw  trim'mings, 

Heavy-lidded, 

Gazing  hypocritically  at  the  ground; 

And  the  steep  roofs,  protuberant  balconies, 

Bristling  towers  and  plate-glass  of  the  nineties 

Glaring  disdainfully, 

Their  elbows  drawn  in. 

It  is  winter — the  trees  stand  gravely  aside. 

The  houses  have  an  air  of  shrugging  slightly, 

Cynically  indifferent  to  this  exposure 

Of  their  bleak  and  dingy  nakedness. 

Motors  like  anxious  black  beetles 

Scurry  busily  to  and  fro. 

In  a  grimy  garden  where  smutty  sparrows  hop 

On  the  sooty  grass 

Three  birch  trees  stand 

Swaying  their  long  hair, 

Posturing, 

Lifting  white  arms  as  if  to  dance. 

Their  feet  are  rooted  under  the  grimy  sod. 

They  sway  sadly  in  the  wind  or  stand 

Dreaming, 

Like  princesses  enchanted. 

CLARA  SHANAFELT. 


482 


THE   DIAL 


[May  23 


La  Tear  de  la  Vie 


REFLECTIONS  ON  WAR  AND  DEATH.  By  Sigmund 
Freud.  Authorized  translation  by  A.  A.  Brill 
and  Alfred  B.  Kuttner.  Moffat,  Yard ;  75  cts. 

It  is  curious  what  different  types  of  mind  and 
what  different  methods  of  intellectual  approach 
have  produced  an  almost  identical  diagnosis  of 
the  anemia  of  modern  industrial  civilization. 
Long  before  the  present  world  war  William 
James,  in  his  now  prophetic  essay  "A  Moral 
Equivalent  for  War,"  expressed  the  criticism  of 
the  alert  and  discerning  mind  at  the  thinness  and 
barrenness  of  a  universe  constructed  from  merely 
well-intentioned  humanitarian  ideals.  To  a  man 
of  such  vigor  and  real  daring  a  world  of  placid 
utopianism  was  intolerable.  James's  whole  essay 
was  a  straightforward  attempt  to  assess  the  high 
value  of  danger  and  risk  in  any  endurable  soci- 
ety. Yet  so  utterly  unlike  a  temperament  as 
that  represented  by  George  Santayana  made  a 
similar  complaint  in  "Winds  of  Doctrine,"  say- 
ing with  great  bitterness  that  nothing  was  meaner 
and  more  contemptible  than  the  desire  to  live 
on,  somehow,  at  any  price — a  desire  which 
seemed  to  be  the  chief  characteristic,  and  to  fur- 
ther which  was  the  main  intellectual  preoccu- 
pation, of  the  age.  Even  in  so  unphilosophical 
and  essentially  journalistic  and  contemporary  a 
writer  as  H.  G.  Wells  there  often  recurred  this 
same  bitterness  at  the  lack  of  color  and  move- 
ment in  modern  life,  where,  as  he  once  expressed 
it,  a  man  could  live  through  his  entire  three 
score  years  and  ten  fudging  and  evading  and 
never  being  really  hungry,  never  being  really 
thirsty  or  angry  or  in  danger,  or  facing  a  really 
great  emotion,  until  the  agony  of  the  deathbed. 
Civilization  had  not  merely  refused  to  calculate 
on  death,  but  had  come  almost  to  the  point  of 
refusing  to  believe  in  it.  The  keener  minds 
rebelled  against  that  hypocrisy. 

Then  came  the  war,  and  with  it  that  most 
disconcerting  phenomenon  which  L.  P.  Jacks  has 
described  as  "the  peacefulness  of  being  at  war" 
— the  sense,  at  last,  that  there  was  really  danger 
and  high  adventure  and  the  possibility  of  deal- 
ing and  receiving  death  once  more.  Of  course 
the  conventional  reformist  type  of  mind  was 
shocked  and  horrified  at  this  emergence  of  death 
as  a  reality.  Up  to  what  we  might  call  the  satu- 
ration point  of  sensitiveness  these  minds  dwelt 
with  almost  unctuous  detail  upon  blood,  pus, 
agony,  and  human  hopes  shattered  to  bits  by 
unfeeling  fire  and  shrapnel.  These  were  the 


people  who  during  the  first  year  of  the  war  never 
tired  of  telling  us  that  civilization  had  tumbled 
into  ruins.  But  as  they  had  never  really  faced 
death  before  the  war  came,  so  they  never  really 
faced  it  afterward.  Their  shrinking  from  war's 
horrors  was  not  sincere ;  they  protested  too  much. 
Unlike  the  average  soldier,  dragged  from  an 
industrial  life  of  doubtful  happiness,  thwarted 
in  his  aspirations  for  creative  activity,  crushed  in 
his  few  timid  strivings  for  genuine  emotions, 
bound  by  routine,  they  did  not  accept  the  war 
as  a  kind  of  release  from  the  diligent  muffling 
against  the  realities  of  life  and  death  which  we 
call  modern  civilization.  In  all  men  in  whose 
veins  blood  has  not  wholly  turned  to  water  there 
is  left  a  strong  instinct  of  what  the  French  call 
"nostalgic  de  la  boue,"  and  while  they  do  not 
pretend  to  like  lice  and  mud  and  sudden  pain 
and  hunger  and  cold  and  an  iron  discipline  that 
reduces  their  own  individuality  to  zero,  it  would 
be  idle  to  deny  that  they  find  in  all  these  things 
a  kind  of  deep  gratification  (a  gratification  which 
the  conventional  pacifist  mind  cannot  even 
imaginatively  appreciate)  that  life  is  not  the 
smooth,  round,  tasteless  monotony  which  the 
industrial  revolution  had  almost  succeeded  in 
making  it. 

Naturally  soldiers  do  not  intellectualize  about 
war  in  the  ingenious  fashion  of  Mr.  Jacks,  and 
for  them  its  glamor  has  little  connection  with 
the  trappings  and  parade  and  music  of  militar- 
istic romance.  What  is  undeniable,  however,  is 
that  war,  in  so  far  as  it  is  war  and  not  a  cor- 
poration-like mechanism,  does  satisfy  a  funda- 
mental and  thwarted  human  need.  This  is  either 
ignored  or  denied  by  the  conventional  humani- 
tarian mind,  which  suddenly  in  August  1914  dis- 
covered that  war  was  horrible  and  men  were 
the  sons  of  women.  And  as  a  consequence  this 
type  of  reformist  intellectual  approach — by  far 
the  most  common — after  its  first  shattering  of 
amiable  illusions  developed  a  curious  technique 
of  evasion,  which  is  precisely  as  much  a  denial 
of  the  reality  of  death  in  actual  war  time  as  it 
was  formerly  in  the  piping  days  of  peace.  De- 
tails are  not  here  necessary,  for  we  all  recognize 
those  for  whom  today  the  emphasis  is  all  upon 
the  happy  by-products  of  the  present  agony,  the 
new  world,  integration,  and  so  on.  Indeed, 
instead  of  being  shocked  by  war  out  of  their  ear- 
lier paltry  utopianism  to  face  and  to  calculate 
upon  the  reality  of  death  in  life,  the  last  four 
years  seem  merely  to  have  made  them  take  ref- 
uge in  even  more  grandiose  utopianisms.  Too 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


483 


many  of  the  schemes  for  a  reconstructed  world 
after  the  war  are  merely  self-protective  prisons 
in  which  the  well-wishers  defend  themselves  from 
the  assaults  of  the  awful  reality  beating  at  their 
doors. 

But  the  competent  and  realistic  mind  is  not 
afraid  either  to  face  the  possibility  of  death  or 
to  describe  modern  war  in  any  other  terms  than 
those  of  permanent  human  values.  It  does  not 
shrink  from  a  world  of  danger  and  struggle,  yet 
neither  does  it  gloss  over  or  prettify  the  tragic 
fruits  of  the  modern  battlefield.  Bertrand  Russell 
is  a  signal  example  of  the  humanist  and  realist 
who  strikes  this  compromise  between  a  recogni- 
tion of  the  necessity  for  danger  and  color  and 
creation  and  movement  in  a  decent  civilization, 
and  a  recognition  of  the  futility  and  waste  of 
modern  war.  He  realizes,  as  Gilbert  Cannan 
in  his  passionate  little  book  "Freedom"  also  real- 
izes, that  modern  wars  are  the  atonement  we 
make  for  our  lack  of  appreciating  the  human 
evils  of  a  pallid,  "safe"  industrialism.  On  the 
other  side  of  the  enemy  frontier,  Professor  Sig- 
mund  Freud  voices  much  the  same  idea  in  this 
short  essay,  "Reflections  on  War  and  Death," 
for  the  translation  of  which  we  have  to  thank 
the  diligence  and  scientific  interest  of  Dr.  A.  A. 
Brill  and  Mr.  A.  B.  Kuttner.  It  is  true  that 
Dr.  Freud's  final  plea  has  not  entirely  the  hope- 
ful and  prophetic  quality  of  Bertrand  Russell's 
vision.  Evidently  the  essay  was  written  early 
in  the  war,  for  it  is  spotty  and  uncoordinated  and 
slight.  Freud  has  not  attempted  to  deal  with 
the  second  and  less  cynical  part  of  the  dilemma 
of  modern  war  as  definitely  and  optimistically 
as  Russell.  But  he  has  stated  afresh  with  great 
vigor,  and  with  the  powerful  reinforcement  of 
his  well  known  technique  of  psychological  analy- 
sis, the  barrenness  of  modern  civilization — a  bar- 
renness which  arose  from  its  refusal  to  calculate 
upon  death. 

"Life  becomes  impoverished  and  loses  its  inter- 
est when  life  itself,  the  highest  stake  in  the  game 
of  living,  must  not  be  risked."  In  ordinary, 
everyday  existence  we  can  get  only  the  thin  grati- 
fication of  our  ever-dying,  ever-resurrected  heroes 
of  literature  and  the  stage.  All  our  risks  and 
our  challenges  of  fate  are  vicarious.  Thus  we 
are  inconsolable  when  death  actually  happens, 
and  we  act  "as  if  we  belonged  to  the  tribe  of  the 
Asra,  who  also  die  when  those  whdm  they  love 
perish."  As  Freud  points  out,  war  compels  us 
to  change  all  that — to  recognize  the  reality  of 


death,  just  as  the  death  of  the  beloved  of  primi- 
tive man  (who,  like  our  own  unconscious  today, 
did  not  believe  in  death)  forced  him  to  recog- 
nize its  reality.  For  war  restores  what  civiliza- 
tion can  hide,  heroism  which  springs  from  our 
deep  inability  to  believe  in  our  own  death,  pleas- 
ure in  the  killing  of  the  hated  one  in  the  enemy 
(the  hatred  which  is  the  component  of  all  love), 
and  power  to  rise  above  "the  shock  of  the  death 
of  friends."  Freud  asks  us  if  we  have  not,  in 
our  civilized  attitude  towards  death,  lived  psy- 
chologically beyond  our  means.  His  own  answer 
of  course  is  in  the  affirmative,  and  the  affirma- 
tive is  probably  correct.  He  is  certainly  right  in 
urging  us  to  shake  off  our  hypocrisy  about  death 
and  to  calculate  upon  its  realities.  But  it  is  a 
plea  which  is  relevant  for  peace  as  for  war. 
Whatever  civilization  emerges  from  the  present 
clash  of  arms,  it  can  have  no  stability  and  no  crea- 
tive joy  unless  our  former  timidities  are  exor- 
cised. Life  loses  its  major  virility  when  we  strive 
at  all  costs  to  maintain  it.  That  is  the  justifi- 
cation for  Freud's  plea,  and  it  is  sufficient. 

HAROLD  STEARNS. 


A  Novelist  Turned  Trophet 

MID-AMERICAN  CHAKTS.    By  Sherwood  Anderson. 
Lane;  $1.25. 

Unsympathetic  as  it  may  sound,  "Mid-Ameri- 
can Chants"  is  an  important-looking  volume 
rather  than  an  important  book.  It  burns  with 
sincerity;  it  is  charged  with  a  fervent  passion; 
it  echoes  great  hopes  and  a  high  purpose.  But 
these  very  qualities  are  so  apparent  that  they 
seem  a  trifle  forced;  the  voice  of  the  prophet 
sounds  a  bit  self-conscious  and  his  mantle  bags 
about  the  knees.  Even  his  "Foreword"  has  a 
pat  and  almost  patronizing  tone: 

I  do  not  believe  that  my  people  of  midwestern 
America,  immersed  as  we  are  in  affairs,  hurried 
and  harried  through  life  by  the  terrible  engine — 
industrialism — have  come  to  the  time  of  song  .  .  . 

For  this  book  of  chants  I  ask  simply  that  it  be 
allowed  to  stand  stark  against  the  background  of 
my  own  place  and  generation.  In  secret  a  million 
men  and  women  are  trying^  as  I  have  tried  here, 
to  express  the  hunger  within  and  I  have  dared  to 
put  these  chants  forth  only  because  I  hope  and  believe 
they  may  find  an  answering  and  clearer  call  in  the 
hearts  of  other  Mid-Americans. 

I  do  not  want  to  suggest  that  these  sentences 
show  Mr.  Anderson  as  anything  but  modest  and 
genuinely  moved — and  yet  they  strike  me  as  some- 
what dubious.  What,  for  instance,  does  Mr. 
Anderson  mean  by  implying  that  because  mid- 


484 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


western  America  is  "hurried  and  harried"  by 
industrialism  it  cannot  sing.  Has  he  forgotten 
Vachel  Lindsay,  Harry  Kemp,  Edgar  Lee  Mas- 
ters, Carl  Sandburg?  Or  has  he  a  more  special 
definition  of  what  constitutes  song?  Or  is  he, 
perhaps,  laboring  under  the  old  fallacy  that  a 
harassed  and  over-worked  race  is  necessarily  an 
inexpressive  and  silent  one.  Let  him  consider  the 
Greeks,  nine  tenths  of  whom  were  actually  slaves ; 
the  Elizabethans,  "harried  and  hurried  through 
life"  by  a  thousand  tyrannies  and  oppressions; 
our  own  negroes,  possibly  the  most  spontaneous 
'of  melody  makers,  broken  of  everything  but  their 
desire  to  sing.  If  the  absence  of  machinery  and 
of  the  wage  system  would  bring  about  a  literary 
efflorescence,  the  aesthetic  world  would  be  led  by 
the  Esquimaux,  the  Javanese,  and  the  Senegam- 
bians.  Song,  as  a  matter  of  scientific  fact,  has 
sprung  not  only  out  of  a  leisurely  contemplation 
of  art  but  from  a  sharp  necessity.  It  has  risen 
out  of  dirt  and  despair  in  jubilations  as  well  as 
protests.  It  is  both  a  relief  and  a  release  from 
the  conditions  that  go  to  create  it. 

The  conditions  rather  than  the  song  are  sug- 
gested in  Mr.  Anderson's  small  but  ambitious 
volume.  It  would  be  pleasant  to  record  that  they 
are  suggested  with  the  same  power  and  original 
utterance  that  were  so  striking  in  "Marching 
Men,"  "Windy  McPherson's  Son,"  and  the 
short  stories  that  caused  such  enthusiastic  com- 
ment upon  their  appearance  in  "The  Seven  Arts." 
But  even  a  casual  reading  of  these  loosely  written 
chants  reveals  how  frequently  the  author  has 
forced  his  note  and  how  much  his  utterance  is 
indebted  to  Whitman  and  the  idiom  of  Sand- 
burg. Here  is  an  illustration: 

SONG  TO  THE  SAP 

In  my  breast  the  sap  of  spring, 

In  my  brain  grey  winter,  bleak  and  hard, 

Through  my  whole  being,  surging  strong  and  sure, 

The  call  of  gods, 

The  forward  push  of  mystery  and  of  life. 

Men,  sweaty  men,  who  walk  on  frozen  roads, 

Or  stand  and  listen  by  the  factory  door, 

Look  up,  men! 

Stand  hard! 

On  winds  the  gods  sweep  down. 

In  denser  shadows  by  the  factory  walls, 

In  my  old  cornfields,  broken  where  the  cattle  roam, 

The  shadow  of  the  face  of  God  falls  down. 

From  all  of  Mid-America  a  prayer, 

To  newer,  braver  gods,  to  dawns  and  days, 

To  truth  and  cleaner,  braver  life  we  come. 

Lift  up  a  song, 

My  sweaty  men, 

Lift  up  a  song. 


And  here  is  the  first  half  of  one  of  the  finest 
of  the  rhapsodies: 

I  am  pregnant  with  song.  My  body  aches  but  do  not 
betray  me.  I  will  sing  songs  and  hide  them  away. 
I  will  tear  them  into  bits  and  throw  them  in  the 
street.  The  streets  of  my  city  are  full  of  dark 
holes.  I  will  hide  my  songs  in  the  holes  of  the 
streets. 

In  the  darkness  of  the  night  I  awoke  and  the  bands 
that  bind  me  were  broken.  I  was  determined  to 
bring  old  things  into  the  land  of  the  new.  A  sacred 
vessel  I  found  and  ran  with  it  into  the  fields,  into 
the  long  fields  where  the  corn  rustles. 

All  of  the  people  of  my  time  were  bound  with  chains. 
They  had  forgotten  the  long  fields  and  the  stand- 
ing corn.  They  had  forgotten  the  west  winds. 

Into  the  cities  my  people  had  gathered.  They  had  be- 
come dizzy  with  words.  Words  had  choked  them. 
They  could  not  breathe. 

The  defects  of  Mr.  Anderson's  prose  poems 
are  of  the  same  character  as  the  faults  in  his 
novels.  In  "Windy  McPherson's  Son,"  for 
instance,  one  could  almost  see  the  dividing  line 
where  the  story  broke  off  abruptly  and  shifted 
from  intensified  fact  to  mere  colored  fiction.  Here 
the  transition  is  less  abrupt;  but  the  pages,  for 
the  greater  part,  are  closely  related  to  the  latter 
and  lesser  half  of  Mr.  Anderson's  remarkable 
books.  They  lose  themselves  in  flights  of  orac- 
ular vagueness;  in  their  determined  effort  to 
be  prophetic  they  show  nothing  so  much  as  an 
inchoate  wish,  a  desire  to  adjust  to  the  rapidly 
shifting  world  of  labor — a  desire  that  is  scarcely 
accomplished.  Mr.  Anderson  himself  may  be 
able  to  face  realities,  but  his  poetry  is  not  nearly 
so  courageous.  It  is  far  more  evasive  than  most 
of  his  prose;  it  goes  round  about,  rather  than 
through,  the  fact.  It  expresses  itself  mainly 
through  the  sort  of  circumlocutory  symbolism 
that  we  have  learned  to  belittle  when  we  find  it 
embodied  in  the  more  regular  forms. 

THE   PLANTING 

'Tis  then  I  am  the  tiny  thing, 

A   little   bug,    a   figure   wondrous   small,    a   sower   on 

prairies  limitless. 
Into  her   arms   I   creep    and   wait   and   dream   that   I 

may  serve, 
And  do  the  work  of  gods  in  that  vast  place. 

Awake — asleep — remade  to  serve, 

I    stretch    my    arms    and    lie — intense — expectant — 'til 

her  moment  comes. 
Then  seeds  leap  forth. 
The   mighty  hills   rise   up   and   gods   and   tiny  things 

like  me  proclaim  their  joy. 

Man  in  the  making — seeds  in  the  ground, 
O'er  all  my  western  country  now   a   wind. 
Rich,  milky  smell  of  cornfields,  dancing  nymphs, 
And  tiny  men  that  turn  away  to  dream. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


485 


Still,  Mr.  Anderson  aims  so  much  higher  than 
most  of  his  contemporaries  that  we  should  be 
attentive  if  not  grateful  to  him.  Even  if  "Mid- 
American Chants"  is  composed  of  the  stuff  of 
poetry  rather  than  poetry  itself,  we  cannot  with- 
hold our  admiration  from  one  whose  utterance  is 
so  vibrant.  From  such  passion,  from  such  rude 
earnestness  may  rise  the  clearer  voice  that  is  im- 
plicit in  Mr.  Anderson's  prophetic  promise. 

Louis  UNTERMEYER. 


The  Rich  Storehouse  of  Croce's 
Thought 

THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  BENEDETTO  CROCE:  The 
Problem  of  Art  and  History.  By  H.  Wildon 
Carr.  Macmillan;  $2.25. 

Benedetto  Croce  has  been  unfortunate  in  the 
manner  of  his  introduction  to  the  English  speak- 
ing people.  His  books  have  been  translated  into 
a  jargon  that  is  not  only  a  caricature  of  his  own 
lucid  and  penetrating  style,  but  that  at  times 
hardly  deserves  to  be  called  English  at  all.  His 
translators  have  limited  themselves  to  his  formal 
treatises — to  the  great  works  on  "/Esthetic," 
"Logic,"  "Economics  and  Ethics,"  or  to  the 
monographs  on  Vico,  Hegel,  Marx — wholly  neg- 
lecting the  rich  storehouse  of  his  critical  essays 
and  his  informal  studies  of  ideas  and  men.  For 
through  the  columns  of  his  journal,  "La  Critica," 
and  through  his  collected  and  uncollected  essays, 
Croce  has  carried  on  a  ceaseless  warfare  against 
the  dual  enemies  of  his  philosophy,  the  older 
metaphysics  and  the  newer  positivism,  and  against 
the  dual  enemies  of  his  theory  of  art  and  lit- 
erature, the  older  traditionalism  and  the  newer 
sociology  masquerading  in  the  guise  of  literary 
history.  With  such  weapons  he  has  not  only 
transformed  Italian  thought,  but  has  breathed  the 
breath  of  life  into  Italian  criticism.  Few  Ameri- 
cans realize  this  resistless  and  inspiriting  swords- 
manship of  one  of  the  greatest  protagonists  of 
modern  thought. 

Nor  will  this  book  help  them  to  realize  it.  It 
is  a  serious  and  dignified  summary  of  Croce's 
philosophy,  with  special  emphasis  on  one,  and 
that  the  most  fruitful,  of  its  many  phases — his 
theory  of  art  and  history.  To  say  less  would 
be  ungenerous  in  the  case  of  a  book  which  is, 
after  all,  the  first  of  its  kind  in  English.  But  its 
sober  method  and  rather  stodgy  style  are  barriers 
behind  which  brood  Croce's  seminal  power,  and 
no  new  conquests  will  be  made  by  it  for  what  is 


new  and  fertilizing  in  Croce's  thought.  No 
reader  will  suspect  that  he  is  face  to  face  with  a 
thinker  who  has  given  the  world  a  vitally  new 
concept  of  art,  who  has  rejuvenated  literary 
criticism  by  giving  it  a  new  purpose  and  meaning, 
who  has  transformed  logic  from  a  formal  and 
lifeless  thing  into  a  function  of  thought  itself, 
who  has  given  a  new  interpretation  to  the  old 
idea  of  truth  and  error,  and  a  new  meaning  to 
the  part  played  by  economic  activity  in  human 
life,  and  who,  as  his  latest  and  greatest  achieve- 
ment, has  altered  man's  outlook  on  the  past  and 
the  present  by  unfolding  the  eternal  contem- 
poraneity of  history.  "Monks  and  professors 
cannot  write  the  lives  of  poets,"  said  an  Italian 
critic;  and  it  would  seem  as  if  the  President  of 
the  Aristotelian  Society  of  London  is  hardly 
the  ideal  interpreter  for  this  freest  of  human 
minds — the  mind  of  a  man  who  has  held  aloof 
from  all  official  position,  in  order  that  he  might 
express  himself  on  all  occasions  as  seemed  to 
him  best. 

I  remember,  some  sixteen  years  ago  when  Croce 
sent  me  the  first  edition  of  the  "/Esthetic"  (there 
are  now  many  editions,  and  translations  into 
many  languages),  how  little  I  suspected  the  real 
significance  of  the  gift.  I  had  known  his  his- 
torical work  for  some  time,  but  knew  nothing 
of  his  speculative  interest  and  power.  So  it  was 
to  the  historical  portion  of  the  book  that  I  turned, 
and  it  was  to  this  portion  that  I  devoted  the  whole 
of  my  review  in  the  "Nation,"  the  first  review  of 
the  book  outside  of  Italy,  so  far  as  I  know.  I 
shudder  to  think  of  the  few  perfunctory  words 
with  which  I  summed  up  the  theoretical  portion, 
which  I  had  skimmed  through  hastily  and  assumed 
to  be  merely  another  machine-made  "theory  of 
art."  Professor  Santayana,  to  whom  I  sent  the 
book  for  review  in  the  "Journal  of  Comparative 
Literature,"  which  I  was  then  editing,  reversed 
the  process,  but  gave  an  unsympathetic  and  (may 
I  add?)  equally  blind  report  of  its  contents.  If 
it  took  me  a  year  or  more  to  realize  the  signifi- 
cance of  a  friend's  work  and  to  become  its 
champion — a  book  which  I  had  at  hand  and  was 
corfstantly  consulting — how  can  I  wonder  that 
its  message  should  not  strike  home  to  those  for 
whom,  because  of  its  language,  it  was  closed 
with  more  than  seven  seals?  The  English  trans- 
lation a  few  years  later  brought  it  many  friends, 
among  temperaments  as  different  as  Mr.  Balfour 
and  the  author  of  "Peter  Dooley,"  but  still 
its  significance  is  unapprehended  by  the  Eng- 
lish speaking  world,  where  Croce  has  been  obliged 


486 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


to  play  second  fiddle  to  the  striking  but  relatively 
inferior  thought  of  Bergson.  Perhaps  this  is  not 
wholly  to  be  wondered  at,  for  the  "^Esthetic," 
though  the  most  striking,  is  the  first  and  least 
mature  of  Croce's  great  philosophical  treatises. 
It  loses  half  of  its  meaning  without  such  commen- 
tary and  interpretation  as  may  be  found  in  his 
later  and  maturer  books,  such  as  the  "Logic," 
which  is  accessible  in  an  English  translation,  and 
the  "Problems  of  Esthetics,"  the  "Critical  Con- 
versations," and  the  "Theory  of  History,"  which 
are  not. 

So  the  work  and  personality  of  Benedetto 
Croce  still  await  an  English  interpreter.  No  little 
guidance  may  be  found  in  this  new  book,  and 
still  more  in  Italian,  though  there  the, slight  and 
inadequate  volume  of  Prezzolini  remains  the  only 
book  covering  the  whole  subject  of  Croce's  life 
and  thought.  But  the  literature  regarding  him 
has  become  enormous:  articles  by  the  hundred 
in  every  European  tongue  indicate  the  interest 
which  he  has  aroused  among  philosophers  and 
men  of  letters.  Yet  what  shall  we  think  of 
this  ocean  of  print,  which  we  may  search  in 
vain  for  a  single  volume  of  creative  interpreta- 
tion— a  single  book  of  which  we  may  say:  "If 
you  wish  to  know  what  Croce  means  for  the 
modern  world,  and  what  is  the  source  of  his 
intellectual  power,  read  this"? 

J.  E.  SPINGARN. 


Our  Enemy  Speaks 

MEN  IN  WAR.    By  Andreas  Latzko.    Translated 
by  Adele  Seltzer.    Boni  &  Liveright;  $1.50. 

The  longer  the  war  goes  on,  the  more  acute 
becomes  the  spiritual  dilemma  which  it  evokes. 
For  if  it  be  regarded  as  a  war  to  end  war,  must 
not  every  mind  carry  into  the  coming  peace  the 
lesson  that  this  horror  can  never  be  allowed  to 
break  loose  again?  Anything,  then,  which  miti- 
gated the  ghastly  reality  of  war  would  by  so 
much  relax  our  vigilance  against  its  recurrence. 
But  on  the  other  hand,  events  require  that  we 
gird  our  loins  and  pursue  the  war  to  the  end 
without  faltering;  in  order  to  keep  the  national 
mind  taut  for  the  unfaltering  prosecution  of  the 
war  military  operations  ought  to  seem  not  only 
palatable  but  even  exhilarating.  Hence  the  uni- 
versal preoccupation  with  "morale."  Faith  and 
delight  in  war  as  an  effective  means  for  pursuing 
national  ends  must  be  maintained  in  order  that 
war  may  be  slain  forever  as  the  vilest  human 


scourge  and  pestilence.  This  is  why  the  liberal 
mind  has  everywhere  taken  delight  in  a  book  like 
"Under  Fire,"  which  artistically  resolves  the 
dilemma.  The  conventional  mind  will  still  pre- 
fer "The  Glory  of  the  Trenches"  to  the  real- 
ism of  Barbusse,  even  though  French  soldiers 
testify  that  "Le  Feu"  has  not  inhibited  them 
from  their  dread  task.  But  to  those  who  have 
had  to  reconcile  their  hatred  of  war  with  their 
determination  to  engage  in  it,  Barbusse  has  been 
a  salvation.  For  the  ideal  attitude  is  realistically 
to  appreciate  the  horrors,  and  yet  continue  to 
believe  that  the  grim  work  has  got  to  be  done. 

Unfortunately,  just  as  this  most  artistic  and 
valuable  reconciliation  of  the  paradox  has  been 
made,  we  are  presented  with  a  book  which  makes 
Barbusse  look  like  a  Christian  Scientist.  Here 
is  an  artistic  mind  which  has  collapsed  under  the 
actual  business  of  war,  and  painstakingly  tells 
us  why.  The  six  stories  of  this  volume  reveal, 
in  a  tone  of  concentrated  fury,  a  mind  for  which 
modern  war  is  unendurable  and  unmitigated. 
No  ray  of  extenuation  and  relief  steals  into  these 
terrible  exposures.  There  is  none  of  that  soft 
hope,  as  in  "Under  Fire,"  of  the  return  to  a 
better  world.  "Men  in  War"  return,  for 
instance  in  the  story  "Home  Again,"  only  to  kill. 
Mutilated  men,  men  in  agony,  the  horror  of 
bloodstained  insanity — this,  to  the  Austrian  officer 
Andreas  Latzko,  is  the  sum  of  war.  Behind  the 
scenes,  as  in  the  story  of  "The  Victor,"  the  gen- 
eral whom  war  has  picked  from  obscurity  and 
deluged  with  power  and  riches,  lie  those  manip- 
ulators whose  greed  of  life  has  been  fed  by  the 
war,  and  to  whom  the  greatest  affront  is  the 
word  "peace."  Nowhere  does  Latzko  see  a 
shred  of  rationality  or  justification  to  this  busi- 
ness in  which  the  world  has  engaged  itself. 

The  heart  of  the  book  is  the  story  "Baptism 
of  Fire,"  which  follows  in  torturing  detail  the 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  an  Austrian  captain  as 
he  leads  his  men  under  fire  against  the  Italians. 
Advancing  to  the  attack,  his  body  is  saturated 
with  sympathy  for  his  men  as  victims;  his  con- 
sciousness retains  all  its  memories  of  the  peaceful 
background  of  their  lives;  he  sees  them  as  harm- 
less humans  in  whose  murder  he  is  assisting.  Even 
the  dead  enemy  arouses  in  him  a  "tangled  web 
of  memories."  "Two  trips  on  a  vacation  in  Italy 
drove  an  army  of  sorrowing  figures  through  his 
mind."  Hp  can  do  nothing,  in  his  agonized 
impotence,  but  turn  over  the  command  to  a  young 
lieutenant  who  has  thirsted  for  this  advance  on 
the  enemy  and  who  robustly  handles  his  men  as 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


487 


military  material.  And  as  they  are  mortally 
wounded  together  the  captain's  last  thought  is 
of  exultation  that  this  creature  of  war  is  him- 
self at  last  suffering. 

It  is  of  course  easy  to  dismiss  such  a  book  as 
the  product  of  a  constitutional  psychopathic  con- 
dition, or  at  least  of  shattered  nerves.  Marsch- 
ner  is  certainly  no  typical  officer.  Most  officers 
are  neither  neurotic  nor  of  the  type  which  learns 
to  think  of  its  men  as  replaceable  wastage,  of  the 
enemy  as  a  mechanical  target  or  as  a  swarm  of 
noxious  rodents,  of  wounds  and  agony  as  so  much 
routine  for  the  doctors  and  nurses.  Yet  is  it  nec- 
essarily neurotic  to  retain  this  full  consciousness 
of  soldiers  as  suffering,  sensing  human  lives  side 
by  side  with  the  activity  of  sending  them  into 
battle?  The  ordinary  man  is  able  to  suspend, 
when  he  thinks  or  acts  in  combat,  all  his  usual 
concepts,  memories,  and  desires  for  life,  liberty, 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  Otherwise  war 
would  be  impossible.  What  makes  this  book  so 
unprecedentedly  grisly  is  that  the  author  insists 
on  seeing  the  war  not  in  terms  of  itself,  but  in 
terms  of  ordinary  kindly  human  life. 

The  stories  of  "Men  in  War"  are  composed 
with  sufficient  skill  to  give  one  the  disquieting 
thought  that  they  may  not  be  the  work  of  a  con- 
stitutional psychopath,  but  of  the  artistic  temper- 
ament. If  so,  then  we  have  to  conclude  that 
modern  war,  seen  through  the  artistic  tempera- 
ment of  a  Hungarian  like  Latzko,  loses  all  con- 
tact with  human  sanity.  If  there  were  many 
more  Austrian  officers  like  this  one,  Austrian 
morale  would  collapse.  Is  it  possible  that  part 
of  the  demoralization  reported  there  is  due 
to  temperamental  reactions  such  as  are  pictured 
in  this  book?  Then  the  lesson  for  the  nation 
which  wishes  to  keep  up  militaristic  morale  is 
not  to  let  the  artistic  temperament  get  anywhere 
near  the  trenches.  A  man  who  reports  the  expe- 
rience of  war  as  lying  without  the  pale  of  human 
sanity  is  infinitely  more  dangerous  than  any  con- 
scientious objector.  It  is  not  for  the  sake  of  the 
artist's  sensitiveness  that  he  should  be  exempted 
from  all  war  service ;  it  is  for  the  sake  of  military 
morale.  If  this  book  means  anything,  it  means 
that  militarism  should  weed  out  its  Marschners 
and  coerce  them  back  to  the  ivory  towers  of  their 
art,  to  the  egoism  of  their  own  spiritual  and 
moral  integrity.  For  if  this  is  the  way  the  artist 
sees  war,  his  apathy  is  something  the  shrewd  mil- 
itarist will  fairly  beg  for. 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


The  "Sage  and  Serious  "  "Poet 

EDMUND  SPENSER:  A  CRITICAL  STUDY.  By  Herbert 
Ellsworth  Cory.  University  of  California  Pub- 
lications in  Modern  Philology;  $3.50. 

For  the  past  ten  years  and  more  scholars  have 
been  unusually  occupied  with  the  study  of  Spenser. 
In  America,  Long,  Greenlaw,  and  Padelford,  to 
mention  only  the  most  active,  have  examined 
various  aspects  of  his  poetry ;  in  England,  scholars 
like  Miss  Winstanley  have  shared  in  the  work. 
There  was  need  of  an  attempt  to  reinterpret  Spen- 
ser in  the  light  of  their  investigations.  And  for  this 
attempt  Professor  Cory  is  in  many  ways  especially 
well  qualified.  He  is  not  a  newcomer  in  the  field, 
and  his  previous  studies  have  revealed  a  tendency 
to  view  Spenser's  achievement  in  its  larger  rather 
than  its  special  aspects.  Moreover,  one  peril  of 
the  present  undertaking  was  eclecticism,  and  from 
this  he  is  saved  by  the  possession  of  a  theory  of 
his  own,  a  conception  of  Spenser's  development 
from  the  "Shepherd's  Calendar"  to  the  cantos  on 
"Mutability"  which  completely  dominates  his  use 
of  particular  contributions.  As  a  result,  though 
we  are  kept  in  touch  with  what  other  scholars 
have  done,  we  are  never  diverted  from  the  main 
purpose  of  his  study,  the  presentation  of  the  poet 
in  a  new  light. 

We  should  not  be  diverted,  that  is,  if  Pro- 
fessor Cory  kept  to  his  Spenser.  But  he  does  not. 
He  also  has  a  theory  of  criticism,  in  which  he  is 
almost  as  much  interested  as  he  is  in  his  avowed 
subject,  and  which  is  constantly  intruding  into  his 
study  of  Spenser.  The  preface  hints  at  the  reason. 
"Already  the  academic  student  of  literatures 
ancient  or  modern,"  he  writes,  "is  the  object  of 
the  gentle  contempt  of  his  more  robust  col- 
leagues." He  is  not  content,  like  most  of  us 
who  teach  literature,  to  acknowledge  the  fact 
privately,  turn  it  to  such  mental  profit  as  he  can, 
and  go  on  with  his  business  as  if  the  joke  were 
too  old  to  be  worth  bothering  about — which  it  is. 
Perhaps  his  more  robust  colleagues  at  Berkeley 
are  more  robust  and  sarcastic  than  the  average. 
If  so,  they  will  henceforward  have  to  hurl  their 
sarcasms  at  others  than  him,  for  he  has  collected 
a  critical  armory  from  all  the  modern  movements 
and  sciences — the  labor  movement,  feminism,  im- 
perialism, ethnology,  heredity,  psychopathology, 
the  empirical  study  of  ethical  values,  and  so  on. 
He  does  not  overtly  use  all  that  he  retails  in  the 
preface,  but  he  uses  enough  to  remind  one  at 
times  of  David  in  the  armor  of  Saul  and  to  set 
one  thinking  that  a  literary  critic  had  best  keep 


488 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


to  his  sling,  as  David  eventually  did.  If  one 
cannot  endure  the  taunts  of  Goliath  of  Gath,  the 
proper  retort  is  still  a  smooth  stone  from  the 
brook.  All  this  display  of  method  seems  par- 
ticularly inappropriate  to  the  interpretation  of 
Spenser,  whose  own  respect  for  learning  appeared 
so  unobtrusively.  This  too  modern  method, 
moreover,  sometimes  leads  to  an  over-emphatic 
style.  To  say  of  the  lines  which  conclude  Book 
VI  of  the  "Faery  Queen"  that  they  "hiss  with 
the  dry  sneer  of  despair"  is  surely  to  lay  on  style 
with  a  trowel.  Critics  may  disagree  about  the 
moods  of  Spenser,  yet  even  Professor  Cory  would 
probably  admit  that  the  phrase  was  excessive. 
Let  us  hope  that  on  reflection  he  would  also 
renounce  the  adjective  "purblind,"  which  he 
bestows  rather  too  easily  on  those  who  disagree 
with  his  estimate  of  the  "supreme  poet." 

However,  the  value  of  this  study  is  not  depend- 
ent upon  method  or  style.  What  the  reader 
brings  away  from  it  is  a  new  conception  of 
Spenser,  a  conception  which,  even  when  it  is  not 
wholly  plausible,  is  always  provocative.  For 
what  we  have  here  is  no  "discovery,"  to  be 
accepted  or  rejected  on  specific  evidence  and  filed 
as  a  fact  or  a  mare's  nest,  but  an  interpretation, 
suggestive  of  many  possibilities.  That  is  the 
advantage  of  trying  to  see  a  poet  as  a  whole,  with 
one's  own  eyes:  one  may  exaggerate  the  signifi- 
cance of  this  or  that  trait,  but  one's  portrait  of 
him  is  likely  to  help  others  to  see  him  more 
clearly. 

Professor  Cory's  point  of  view  is  avowedly  that 
of  Dowden's  essay  on  "Spenser,  the  Poet  and 
Teacher."  He  holds,  as  Dowden  did,  that  to  see 
nothing  in  Spenser  except  the  poetry  of  romantic 
delightsomeness  is  to  misunderstand  him  fatally. 
He  believes  that  Spenser  is  essentially  what 
Milton  called  him,  in  the  much  hackneyed  phrase, 
"sage  and  serious."  From  one  opinion  or  the 
other  all  fundamental  criticism  of  the  poet  must 
start,  and  Professor  Cory  takes  his  stand  by 
Milton.  Of  course  there  is  danger  in  stating 
the  issue  too  simply.  The  question  is  not  merely 
whether  the  poet  of  the  "Faery  Queen"  was  in 
earnest  about  his  teaching.  Some  have  maintained 
that  his  teaching  was  a  pure  convention  imposed 
upon  him  by  the  standards  of  his  day,  which 
demanded  that  an  epic  should  be  edifying, 
although  the  majority  of  commentators  have 
agreed  that  Spenser's  declaration  of  purpose  was 
sincere.  Yet  most  of  the  latter  would  still  main- 
tain that  what  has  made  his  poetry  last  is  not 


moral  flavor  but  sheer  romantic  charm,  the 
delightsomeness  which  has  always  won  him  fol- 
lowers, generation  after  generation.  And  that 
view  merits  something  more  than  mere  denuncia- 
tion. To  insist  that  Spenser,  like  Dante,  is  a 
"supreme  poet"  is  only  to  make  the  disagreement 
harder  to  compose;  for  about  a  supreme  poet, 
at  this  late  day,  there  is  not  likely  to  be  much 
chance  for  misunderstanding.  No,  Spenser  will 
not  be  accepted  for  a  supreme  poet,  nor  his  moral 
value  considered  the  equivalent  of  the  really  great 
moralist's.  Perhaps  the  question  resolves  itself 
into  one  of  taste,  and  is  therefore  not  to  be 
argued.  If  so,  the  hedonists  might  be  met  with 
their  own  weapons;  for  surely,  to  fail  to  perceive 
that  Spenser's  greatest  work  has  a  tone  of  moral 
dignity  and  sweetness  which  is  quite  as  delightful 
to  those  who  care  for  these  qualities  as  its  merely 
sensuous  charm,  is  to  convict  oneself  of  defective 
sensibilities. 

Proceeding  from  this  fundamental  conception 
of  Spenser — that  he  is  a  man  of  sincere  moral 
earnestness — Professor  Cory  endeavors  to  trace 
the  line  of  his  natural  development.  We  have 
had  studies  in  Spenser's  art  and  in  his  philosophic 
idealism,  his  religion;  yet  heretofore  nobody  has 
conceived  of  following  his  moral  and  emotional 
experiences  down  the  line  of  his  successive  poems. 
I  have  not  space  for  a  full  survey  of  all  the 
results,  and  a  summary  is  never  quite  fair;  but 
fair  or  not,  the  gist  of  it  may,  I  think,  be  given 
in  a  sentence:  the  poet's  career  proceeds  from  an 
ardent  youthful  hope  of  being  the  prophet  of  his 
country's  true  greatness,  through  disillusion  and 
bitterness  as  he  sees  his  counsels  ignored,  to  a  final 
mood  of  reconciliation  with  the  world,  which  is 
not  the  ignoble  peace  of  philosophic  retirement 
but  a  casting  forward  into  eternity.  The  crucial 
point  of  this  is  the  conception  of  Spenser  as  a 
prophet.  Every  reader  of  his  poetry  has  noted  the 
occasional  moods  of  dejection  or  discontent,  and 
these  have  commonly  been  laid  to  the  disappoint- 
ments of  his  material  career.  Professor  Cory 
sees  otherwise.  According  to  him,  these  disap- 
pointments, though  real  enough,  were  only  sec- 
ondary; the  main  cause  of  Spenser's  heartache 
was  the  failure  in  his  larger  hopes.  He  had 
begun  his  "Faery  Queen"  as  an  "epic  of  the 
future,"  a  promulgation  of  the  spiritual  condi- 
tions under  which  his  country  might  thrive.  He 
had  centred  his  hopes  for  the  realization  of 
these  in  his  patron  Leicester,  who  was  to  marry 
the  Queen  (as  Arthur  was  to  be  united  with 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


489 


Gloriana)  and  settle  the  kingdom  firmly  on  the 
true  bases  of  national  greatness.  But  Leicester 
died  before  the  first  three  books  were  finished, 
and  his  death  took  the  heart  out  of  the  poet's 
enterprise.  The  discouragement  was  completed 
by  the  course  of  the  nation's  life,  as  it  became 
clear  that  the  governing  classes  cared  nothing 
for  the  ideals  on  which  the  poem  was  grounded. 
From  the  disillusion  of  this  experience,  which 
may  be  traced  in  the  aimlessness  and  sense  of 
futility  of  the  later  books,  the  poet  was  to  recover 
only  in  his  final  years. 

To  discuss  the  validity  of  this  thesis  without 
following  the  critic  into  detail  would  be  ungener- 
ous. It  is  argued  with  sincere  conviction,  and 
if  at  times  the  evidence  seems  rather  frail  for  the 
conclusions,  one  need  only  reflect  that,  after  all, 
the  benefit  of  studies  such  as  this  does  not  neces- 
sarily lie  in  conclusiveness.  Professor  Cory  has 
suggested  more  than  a  merely  interesting  view. 

R.  E.  NEIL  DODGE. 


May  Sinclair,  Sentimentalist 

THE  TREE  OF  HEAVEN.    By  May  Sinclair.    Mac- 

millan ;  $1.60. 

If  only  "The  Tree  of  Heaven"  were  not  so 
subtly  and  so  well  constructed.  The  author  has 
thoroughly  documented  the  history  of  the  Har- 
rison family  from  the  youth  of  its  men  children 
until,  as  men,  they  fall  in  the  great  war.  It  is 
a  family  which  lives  in  the  "ruinous  adoration" 
of  a  mother's  eyes.  The  children,  beautiful  in 
body  and  fine  of  mind,  are  painted  against  a 
background  of  desiccated  lives — a  grandmother 
and  three  spinster  aunts  full  of  the  subtle  antago- 
nisms of  old  women  for  the  unsuccessful  of  their 
sex,  one  drunkard  uncle  and  one  uncle  mismated. 
Those  waste  people  are  painted  in  early  in  the 
children's  lives,  at  the  height  of  their  adolescence, 
and  as  survivors  of  the  three  sons — Michael, 
Nicky,  and  John — who  have  been  sucked  into  the 
war.  Here  you  have  part  of  the  book's  conscious 
irony. 

Then  there  is  the  approach  of  war  down  the 
years  upon  the  unconscious  members  of  the  Har- 
rison family.  Michael's  resistance  to  war  is 
forecast  in  his  humanism  and  libertarianism :  he 
is  ardently  for  Irish  freedom  at  the  age  of  thir- 
teen. Nicky  by  the  predisposing  hand  of  the 
author  is  made  to  invent  a  "forteresse  mobile," 
a  sort  of  forerunner  of  the  tank.  Frances,  the 


mother,  is  shown  in  sublime  upper-class  satisfac- 
tion informing  herself  of  the  affairs  of  the  nation 
by  skimming  the  columns  of  the  "Times,"  only 
to  have  those  affairs  thrust  themselves  violently 
into  her  life  and  her  children's  lives. 

Even  the  author's  great  "reality" — that  immi- 
nent death  and  transfiguration  her  young  men 
write  about  and  face  in  battle — is  forecast  in  the 
middle  third  of  her  book,  called  "Vortex."  Here 
the  children  of  the  Harrison  family  are  engaged 
in  various  adventures:  Dorothy  in  intellectualist 
feminism,  Michael  in  futurist  art,  Nicky  in  scien- 
tific invention  and  sex.  And  each  of  the 
adventures  is  made  to  seem  pale  in  retrospect 
from  the  overwhelming  tide  of  war. 

If  only  the  book  were  not  so  well  constructed. 
For  it  is  full  of  strange  beauties  of  insight  into  a 
mother's  feelings,  the  sheer  and  naked  thoughts 
of  children,  the  pervasive  consciousness  that 
makes  a  family,  the  awesome  mysteries  of  young 
girlhood.  There  are  scenes  whose  haunting  beauty 
lies  not  in  any  phrase  but  in  the  simplicity  with 
which  human  beings  are  observed.  There  is  a 
chapter  of  Nicky  and  his  cat  Jerry,  of  the  yellow 
eyes — "the  soul  of  Nicky  is  in  that  cat" — which 
has  the  best  of  childhood  in  it,  as  has  Nicky's 
earache  and  the  smile  he  made  carefully  so  it 
wojild  not  hurt  him.  There  is  the  Veronica  of 
honey-colored  hair,  "a  little,  slender  girl  in  a 
straight  white  frock,"  who  sees  ghosts  like  Ferdie, 
her  mother's  lover.  There  are  even  descriptions 
of  crowds  that  seem  by  some  nearly  orgiastic  ebb 
and  flow  of  words  to  represent  motion.  There 
is  the  pageantry  and  exaltation  of  a  suffrage  pro- 
cession seen  through  the  eyes  of  Veronica,  who 
did  not  know  she  had  been  chosen  to  lead  because 
of  her  youth  and  "her  processional,  hieratic 
beauty."  Spots  there  are  of  foreseeing  and  retro- 
spection which  would  have  been  richer  if  Miss 
Sinclair  hadn't  been  afraid  of  writing  imagism 
like  Miss  Richardson's,  author  of  that  important 
trilogy  "Backwater."  Miss  Sinclair  hasn't  been 
so  afraid  as  some  writers  of  upper-class  bias  of 
her  own  and  other  people's  unbidden  thoughts. 
And  so  the  book,  written  in  a  fine  feminine  hand, 
is  full  of  subtle  and  truthfully  observed  impres- 
sions. 

But  it  is  too  inexorably  harnessed  to  what  Miss 
Sinclair  has  made  her  people  in  their  unprophetic 
amaze  call  "Armageddon."  She  might  have 
rested  on  the  Harrison  family  as  she  saw  it,  with 
the  stray  thoughts  of  Frances,  the  unfolding  of 
Michael  and  Nicky  and  the  cousin  Veronica,  the 


490 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


art  world  and  the  other  worlds  of  turmoil  that 
make  their  way  into  the  circle.  But  she  has 
rested  her  book  upon  an  apex  of  war.  So  doing, 
she  challenges  a  criticism  of  her  understanding  of 
war.  So  doing,  she  has  romanticized  Nicky 
because  partly  he  was  to  do  the  right  thing  in 
that  war;  while  Michael,  the  poet,  who  at  times 
seems  to  represent  her  heart's  desire,  she  has  been 
tenderly  charitable  to — and  has  cruelly  misrepre- 
sented and  misunderstood.  Miss  Sinclair's  atti- 
tude toward  war  has  vitiated  her  attitude  toward 
Michael,  as  toward  art.  She  has  an  incredibly 
mean  and  cheap  sneer  at  Michael,  poet  and 
resister  of  war:  "After  all,  the  Germans  had  been 
held  back  from  Paris.  As  Stephen  pointed  out 
to  him,  the  Battle  of  the  Marne  had  saved 
Michael.  In  magnificent  defiance  of  the  enemy, 
the  'New  Poems'  of  Michael  Harrison,  with 
illustrations  by  Austin  Mitchell,  were  announced 
as  forthcoming  in  October."  She  is  cheap  again 
when  Lawrence  Stephen,  a  figure  she  intended  to 
be  of  artistic  potence  and  freedom,  is  as  it  were 
converted  to  war  and  is  made  to  say:  "My 
grandmother  was  a  hard  Ulster  woman  and  I 
hated  her.  But  I  wouldn't  be  a  thorn  in  my 
grandmother's  side  if  the  old  lady  was  assaulted 
by  a  brutal  voluptuary,  and  I  saw  her  down  and 
fighting  for  her  honor."  Her  use  of  the  upper- 
class  slang,  "funk,"  which  means  not  doing  things 
in  an  upper-class  way,  failing  from  the  upper- 
class  point  of  view,  is  just  a  little  facile. 

If  the  "reality"  of  war  is  as  her  men  and 
women  see  it,  it  is  a  very  partial  reality.  Michael 
after  his  conversion  to  war  dismisses  a  French- 
man, who  can  be  none  other  than  Henri  Barbusse, 
with :  "It's  a  sort  of  literary  'f rightfulness.'  " 
One  questions  Miss  Sinclair's  taste  in  dismissing 
Barbusse  through  the  pen  of  her  exalted  young 
man.  There  is  no  less  reality  in  Barbusse,  who 
still  fought,  though  without  exaltations  and  great 
mystic  "realities."  Barbusse's  realities  were  the 
stinks  and  horrors  of  war  mixed  with  its  humani- 
ties, on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other,  the  deep 
realization  that  the  roots  of  war  are  in  social  and 
economic  inequality.  Of  this  sort  of  reality  Miss 
Sinclair  seems  to  have  taken  cognizance  in  only 
one  sentence  of  her  book.  It  was  when  Michael 
saw  "that  the  strength  of  the  Allies  was  in  exact 
proportion  to  the  strength  and  enlightenment  of 
their  democracies."  For  the  rest,  it  is  to  be 
feared  that  Barbusse  might  find  "The  Tree  of 
Heaven"  just  a  little  naive  and  perhaps  senti- 


BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 


mental. 


HERBERT  J.  SELIGMANN. 


THE   VIRGIN    ISLANDS   OF   THE    UNITED 

STATES    OF    AMERICA.       By    Luther    K. 

Zabriskie.    Putnam;  $4. 

The  former  Consul  at  St.  Thomas  devotes 
this  volume  of  339  pages  to  a  semipopular 
description  of  our  latest  territorial  acquisition. 
Three  of  the  35  chapters  in  which  the  book  is 
divided  serve  for  a  historical  introduction.  Then 
he  follows  with  a  geographical  description  of 
each  of  the  three  important  islands.  Their  com- 
merce, their  banking  facilities,  their  products,  and 
their  occupations  complete  two  thirds  of  the 
work.  Three  short  chapters  deal  with  general 
social  conditions.  The  remaining  fourth  of  the 
book  treats  of  recent  events,  and  of  the  story  of 
the  transfer  to  the  United  States.  The  narrative 
is  largely  made  up  of  quotations  from  contem- 
porary documents.  In  contrast  with  other  works 
dealing  with  these  islands,  particularly  the  recent 
volume  of  Westergaard,  the  present  work  is 
much  lighter  in  character  and  aims  to  be  more 
general  in  its  description.  It  is  obviously  a  work 
of  love  on  the  part  of  the  author,  and  it  will 
warrant  careful  attention  on  the  part  of  the 
curious  reader. 

THE  LANGUAGE  OF  COLOR.    By  M.  Luck- 
iesh.     Dodd,  Mead;  $1.50. 

This  book  is  modeled  upon  an  old  pattern — 
a  pattern  useful  to  the  preparation  of  themes  in 
college  or  papers  at  Women's  Clubs.  It  covers 
much  ground,  and  at  no  point  digs  deep.  Yet 
fair  as  is  this  description  of  the  type,  it  is  not 
fair  to  the  merit  with  which  the  pattern  is  fol- 
lowed in  this  specific  book.  For  the  casual  reader 
desirous  of  having  something  about  "Color"  on 
the  shelves  of  his  library,  will  find  "The  Lan- 
guage of  Color"  suitable  to  his  needs.  In  its 
four  divisions  it  covers  the  mythology,  the  histor- 
ical and  emotional  associations  of  color,  the  sym- 
bolisms of  the  several  colors,  and  the  scientific 
facts  of  .color,  particularly  the  psychological 
facts,  which  are  well  considered  in  the  light  of 
modern  experiments  on  color  preferences.  Even 
the  aesthetics  of  color  is  discussed.  These  inter- 
ests may  not  clash ;  but  they  are  more  or  less 
differentiated,  and  their  nearly  parallel  treat- 
ment gives  the  false  implication  that  the  data  and 
opinions  are  of  comparable  importance  and  stand 
on  comparable  evidence.  An  author  with  greater 
insight  than  the  present  is  demanded  for  a 
book  of  real  perspicacity  and  clarity.  Yet  this 
criticism  is  perhaps  itself  open  to  the  criti- 
cism that  it  is  not  just  to  judge  a  book  for  not 
accomplishing  what  it  does  not  attempt.  For  a 
rapid  survey  of  the  field  the  volume  has  its  uses; 
it  opens  invitingly  the  door  to  the  house  of  color. 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


491 


FURNITURE  OF  THE  OLDEN  TIME.  By 
Frances  Clarey  Morse.  Macmillan;  $6. 
Twenty  years  ago  our  country  was  overrun  by 
a  cult  of  the  old.  The  "old-fashioned"  and  the 
"new-fangled"  were  locked  in  a  death  grip,  and 
in  matters  aesthetic  the  former  seemed  about  to 
triumph.  Old  furniture,  dusty  pewter,  and  even 
fishing-nets  as  ceiling  decorations  were  in  vogue. 
The  "old  for  old's  sake"  was  a  watchword.  It 
was  the  open  season  for  "the  quaint."  "Junk 
and  Dust,  Junk  and  Dust,"  sang  Gelett  Burgess 
in  a  waspish  mood  as  he  attacked  the  affected 
connoisseurship  of  the  time,  which  bade  fair  to 
strangle  the  impulse  toward  a  rational  aesthetic 
attitude.  But  much  furniture  has  come  out  of 
Michigan  since  then.  It  is  through  the  circula- 
tion of  such  books  as  "Furniture  of  the  Olden 
Time"  that  we  are  being  brought  to  see  the 
trend  of  our  national  taste.  Once  we  were  free 
of  the  mid- Victorian  incubus,  the  return  to  the 
Colonial  type  of  furniture  was  more  than  mere 
sentiment.  Indeed,  had  our  Colonial  period  been 
from  1400  to  1600  instead  of  two  centuries  later, 
it  is  inevitable  that  our  preferences  today  would 
have  been  the  same.  We  should  not  now  rave 
over  Henry  IV  or  Henry  VIII  pieces  or  other 
Gothic  work,  for  the  simple  reason  that  the  Anne- 
Georgian  period  saw  the  development  of  the  best 
forms  and  the  finest  furniture  craftsmanship  all 
over  Europe.  This  perhaps  is  more  a  matter  of 
evolution  than  art,  but  its  realization  is  extremely 
important  to  a  young  nation  of  our  industrial 
tendencies.  Miss  Morse  deals  with  furniture 
actually  in  America  and  much  of  it  American 
made.  The  various  pieces — chairs,  settees,  and 
so  on — are  grouped  in  separate  chapters,  a  process 
slightly  cumbersome,  but  no  better  system  has  so 
far  been  evolved.  The  illustrations,  though 
small,  are  excellently  chosen  and  reproduced,  and 
the  book  contains  two  welcome  chapters  on 
musical  instruments  and  staircases. 

NINETY-SIX  HOURS'  LEAVE.     By  Stephen 

McKenna.     Doran;  $1.35. 

Any  author  who  can  write  so  fine  and  discern- 
ing a  study  of  the  change  in  English  life  from 
the  old  world  of  peace  to  the  new  war  world  of 
today  as  "Sonia"  was,  can  lay  legitimate  claim  to 
a  holiday.  Mr.  McKenna  frankly  takes  his  holi- 
day in  this  gay  little  story  of  three  British  offi- 
cers on  four  days'  leave.  One's  first  temptation 
is  to  regard  the  book  more  as  an  expression  of 
happy  versatility  than  as  an  intrinsically  inter- 
esting example  in  the  genre  of  high-spirited  good 
humor.  This  is  the  unfortunate  penalty  one 
often  pays  for  writing  an  excellent  serious  novel; 
but  "Ninety-Six  Hours'  Leave"  is  an  amusing 
bit,  and  Mr.  McKenna  could  venture  to  be  its 
sponsor  quite  on  its  own  merits.  It  is  a  non- 


sensical fable  about  assuming  a  disguise  for  fun 
and  the  absurd  contretemps  which  result.  Inter- 
est in  the  mood  and  temper  in  which  it  was  writ- 
ten persists  after  the  book  has  accomplished  its 
avowed  purpose  of  entertaining.  One  wonders 
if  German  officers  on  leave  have  as  light-hearted 
a  time.  For  it  is  one  of  the  most  enduring  traits 
of  the  British  temperament  not  to  take  even  a 
world  cataclysm  too  seriously — it  is  something 
to  be  endured,  to  be  "seen  through,"  and  to  be 
laughed  at  as  a  great  joke.  Mr.  McKenna  con- 
vinces you  that  the  type  of  old  civilization  which, 
even  when  it  faces  the  greatest  crisis  of  its  his- 
tory, is  not  grim  about  it — that  such  a  civilization 
will  defeat  Germany  by  its  enduring  jest. 

Two  SUMMERS  IN  THE  ICE  WILDS  OF 
EASTERN  KARAKORAM.  By  Fannie  Bullock 
Workman  and  William  Hunter  Workman. 
Dutton;  $8. 

Eight  summers'  explorations  in  the  remotest 
fastnesses  of  the  Karakorams  from  1898  to  1912 
create  the  background  of  knowledge  and  ex- 
perience for  this  account  of  the  greatest  achieve- 
ments of  these  noted  Himalayists;  to  wit,  the 
exploration  of  1900  square  miles  of  mountain 
and  glacier.  The  crowning  accomplishment  was 
the  exploration  and  mapping  of  the  great  Siachen 
or  Rose  Glacier,  the  longest  non-polar  ice  mass 
in  the  world,  forty-six  miles  in  length,  and 
ranging  in  altitude  from  12,000  to  18,705  feet. 
The  task  was  an  arduous  one,  not  devoid  of 
danger  from  mud  flows,  crevasses,  and  ava- 
lanches, to  say  nothing  of  an  earthquake  which 
crumbled  the  cliffs  and  filled  the  air  with  dust 
for  days.  Long  familiarity  on  the  part  of  the 
authors  with  these  dangers  of  mountain-climbing 
and  ice  work  has  robbed  this  book  of  the  fresh- 
ness and  novelty  of  new  adventure,  although 
there  is  enough  material  therein  for  repeated 
thrills.  Instead  of  receiving  stimulus  from  an 
exhilarating  tale  of  achievement  -the  reader  is 
wearied  by  acidulous  replies  to  critics  of,  and 
comment  upon,  previous  accounts  of  the  authors' 
mountain  experiences.  He  is  even  more  pained 
by  the  strident  assertion  and  repeated  emphasis 
on  the  part  of  the  feminine  author  of  her  share  in 
the  enterprise.  One  finds  himself  unconsciously 
looking  for  the  legend  "Votes  for  Women" 
printed  large  across  the  excellently  elaborated 
map  of  the  Rose  Glacier.  However,  this  quality 
is  doubtless  useful  in  conquering  mountains, 
physical  as  well  as  political  and  social,  and  the 
work  as  a  scientific  treatise  on  glaciers  and  the 
topography  of  the  eastern  Karakoram  has  a 
large,  permanent  value.  The  141  photogravures 
are  superb  portrayals  of  mountain  scenery  at  the 
top  of  the  world,  many  of  them  novel  and  in- 
structive pictures  of  the  glacial  ice  in  action. 


492 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


A  CYCLE  OF  SONNETS.  By  Edith  Willis 
Linn.  James  T.  White  &  Co.,  New  York; 
$1.25.  " 

SONNETS,  and  Other  Lyrics.  By  Rob- 
ert Silliman  Hillyer.  Harvard  University 
Press;  75  cts. 

The  vogue  of  free  verse  has  accomplished  this 
— that  we  can  no  longer  be  deceived  by  mere 
pageantry  of  words  held  together  by  the  conven- 
tional meters.  The  appeal  of  real  poetry  in  such 
meters  however  has  not  been  lessened.  Miss 
Linn's  vocabulary  contains  such  words  as  "som- 
nolent," "opalescence,"  "incarnadined,"  "limned," 
"bedight,"  "chalice,"  "minarets,"  "cerulean," 
"pleached,"  "gnomon,"  "solstice,"  "estival," 
"florescence."  Behind  this  rich  flow  of  words 
there  is  seldom  to  be  found  an  idea  justifying  the 
existence  of  the  sonnets.  In  spite  of  some  very 
pretty  and  worth  while  poems,  the  volume  gives 
the  impression,  furthermore,  that  Miss  Linn  has 
not  derived  her  inspiration  from  reality.  On  two 
occasions  the  sonnet  on  the  left  page  tells  of  the 
impermanence  of  her  love,  while  that  on  the 
right  insists  that  she  will  love  on  eternally. 

Mr.  Hillyer's  sonnets,  on  the  other  hand,  are, 
vitalized  by  consistent,  well  expressed  ideas  and 
are  additional  evidence  that  the  sonnet  can  be 
used  with  signal  success  in  the  face  of  the  re- 
valuing of  poetical  standards  going  on  today. 
The  best  of  his  poems  are  intimate,  real,  satisfy- 
ing. Some  are  mere  Elizabethan  imitations,  but 
these  are  in  the  minority;  the  others  show  an 
individual  expression  which  promises  much.  Mr. 
Hillyer  understands  well  what  can  be  done  and 
what  cannot  be  done  in  a  sonnet.  The  other 
pieces  are  both  good  and  bad;  sometimes  he  has 
caught  the  lyric  quality  of  the  best  American 
poetry.  Taken  as  a  whole  the  book  is  a  readable 
addition  to  our  poetry,  and  heralds  a  welcome 
addition  to  our  poets. 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  THE  FUTURE.     By 

Emile   Boirac.     Translated   and   edited   by 

W.  de  Kerlor.     Stokes;  $2.50. 

A  recent  view,  supported  by  the  evidence  of 
an  increasing  number  of  books  like  the  present, 
sets  forth  that  in  matters  substantiated  by  clear 
scientific  evidence  we  believe  with  strong  reason- 
able confidence;  but  in  those  of  which  we  have 
only  inexpert  or  uncertain  knowledge,  like  poli- 
tics and  psychical  research,  we  have  absolute, 
unshakable  convictions.  For  these,  like  instincts, 
speak  with  the  authentic  voice  of  an  older  nature. 
M.  Boirac  should  have  called  his  work  "The 
Psychology  of  the  Past."  His  voice  sounds  like 
that  of  a  primitive  man  proving  his  modernity 
by  speaking  through  a  telephone.  The  book  is 
one  of  the  many  contemporary  attempts  to  revive 
occult  mysticism  by  conscripting  some  of  the 
products  of  scientific  observation — like  trance, 


dual  personality,  hypnosis — or  by  forcing  analo- 
gies with  X  rays  and  wireless  telegraphy.  But 
the  oil  and  water  will  not  mix ;  it  is  the  old  story 
of  telepathy  and  clairvoyance  and  psychic  healing 
and  messages  from  the  beyond.  It  is  just  a  change 
of  costume,  old  folk  superstition  in  the  dress 
of  Greek  words,  and  a  pretentious  logical  ges- 
ture in  imitation  of  the  wand  of  science.  Whether 
one  finds  this  sort  of  thing  amusing  or  pathetic 
depends  upon  one's  mood :  one  can  be  either  like 
Puck  contemplating  the  folly  of  mortals,  or  like 
Carlyle  in  despair  over  the  ineducability  of  nine- 
teenth-century minds.  Books  of  this  kind  cre- 
ate a  luminous  fog  in  which  the  unwary  see,  as 
in  a  halo,  the  reflection  of  their  own  limitations. 
Reputable  publishers  should  have  some  con- 
science about  extending  their  pernicious  influ- 
ence by  translation.  Absurdity  vies  with  absurd- 
ity on  every  page,  and  pretense  is  added  to  pre- 
tense, from  the  jacket,  which  announces  that  the 
human  body  "radiates  a  powerful  magnetic 
energy,"  to  the  last  page,  which  gives  up  a  "cryp- 
topsychic"  interpretation  of  the  universe. 

A  YEAR  OF  COSTA  RICAN  NATURAL  HIS- 
TORY. By  A.  S.  and  P.  P.  Calvert.  Mac- 
millan;  $3. 

Barriers  of  language  and  culture  have  long 
separated  us  from  our  sister  republics  to  the 
south,  and  even  the  recently  greatly  improved 
facilities  for  transportation  as  a  result  of  the 
growth  of  the  banana  trade  have  not  turned 
any  considerable  tide  of  tourist  travel  to  the  trop- 
ical shores  of  the  Central  American  republics. 
Indeed,  if  one  is  looking  for  the  luxuries  of  travel 
in  the  tropics,  he  will  find  little  to  entice  him  in 
Professor  and  Mrs.  Calvert's  narrative  of  their 
year  of  varied  experiences  in  the  upland  cities 
and  forests  of  Costa  Rica. 

Dragon  flies  were  the  quest.  It  took  the 
explorers  into  the  banana  plantations,  the  low- 
land jungles,  and  upland  forests,  by  canyon 
streams,  by  morass  and  mountain  lake.  The  book 
is  an  entomological  diary  of  daily  jungle  adven- 
tures, of  successful  stalks  on  mosquito  hawks 
and  water  bears,  of  the  joys  over  quarry  taken 
and  the  disappointments  over  big  bugs  that 
escaped.  In  fact,  the  general  reader  is  often  lost 
in  the  multitudinous  details  of  entomological  lore 
which  tire  and  do  not  illuminate.  A  topical 
treatment  with  well-developed  examples  and  an 
omission  of  minor,  oft-repeated  details  would 
have  made  a  more  readable  work.  But  the 
book  contains  valuable  information,  not  only  for 
the  prospective  traveler  in  Costa  Rica,  but  also 
for  anyone  going  for  scientific  exploration  into 
the  American  tropics.  It  gives  a  sympathetic 
and  reliable  picture  of  present-day  village  and 
country  life  in  Costa  Rica. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


493 


HUGO  GROTIUS:  the  Father  of  the  Modern 
Science  of  International  Law.  By  Hamilton 
Vreeland,  Jr.  Oxford  University  Press;  $2. 

Grotius  was  born  at  seven  o'clock  in  the  even- 
ing, and  died  "exactly  at  midnight."  His  "vital 
organs  were  sealed  in  a  copper  casket  and  buried 
in  the  Cathedral  of  Rostock,  to  the  left  of  the 
choir."  These  and  many  other  facts  can  be 
learned  from  this  short  biography.  For  the  book 
is  narrowly  biographical,  containing  no  discus- 
sion of  the  Grotian  legal  philosophy  nor  of  its 
contribution  to  European  thought.  True,  one 
of  the  twelve  chapters  is  called  "The  'De  Jure 
Prasdae'  "  and  another  "The  'De  Jure  Belli  ac 
Pads'  " ;  but  both  chapters  do  little  more  than 
describe  the  circumstances  under  which  the  books 
were  written,  briefly  state  their  contents,  and 
inform  us  that  they  are  masterpieces.  Earlier 
writers  are  mentioned  only  to  exonerate  Grotius 
of  plagiarism.  It  is  perhaps  fortunate  that  the 
writer  so  restricted  himself.  When  he  translates 
"jus"  as  both '"law"  and  "right"  in  the  same 
sentence,  we  cannot  help  suspecting  that  he  does 
not  know  that  the  confusion  of  these  two  words 
is  fundamentally  characteristic  of  Grotius  and  all 
his  followers.  Mr.  Vreeland,  in  all  the  lauda- 
tion of  his  hero  pro  tern,  never  hints  at  the  great 
Hollander's  chief  service  to  the  world — his  rest- 
ing law  on  a  basis  other  than  theology.  If  Mr. 
Vreeland  does  not  know  these  things,  it  is  bet- 
ter that  he  content  himself  a.s  he  has,  recount- 
ing the  miscellaneous  historical  details  which 
make  up  the  volume.  He  loves  all  facts  impar- 
tially, the  small  and  irrelevant  as  much  as  the 
great  and  significant.  He  loves  them  as  facts.  An 
oasis  in  this  desert  might  have  been  Grotius's  es- 
cape from  prison  in  a  trunk;  but  Mr.  Vreeland 
was  on  the  lookout  and  carefully  prefaced  the 
story  with  a  statement  of  how  it  turned  out.  He 
would  probably  be  shocked  at  the  thought  of  a 
historian  consciously  trying  to  prevent  his  work 
from  being  dull. 

OVER  HERE.    By  Hector  MacQuarrie.    Lip- 

pincott;  $1.35. 

This  is  frankly  a  book  of  gossipy  impressions 
by  a  young  Lieutenant  of  the  Royal  Field  Artil- 
lery, sent  to  this  country  as  inspector  of  produc- 
tion for  the  British  Government,  after  being 
invalided  from  Ypres.  Now  most  books  of  gossip 
seem  impertinences  in  war  time.  But  it  would 
be  an  exceedingly  finicky  and  humorless  person 
who  did  not  find  "Over  Here"  a  delightful  three 
hours'  excursion.  Lieutenant  MacQuarrie  does 
not  pretend  to  be  writing  a  literary  masterpiece, 
and  as  he  hopes  his  book  will  be  read  at  home — 
that  is,  in  England — as  much  as  in  the  country 
where  he  has  been  so  observing  and  gracious  a 
guest,  he  can  afford  to  be  franker  in  his  criticisms. 
He  discovers  the  ethnology  of  a  big  steel  town, 


the  money-spending  possibilities  of  Atlantic  City, 
the  privileged  position  of  American  wives,  the 
"chicken,"  the  cocktail  and  the  mint  julep,  the 
country  club,  and  the  human  side  of  that  Euro- 
pean myth  "the  American  business  man."  It  is 
all  very  gay  and  amusing.  And  the  temper  of 
it  is  almost  a  rebuke  to  some  of  our  excesses. 
"I  don't  believe  either,  and  no  one  I  knew  in 
France  during  my  year  there  believed,  that  the 
Boche  were  always  dirty  in  their  tricks,  though 
I  will  admit  that  they  show  up  badly  as  sports- 
men. .  .  I  dislike  intensely  this  savage  hate 
propaganda  that  is  being  affected  here  [in  the 
United  States].  It  is  stupid,  useless,  and  danger- 
ous. Didn't  some  philosopher  say  that  if  he 
wanted  to  punish  a  man  he  would  teach  him  how 
to  hate?  ...  I  always  feel  that  in  the  same 
way  you  hide  love  from  the  rest  of  the  world  be- 
cause you  are  proud  of  it,  so  you  hide  hate  because 
you  are  ashamed  of  it."  There  speaks  the  true 
sportsman.  We  like  Lieutenant  MacQuarrie  all 
the  better  for  this  directness.  But  from  the  time 
he  learned  to  accommodate  himself  to  the  public 
horrors  of  our  sleeping  cars  we  liked  him  any- 
way. The  spirit  of  Anglo-American  cooperation 
is  stronger  for  his  having  come  here. 

FORECASTING  THE  YIELD  AND  THE  PRICE 
OF  COTTON.  By  Henry  Ludwell  Moore. 
Macmillan;  $2.50. 

The  mark  of  a  real  science  is  said  to  be  the 
power  of  prediction,  the  power  to  forecast  the 
future.  Given  certain  conditions,  certain  results 
must  follow.  But  in  the  social  sciences — like 
economics,  sociology,  and  history — the  human 
equation  enters  and  must  be  reckoned  with;  and 
while  it  is  doubtless  ultimately  true  that  all 
human  actions  are  the  result  of  definitely  related 
forces,  it  is  also  true  that  these  forces  and  their 
relations  are  so  complex  and  elusive  that  they 
have,  thus  far  at  least,  escaped  our  grasp.  This 
is  especially  true  in  the  field  of  economics,  al- 
though some  advance  has  been  made  by  the  use 
of  statistics  and  mathematical  methods.  The 
present  essay  on  the  yield  and  the  price  of  cotton 
is  a  scholarly  attempt  to  obtain  a  method  by 
which  accurate  prediction  may  be  possible.  Math- 
ematical methods  of  probability  are  used  to  reduce 
to  system  the  extraction  of  truth  contained  in 
official  statistics  and  to  compute  with  relative 
exactitude  the  influence  of  various  factors.  An 
informing  chapter  on  the  mathematics  of  correla- 
tion describes  clearly  the  method  used.  Two 
chapters  are  devoted  to  a  critical  examination  of 
the  methods  and  results  of  the  Department  of 
Agriculture  as  to  the  yield  and  value  per  acre 
and  of  the  current  reports  of  the  Weather 
Bureau  as  to  rainfall  and  temperature.  A  better 
method  of  correlation  is  substituted  for  the  offi- 


494 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


cial  one,  and  the  conclusion  seems  to  be  worked 
out  that  given  certain  conditions,  a  certain  yield 
can  be  forecast.  The  same  method  is  then 
carried  over  into  the  field  of  demand.  Here 
however  the  result  is  not  so  conclusive,  because 
when  the  supply  of  cotton  varies,  it  is  necessary 
that  the  demand  for  other  articles  remain  the 
same  if  the  demand  for  cotton  is  to  be  forecast 
accurately.  Changes  in  style — the  human  equa- 
tion— enter  into  the  problem.  Who  could  have 
forecast,  for  example,  the  slump  in  the  bicy9le 
industry?  Again,  a  court  goes  into  mourning 
and  there  is  an  unpredictable  demand  for  black 
goods.  The  demand  for  cotton  goods  may  be 
more  stable  than  that  for  most  goods,  but  the 
effect  of  high  prices  on  consumption  is  a  very 
difficult  problem  to  solve  correctly.  Many  econo- 
mists question  the  value  of  mathematical  state- 
ments except  as  illustrating  previously  ascertained 
truth.  The  trouble  lies  in  the  fact  that  the  con- 
clusion is  wrapped  up  in  the  mathematical  pre- 
mise. Professor  Moore  has  however  made  in 
this  study  a  distinct  and  interesting  contribution 
to  economic  literature. 

SOUTH-EASTERN  EUROPE:  The  Main  Prob- 
lem of  the  Present  World  Struggle.  By 
Vladislav  R.  Savic.  Revell;  $1.50. 

It  is  altogether  likely  that  the  most  difficult 
task  that  will  fall  to  the  negotiators  of  the  com- 
ing peace  will  be  the  solution  of  the  Balkan  prob- 
lem. Statesmen,  diplomats,  and  warriors  have 
vainly  sought  such  a  settlement  through  the  cen- 
turies; one  of  the  most  colossal  blunders. of  the 
past  hundred  years — the  revision  of  the  treaty 
of  San  Stefano  at  Berlin  in  1875 — was  commit- 
ted in  the  course  of  the  search.  Two  or  three 
main  requirements  of  the  situation  are  obvious 
to  all  fair-minded  people.  The  Turk  as  a  ruler 
should  be  finally  and  completely  expelled  from 
Europe.  The  just  claims  of  Greece  should  be 
recognized.  Most  important  of  all,  the  whole 
vast  stretch  of  territory  from  the  Drave  and  the 
Isonzo  to  the  Bosphorus  and  the  j^Egean  should 
be  laid  out  in  a  new  group  of  states  based  funda- 
mentally upon  the  principle  of  nationality.  One 
of  the  most  important  of  these  new,  truly  national 
states  would,  under  any  arrangement,  \be  that  of 
the  Jugoslavs,  or  Southern  Slavs,  composed  of 
the  Serbs,  the  Croats,  and  the  Slovenes;  and  in 
Savic's  "South-Eastern  Europe"  are  presented  in 
vivid  fashion  the  arguments  for  this  particular 
part  of  the  general  readjustment.  The  author 
is  a  native  Serb  who  has  been  head  of  the  press 
bureau  in  the  foreign  office  at  Belgrade,  and  also 
a  correspondent  of  various  English  and  other 
foreign  newspapers.  He  writes  good  journalistic 
English  and  shows  a  considerable  acquaintance 
with  modern  European  history  and  politics.  The 


reader  must  occasionally  make  allowance  for 
an  excess  of  enthusiasm.  Yet  on  the  whole  the 
tone  is  restrained  and  the  argument  unassailable. 
How  the  Jugoslavs  came  to  be  in  the  Balkans, 
the  incongruity  of  their  exposed  international 
position  with  their  pacific  character,  the  wrongs 
which  they  have  suffered  from  Austria-Hungary, 
the  role  of  Servia  in  the  Balkan  wars  and  in  the 
present  conflict,  the  aspirations  and  rights  of  the 
South  Slav  peoples,  the  reasons  why  Americans 
should  be  interested  in  seeing  justice  done  in 
Southeastern  Europe:  these  are  the  matters  to 
which  space  is  chiefly  given.  The  South  Slav 
state  which  Mr.  Savic  conceives  would  in- 
clude, besides  Servia  and  Montenegro,  Bosnia 
and  Herzegovina,  Carniola,  Goritzia,  half  of 
Istria,  all  of  the  Dalmatian  coast,  and  other 
pieces  of  land,  aggregating  one  hundred  thou- 
sand square  miles  and  having  a  population  of 
about  fourteen  millions.  To  create  such  a  state 
would  mean,  of  course,  to  unite  certain  Balkan 
states  that  hitherto  have  been  independent,  to 
dismember  Hungary,  and  to  attach  the  coastal 
territories  for  which  Italy  is  actively  reaching 
out  in  the  present  conflict.  Assuming  the  defeat 
of  the  Teutonic  powers,  the  chief  difficulty  is 
likely  to  arise  from  the  clash  of  interests  with 
the  Italians.  Mr.  Savic  presents  fairly  the  Ital- 
ian claims  and  then  produces  strong  armument 
to  show  that  they  should  not  be  allowed  to  stand 
as  against  the  superior  rights  of  the  Jugoslavs. 
Italian  expansionists  have  an  unanswerable  case 
in  the  Trentino,  and  a  fairly  good  one  in  Trieste. 
But  the  Dalmatian  coasts  southward  to  Albania 
(which  Mr.  Savic  would  leave  autonomous)  are 
ethnically  and  in  other  ways  far  more  Slavic  than 
Italian.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  the  Italian  de- 
mands in  this  quarter  will  not  be  pressed,  for 
the  result  could  hardly  fail  to  be  discord  and 
misfortune  all  round.  To  fulfill  the  legitimate 
aspirations  of  a  long  divided  and  oppressed  peo- 
ple, thereby  contributing  to  the  future  stability 
of  the  Southeast,  and  to  set  up  the  very  sort  of 
barrier  to  Teutonic  imperialistic  advance  south- 
eastward which  the  Berlin  and  Vienna  govern- 
ments in  1914  proposed  to  avert — these  the 
author  convincingly  puts  forward  as  the  great 
reasons  why  "Jugoslavia"  should,  at  the  restora- 
tion of  peace,  be  allowed  at  last  to  become  a 
reality. 

ON  THE  HEADWATERS  OF  PEACE  RIVER. 

By  Paul  Leland  Haworth.     Scribner;  $4. 

We  owe  most  of  the  good  books  of  backwoods 
travel  to  men  who  are  lured  into  the  wilds  by  the 
spirit  of  adventure  rather  than  stern  necessity. 
If  Daniel  Boone  had  been  a  writer,  there  would 
have  remained  comparatively  few  opportunities 
for  men  like  Ernest  Thompson  Seton,  Stewart 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


495 


Edward  White,  and  Paul  Leland  Haworth  to 
distinguish  themselves.  But  the  earlier  woods- 
men had  neither  the  leisure  nor  the  ability  to 
chronicle  more  than  the  barest  outlines  of  their 
achievements.  Mr.  Haworth  possesses  in  a 
marked  degree  the  faculty  of  seeing  in  retrospect 
the  picturesque  features  of  an  expedition.  With 
a  guide  who  had  been  part  way  he  penetrated 
into  the  upper  reaches  of  the  Peace  River  basin 
and  explored  some  hitherto  unvisited  country. 
While  the  trip  involved  some  hardships  and  re- 
quired considerable  skill  in  woodcraft,  it  did  not 
present  any  extraordinary  danger.  The  adven- 
tures were  chiefly  those  which  come  to  all  hunters 
and  fishermen  who  get  far  away  from  beaten 
tracks.  There  was  enough  pot-hunting  to  make 
it  interesting  from  the  sportsman's  point  of  view, 
inasmuch  as  the  game  included  bear,  moose, 
mountain  sheep,  and  the  like,  and  certain  of  the 
streams  provided  royal  fishing.  Mr.  Haworth 
named  one  of  the  unmapped  peaks  Mount  Lloyd 
George,  a  stream  after  the  heroic  aviator  Warne- 
ford,  and  a  mountain  range  for  Marshal  Joffre. 
He  discovered  the  glacier  that  makes  the  Quada- 
cha  River  white  and  cleared  up  a  popular  mis- 
conception of  the  reason  for  the  phenomenon. 
These  were  practically  all  of  the  geographical 
results  of  the  expedition.  The  book  is  mainly  a 
very  fascinating  record  of  an  out-of-door  man's 
good  time. 

A  SOLDIER'S  MEMORIES.     By  Major-Gen- 
eral Sir  George  Younghusband.  Button ;  $5. 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  the  reminiscences  of 
British  army  officers  dating  from  the  period  be- 
fore the  present  world  struggle  will  soon  give 
way  to  the  experiences  of  youthful  veterans  now 
engaged  in  making  history.  One  would  expect 
the  old  and  the  new  schools  to  belong  to  the 
period  of  the  Boer  War  and  after ;  but  the  latest 
War  Office  statistics  show  the  heavy  toll  taken 
of  the  South  African  veterans.  Thus  such  vol- 
umes as  Sir  George  Younghusband's  are  the  last 
to  cover  the  period  from  the  Afghan  to  the  Boer 
War.  From  the  literary  point  of  view,  apart 
from  the  technical  point  of  view  now  grown 
obsolete,  the  change  will  be  welcome.  It  is  a 
commonplace  that  wit  and  humor  have  had  small 
place  in  these  records  of  the  recent  past,  when 
a  certain  brand  of  labored,  smoking-room  hilar- 
ity glossed  the  horseplay  and  skylarking  famil- 
iarly associated  with  the  "griffins" — as  raw  young 
subalterns  are  termed  on  their  first,  callow  ap- 
pearances in  India.  Since  the  Territorial  regi- 
ments took  up  the  garrisoning  of  India  and  the 
Colonies  during  the  present  war,  the  hobblede- 
hoy of  the  Kipling  school  has  given  way  to  the 
university-bred  and  far  more  intelligent  type  of 
junior  officer. 


General  Younghusband  (not  to  be  confused 
with  a  scholarly  brother  who  led  the  British  to 
Lhassa)  has  seen  fit  to  regale  us  with  many 
such  excerpts  from  a  life  devoted  to  soldiering 
in  India,  Egypt,  and  South  Africa,  and  the  selec- 
tions are  not  very  amusing.  We  are  certain  that 
subalterns  of  the  new  army  will  have  better  taste 
than  to  train  their  dogs  to  "go  for  niggers,"  and 
those  of  them  who  have  seen  the  heroism  and 
sacrifices  of  the  Indian  Army  in  France,  East 
Africa,  the  Dardanelles,  Palestine,  and  Mesopo- 
tamia will  certainly  refrain  from  designating 
their  Aryan  comrades  by  that  name.  But  Gen- 
eral Younghusband  is  frankly  of  the  old  school, 
and  his  pages  contain  interesting  and  exciting 
records  of  Asiatic  adventure.  Glimpses  of  the 
early  days  on  the  Northwest  Frontier  of  India, 
of  the  customs  and  methods  of  fighting  among 
Afghan  and  Afridi,  including  experiences  among 
the  picturesque  Shans  of  the  Burmese  frontier, 
on  the  Egyptian  hinterland,  and  in  South  Africa, 
help  to  light  up  swashbuckling  annals  that  were 
nuts  and  wine  to  the  adolescent  Kipling,  but 
which  are  rapidly  growing  old-fashioned.  Gen- 
eral Younghusband  only  once  surpasses  himself 
— in  his  portrait  of  the  Column  Commander  he 
fought  under  in  South  Africa;  we  can  only  hope 
that  the  new  army  will  discover  many  men  of 
that  knightly  mould.  The  author  has  been  free 
in  recording  the  names  of  kings,  generals,  and 
many  nonentities  in  his  pages,  but  we  wish  that 
the  name  of  the  Column  Commander  had  sur- 
vived. 

We  did  not  expect  to  find  the  General  illu- 
minating on  the  Indian  problem,  and  we  are  not 
disappointed.  He  belongs  to  that  defunct  school 
of  Anglo-Indian  officials  who,  writing  on  India 
and  the  Indians,  are  at  their  best  when  they  are 
sentimental.  Thus  the  devotion  of  the  old  na- 
tive officer,  Ibrahim  Khan,  to  the  Younghusband 
family  is  fittingly  recorded.  It  is  to  the  civil 
and  military  officers  of  the  present  generation 
that  we  look  for  a  solution  of  the  problem. 
On  the  whole,  the  author's  long  service  in 
India  has  not  gleaned  the  rich  harvest  of  that 
fascinating  ethnical  laboratory  we  have  been 
rewarded  with  in  books  from  men  slightly  his 
junior.  Nor  are  the  sketches  of  the  men  he  has 
met,  from  King  Edward  to  officers  like  Roberts 
and  Kitchener,  of  any  value  to  the  biographer. 
Writing  like  a  soldier,  however,  he  makes  his 
impressions,  including  those  of  a  brief  sojourn  in 
America,  typical  of  that  military  valetudinarian- 
ism of  which  General  Younghusband  is  a  notable 
example.  We  are  indebted  to  him  for  some 
interesting  data  on  British  mess  and  regimental 
customs  which  will  appeal  to  the  new  army, 
together  with  a  chapter  on  the  almost  forgotten 
deeds  that  won  the  coveted  Cross  for  some  of 
his  contemporaries  in  Victorian  India. 


496 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


THE  GERMAN  IMPERIALISTS  WHO  ARE  so 
gaily  plundering  the  border  states  of  Russia  and 
so  busily  handing  out  dukedoms  and  petty  princi- 
palities to  the  faithful,  will  not  read  President 
Wilson's  Red  Cross  speech  with  any  considerable 
pleasure.  It  is  the  first  public  announcement 
from  the  Allied  side  that  the  open  season  in 
Russia  has  definitely  closed.  Sooner  or  later  the 
clique  of  titled  bandits  who  are  leading  Germany 
and  the  German  people  to  ruin  will  realize 
that  there  is  a  certain  irreducible  minimum 
which  they  must  offer  before  they  can  even  dis- 
cuss peace  with  the  Allies.  That  minimum  has 
been  stated  in  Germany  itself  and  by  the  majority 
of  a  body  they  now  affect  to  despise — the  Reichs- 
tag. Sooner  or  later  the  military  party  will 
realize  that  the  famous  phrase  of  the  resolution — 
no  annexations  and  no  indemnities — does  repre- 
sent a  political  reality  which  they  must  cal- 
culate upon.  May  the  German  people  themselves 
soon  realize  it  too.  For  although  the  Allies 
may  demand  much  more  than  a  status  quo  peace, 
from  the  temper  of  President  Wilson's  speech 
it  is  clear  they  will  not  even  discuss  peace  until 
this  much  has  been  guaranteed. 


IN    A    RECENT    ISSUE    OF    THE    LONDON    "NA- 

tion"  Augustine  Birrell  concludes  a  review  of 
"A  World  in  Ferment"  with  this  remarkable 
sentence:  "In  an  hour  of  testing  trial  we  may 
indeed  be  thankful  to  possess  across  the  wide 
Atlantic  such  leaders  of  men  as  the  two  American 
Doctors — Wilson  and  Butler."  We  say  "re- 
markable," for  in  any  event  it  would  be  something 
odd  to  discover  an  English  contemporary  so  eager 
to  prove  the  intellectual  leadership  of  an  ally, 
hitherto  seldom  conceded  any  intellectual  leader- 
ship, as  to  advance  this  astounding  comparison. 
The  sentence  is  all  the  more  remarkable  how- 
ever in  view  of  the  curious  pattern  of  the  review 
which  precedes,  the  strangest  mosaic  of  satire 
and  amiability  that  we  have  read  for  a  long  time 
— even  in  the  "Nation."  That  characteristic  of 
Dr.  Butler's  style  and  method  of  thought,  sen- 
tentious platitude,  has  evidently  not  escaped  so 
discerning  and  shrewd  a  critic  as  Mr.  Birrell. 
But  he  is  terribly  nice  about  it:  "I  will  add,  as 
nearly  as  possible  in  Dr.  Butler's  own  words, 
which  at  times  glow  with  'an  unconquerable 
optimism'  I  find  it  easier  to  love  than  to  share, 
half-a-dozen  of  his  Sententiae,  which  may  serve 
us,  in  default  of  any  Thomas  Fuller  of  our  own, 
for  'Good  Thoughts  in  Bad  Times.'  "  Here  the 
desire  to  please  American  academic  vanity  obvi- 
ously clashes  with  the  desire  to  be  somewhat 
harsher  than  any  vanity  could  endure.  Mr.  Bir- 
rell should  be  advised  that  he  really  does  not 


need  to  be  so  meticulously  discriminating  and 
friendly.  American  intellectual  circles  will  not 
be  aggrieved  at  any  severe  judgment  on  Dr.  But- 
ler's intellectual  processes.  And  Mr.  Birrell  may 
rest  easy  in  his  mind  about  such  severity's  tend- 
ing by  ever  so  infinitely  little  to  disturb  that  intel- 
lectual rapprochement  which  is  one  of  the  hap- 
piest by-products  of  the  present  Anglo-American 
cooperation. 

WHAT  Miss  DEUTSCH  HAS  TO  SAY  ABOUT 
librarians'  salaries  in  this  issue  of  THE  DIAL  is 
reenforced  in  a  letter  recently  prepared  by  a  com- 
mittee of  the  Association  of  American  Library 
Schools  and  addressed  to  library  trustees  and 
librarians.  The  letter  sets  forth  that  the  present 
great  demand,  in  business  and  in  government 
bureaus,  for  persons  skilled  in  filing  and 
indexing  has  created  a  situation  which  "has 
affected  directly  or  indirectly  nearly  all  libraries 
and  has  become  a  grave  one  in  some  of  the 
larger."  Last  year,  for  instance,  two  depart- 
ments of  the  New  York  Public  Library  lost  no 
less  than  208  trained  employees  to  this  competi- 
tion. The  committee  estimates  that  "probably 
1000  persons  receiving  salaries  from  $500  to 
$1000  have  been  drawn  out  of  active  library 
work  by  initial  salaries  of  $1000  to  $1500." 
Clearly  this  competition  will  not  relax  during 
the  war,  and  may  not  afterward;  so  that  the 
libraries  must  face  the  alternatives  of  paying 
higher  salaries  or  submitting  to  incompetent  serv- 
ice. What  used  to  be  an  agitation  for  a  just 
wage  is  rapidly  becoming  a  grim  economic  neces- 
sity. It  is  probable  that  in  most  cases  librarians, 
and  in  many  cases  boards  of  trustees,  are  powerless 
to  meet  the  situation  from  present  appropriations ; 
but  in  addressing  them,  the  committee,  who  can 
scarcely  address  the  holders  of  the  public  purse 
strings  throughout  the  country,  have  done  what 
they  could  to  get  the  situation  recognized  in  the 
proper  quarters.  It  remains  for  library  officers 
to  urge  upon  the  authorities  not  only  the  justice 
of  higher  salaries,  but  their  immediate  necessity 
if  the  library  is  not  to  fall  away  from  what  effi- 
ciency it  has  attained  in  its  public  function. 

THAT  THE  NEFARIOUS  INTERLOCKING  OF 
business  with  politics  has  its  parallel  in  the 
academic  world  in  the  interlocking  of  business 
with  doctrine  and  academic  control  is  of  course 
no  secret.  The  cases  of  Nearing,  Keasbey,  Cat- 
tell,  Dana,  Beard,  and  others  keep  reminding  us, 
and  the  dignified  if  impotent  Association  of  Uni- 
versity Professors  does  not  let  us  forget.  But 
that  impatience  with  the  situation  should  take 
trie  form  of  a  programme  for  a  new  College  of 
Political  Science,  free  from  all  control  except 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


497 


a  firm  purpose  to  speak  and  teach  the  truth,  is 
a  bit  of  news  as  welcome  as  it  is  exciting.  A 
plan  is  afoot  to  create  in  New  York  a  College 
of  Political  Science  that  shall  study  political 
questions  purely  in  the  spirit  of  science,  that  shall 
seek  in  that  spirit  to  train  public  servants  by 
means  of  courses  leading  to  the  degrees  of  Mas- 
ter of  Arts  and  Doctor  of  Philosophy.  The 
instructors  are  to  be  chosen  from  the  most  dis- 
tinguished specialists  in  the  various  branches  of 
social  science.  They  are  to  have  complete  self- 
government,  to  be  free  from  administrative 
responsibilities  and  the  administrative  machine  of 
deans,  presidents,  and  "the  usual  administrative 
retinue."  Such  administration  as  may  be  needed 
is  to  be  carried  on  by  a  board  of  trustees,  one 
half  of  whom  are  to  be  elected  annually  by  the 
faculty,  which  is  also  to  have  exclusive  power 
of  appointment  and  dismissal.  The  influence 
that  such  a  college  could  wield  over  the  political 
and  academic  life  and  standards  of  the  country 
is,  if  it  lived  up  to  its  programme,  little  short  of 
controlling.  There  should  be  no  delay  in  its 
establishment. 

THE   QUESTION   OF   WHAT   PART  ADVERTISING 

and  reviewing  play  in  the  making  of  a  book  is  per- 
haps an  older  one  than  we  think.  Henry  Adams,  it 
seems,  asked  it  a  generation  ago.  "The  Life  of 
John  Hay"  lately  gave  away  the  long  kept  secret 
of  his  authorship  of  "Democracy,"  and  Henry 
Holt  &  Co.,  his  publishers,  now  divulge  the  fact 
that  he  was  also  the  author  of  "Esther,"  a  novel 
issued  in  1884.  "Democracy"  was  marketed  in 
the  usual  way  and  has  run  through  sixteen  edi- 
tions. "Esther"  was  neither  advertised  nor  sent 
out  for  review,  the  author  making  it  a  test  of  a 
book's  opportunity  to  succeed  on  its  own  merit — 
and  who  remembers  "Esther"?  Had  the  novel 
been  another  "Democracy"  the  test  might  have 
had  some  value.  But  when  was  an  author — or, 
for  that  matter,  his  publisher — a  sound  judge  of 
his  book's  merit?  Even  while  the  publisher  is 
advertising  the  book's  excellence,  the  reviewers 
begin  speaking  for  the  ultimate  judge,  the  public; 
and  that  is  a  verdict  which  generally  occasions 
some  revision,  either  downward  or  upward,  in 
their  claims.  Make  reviewing  difficult,  and  you 
delay,  more  than  likely  you  prevent,  the  handing 
down  of  that  verdict.  Wine  may  perhaps  dis- 
pense with  a  bush,  but  books  are  not  books  with- 
out reviewers. 

IN   THE    AMUSING    QUARREL   D'ESTIME,    AS    IT 

might  be  called,  between  Postmaster  General  Bur- 
leson  and  ex-President  Roosevelt  apropos  of  the 
degree  of  patriotism  manifested  by  the  New  York 
"Tribune,"  "Collier's,"  and  the  "Metropolitan" 
as  contrasted  with  the  Hearst  newspapers,  Mr. 


Burleson  certainly  has  the  better  of  the  argument 
— so  far,  at  any  rate;  for  it  is  not  like  the 
Colonel  to  allow  anyone  else  the  last  word — 
when  he  points  out  that  "all  but  two  of  the 
articles  in  the  Hearst  papers  referred  to  by  Mr. 
Roosevelt  were  published  before  the  passage  of 
the  Espionage  Act  (June  15,  1917)  and  some  of 
them  before  our  entry  into  the  war."  This  is 
the  hit  direct.  For  if  the  provisions  of  the 
Espionage  Act  are  to  be  made  retroactive  there 
is  no  logical  reason  why  it  should  stop  short  at 
any  particular  point.  It  might  even  go  back  to 
the  time  when  Colonel  Roosevelt  said  nice  things 
about  the  Kaiser — long  before  the  present  war, 
to  be  sure,  but  mere  chronology  would  be  irrele- 
vant were  the  retroactive  principle  strictly  ap- 
plied. It  might  even  include  professors  who 
received  honorary  degrees  from  German  univer- 
sities, and  praised  the  meticulous  efficiency  of 
Prussian  scholarship.  It  might  cover  all  who 
have  seen  aesthetic  charm  in  the  stage-settings  of 
the  Munich  theatre.  In  fact,  who  of  us  would 
'scape  whipping  if  all  the  nice  things  we  said 
about  Germany  and  the  Germans  before  we  en- 
tered the  war  were  brought  up  against  us?  That 
is  the  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  the  theory  that 
the  Espionage  Act  is  a  kind  of  free-for-all  test  of 
character  from  birth  (as  some  excited  individ- 
uals are  actually  trying  to  make  it)  instead  of 
what  it  obviously  is,  a  special  measure  for  war 
time  and  war  time  alone. 

THE  AMERICAN  LIBRARY  ASSOCIATION  WAR 
Service  (discussed  in  THE  DIAL  for  January  31) 
now  reports  that  more  than  three  million  books 
were  donated  to  the  soldiers  and  sailors  in  the 
recent  campaign.  Not  only  the  number  but  also 
the  high  quality  of  the  donations  exceeded  the 
librarians'  expectations.  The  library  thus  assem- 
bled is  one  third  larger  than  the  Congressional 
and  handsomely  lives  up  to  the  Association's  an- 
nounced aim:  "For  every  man  in  service  a  book 
in  service."  Best  of  all,  it  permits  the  library 
funds  to  be  devoted  more  to  building  and  main- 
tenance than  to  the  purchase  of  books.  Here  is 
cause  for  congratulation — but  not  for  ceasing  to 
give.  Shortly  there  will  be  long  casualty  lists 
among  the  three  million  volumes,  whose  ranks 
must  receive  constant  reinforcements  from  fresh 
donations.  One  must  however  observe  certain 
precautions  in  his  giving:  these  librarians,  like 
their  public  colleagues,  play  the  censor.  Zola's 
"L'  Assommoir,"  Daudet's  "Sapho,"  and  Mau- 
passant's "Bel-Ami,"  it  appears,  are  to  have  no 
chance  to  rub  the  bloom  off  our  soldiers.  But  if 
one  is  so  fortunate  as  to  possess  a  copy  of  the 
famous  expurgated  edition  of  Felicia  Hemans's 
poems,  one  has  no  right  to  withhold  it  from  the 
army. 


.498 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


BRIEFER  MENTION 


Many,  we  suppose,  are  the  reasons  for  travel- 
ing: pure  wanderlust;  the  desire  to  say,  "Yes,  I 
have  been  there";  and  the  expectancy  of  its  being 
the  short  road  to  culture.  And  as  many  as  the 
reasons  for  doing  it  are  the  varieties  of  books 
written  to  coax  the  cautious  dollar  from  the  pockets 
of  those  who  are  smitten  with  the  travel  fever. 
We  remember  hearing  one  of  our  best  known 
globe-trotters  say  some  four  years  ago  that  South 
America  would  be  the  tourists'  Mecca  in  the  near 
future.  Since  that  time  numberless  have  been 
the  books  issued  regarding  that  continent — some 
picturing  it  a  second  Eden,  some  as  the  breeding- 
place  of  every  ill  known  to  man,  and  some  taking 
a  middle  ground.  In  "Vagabonding  down  the 
Andes"  (Century;  $4.)  Mr.  Franck  shows  it  as  a 
country  little  removed  from  savagery,  where  even 
the  largest  cities  do  not  know  the  alpha  of  clean- 
liness or  sanitation  and  where  the  natives  are  still 
using  the  primitive  instruments  of  the  Incas.  He 
asserts  over  and  over  that  many  of  the  leaders 
in  society  there  are  of  an  intelligence  equal  to  that 
of  a  schoolboy  in  our  country.  To  one  of  Mr. 
Franck's  temperament,  however,  this  very  primi- 
tiveness  is  one  of  the  country's  chief  charms.  With 
the  winding  road  ever  beckoning  him  on,  he  makes 
the  journey  from  Colombia  to  Argentina  mostly 
on  foot  along  the  little  frequented  roads  and  trails 
of  the  mid-Andes.  He  gets  so  far  out  of  touch 
with  the  world  that  he  is  obliged  to  make  him- 
self understood  with  his  few  words  of  Quichua, 
the  ancient  Indian  language.  Part  of  the  journey 
is  amusingly  reminiscent  of  R.  L.  S.,  for  Mr.  Franck 
buys  a  donkey  to  carry  his  luggage.  Whatever  the 
difficulties  of  bitter  cold,  or  hard  travel,  the  adven- 
turer clings  to  his  camera  and  as  a  result  we  have 
a  most  unusual  collection  of  photographs.  The  book 
makes  good  reading  but  is  hardly  likely  to  create 
enthusiasm  in  the  breast  of  the  ordinary  tourist 
or  business  man.  One  prefers  to  suffer  the  trib- 
ulations of  South  American  travel  by  proxy. 

In  ,  striking  contrast  to  the  cold,  forbidding 
Andean  landscape  and  hard  travel  there,  is  Robert 
Shackleton's  comfortable  motor  trip  through  the 
soft  smiling  landscape  of  Great  Britain — a  trip 
made  with  almost  no  engine  trouble,  over  nearly 
perfect  roads,  and  punctuated  by  stops  at  the  best 
of  inns.  Mr.  Shackleton  tells  how,  in  six  weeks,  all 
points  of  historical  or  literary  interest  or  of  beauty 
were  visited  in  a  roundabout  journey  that  goes 
through  Wales,  over  into  England,  along  the  Wye 
valley,  the  coast  of  Somerset  and  Devon,  the  whole 
south  coast  of  England,  north  to  Canterbury,  Lon- 
don, and  on  to  Oxford  and  Stratford,  Warwick, 
Coventry,  east  to  the  North  Sea  coast,  then  inland 
again  to  Lincoln  and  York,  and  on  north  into 
Scotland  to  Edinburgh,  the  lakes,  the  highlands, 
and  back  southwest  to  Glasgow,  and  south  through 
the  English  lake  country,  Sherwood,  H addon  Hall, 
and  at  last  to  Liverpool.  "Touring  Great  Britain" 
(Penn  Publishing  Co.;  $2.50)  is  three  things  in 
one:  a  readable  story,  a  splendid  guidebook,  and 
a  beautiful  gift  book. 

In  "The  Adirondacks"  (Century;  $2.50)  T.  Mor- 


ns Longstreth  is  possessed  of  much  enthusiasm  for 
his  subject  but  little  native  ability  in  organizing 
his  impressions.  He  starts  out  by  writing  a  sort 
of  daily  journal  which  gives  an  account  of  his  trip 
through  the  mountains.  Then  he  breaks  off  into 
chapters,  wherein  he  discusses  the  tree  and  ani- 
mal life  found  there,  the  inns,  a  few  of  the  better 
known  peaks — all  somewhat  incoherently  done. 
When  at  length  he  gives  us  a  bibliography  of  Adi- 
rondack literature,  we  discover  that  there  really 
is  a  need  both  for  reliable,  comprehensive  guides 
and  for  records  of  impressions.  Both  are  indeed 
meager  and  incomplete.  Perhaps  the  nearest  ap- 
proach to  the  latter  is  Dr.  Henry  Van  Dyke's 
account  of  his  ascent  of  Ampersand  in  "Little 
Rivers." 

"Finland  and  the  Finns,"  by  Arthur  Reade 
(Dodd,  Mead;  $2.),  is  a  timely  book,  considering 
that  the  world  is  looking  so  much  to  Russia  and  her 
sister  states  just  now.  It  is  a  clear  exposition  of  the 
various  political  and  social  problems  of  the  Finnish 
people.  This  means  giving  the  reader  an  interesting 
historical  perspective  wherein  is  traced  the  varying 
Russian,  Swedish,  and  Finnish  influences.  Finland 
is  a  most  remarkable  example  of  a  country  pre- 
serving intact  its  national  traits'  in  spite  of  outside 
oppression.  There  are  also  fine  chapters  on  the 
painting,  music,  and  literature  of  Finland,  on  edu- 
cation there  and  the  status  of  woman,  and  a  suffi- 
ciently clear  account  of  the  chief  industries. 
Beside  all  this  the  author  shows  us  both  city  and 
country  folk — their  manners,  customs,  and  beliefs. 
Today  one  is  permitted  to  study  the  potentialities 
of  any  country  and  especially  of  a  country  as  young 
(politically  speaking)  as  Finland,  for  it  is  only 
within  the  last  decade  that  this  race  has  managed 
to  make  its  own  language  the  official  one  for  every 
purpose.  Just  here  is  where  Mr.  Reade's  book 
is  valuable:  it  is  an  authoritative  source  of  material 
for  such  a  study — material  wholly  pertinent  and 
sensibly  classified — a  book  not  to  be  missed  by  any 
student  of  today's  affairs. 

One  would  imagine  that  there  was  no  corner 
of  Europe  but  had  been  described  over  and  over, 
yet  that  there  is  something  new  Eugenie  M.  Fryer 
reveals,  classifying  some  beautiful  places  under  the 
title  of  "The  Hill-Towns  of  France"  (Dutton; 
$2.50).  She  has  put  them  into  four  groups:  "First, 
the  large  town,  commanded  and  protected  by  the 
turrets  and  massive  towers  of  its  walls  and  cita- 
del; second,  the  feudal  castle,  the  residence  of 
some  great  lord  about  whose  walls  a  straggling 
town  has  grown  up;  third,  the  fortified  town,  com- 
munal in  character,  which  governed  by  no  over- 
lord and  possessed  of  no  castle,  protects  itself  from 
invasion  by  fortifying  its  houses  and  churches  also; 
fourth,  the  monastic  hill-town,  its  defences  built 
primarily  to  defend  a  shrine."  It  is  in  one  sense  a 
guidebook,  but  it  is  no  less  a  book  to  be  enjoyed 
by  the  winter  fireside.  Almost  thirty  towns  are  de- 
scribed without  too  many  cliches,  and  the  history 
or  romance  of  each  one  given;  and  such  is  the 
art  of  the  author  that  the  very  spirit  of  France, 
the  essence  of  her  beauty  and  strength,  is  put  upon 
the  page.  The  book  is  charmingly  illustrated  with 
both  drawings  and  photographs. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


499 


For  all  our  admiration  for  France,  even  our 
affection,  French  literature  cannot  yet  be  said  to 
appeal  very  widely  to  American  readers.  Certainly 
the  easiest  form  to  begin  with  is  the  short  story, 
and  Willard  Huntington  Wright's  "The  Great 
Modern  French  Stories"  (Boni  &  Liveright; 
$1.50)  offers  a  convenient  and  interesting  means 
of  approach.  Its  introduction  of  twenty-nine  pages 
traces  with  clarity  and  some  distinction,  but  with 
a  rather  noticeable  disregard  of  foreign  influence — 
Scott  is  barely  mentioned  and  Poe  not  at  all — the 
development  of  French  fiction  as  a  whole,  rather 
than  that  of  the  short  story,  from  Rousseau  to 
Barres  and  Philippe.  Then  follow  in  satisfactory 
translations  twenty-two  stories  by  a  score  of  writers 
— it  is  Maupassant  who  is  represented  by  three. 
Such  a  choice  must  of  course  include  some  stories 
that  have  become  hackneyed  through  inclusion  in 
numerous  anthologies,  but  most  of  them  are  fresh 
as  well  as  typical  of  their  authors.  Short  biog- 
raphies of  the  authors  and  a  discriminating  account 
of  available  translations  of  their  works  into  Eng- 
lish, a  valuable  assistance  to  libraries  and  other 
purchasers  who  would  avoid  inadequate  editions, 
complete  this  useful  and  well  arranged  book. 

The  casual  traveler  in  our  Southwestern  country 
who  comes  suddenly  upon  the  serene  gray  ruins 
of  an  old  Spanish  mission  outlined  against  the 
radiant  sky  must  stop  to  wonder  what  events  in 
the  human  drama  produced  the  air  of  mystery  and 
romance  which  hangs  about  its  crumbling  walls. 
Its  architecture,  conspicuously  out  of  time  and 
place  in  its  present  environment  and  thereby  the 
more  precious;  a  solitary  goat  nibbling  in  subdued 
fashion  in  the  deserted  kitchen  garden;  half  remem- 
bered tales  of  subterranean  passages  for  retreat: 
such  fragments  of  recollection  will  be  happily  re- 
vived by  the  "Stories  of  the  Old  Missions  of  Cali- 
fornia" in  Charles  Franklin  Carter's  book  (Paul 
Elder;  $1.50).  "These  legends  are  recognized  in 
the  recorded  history  of  the  period  and  they  reflect 
the  spirit  of  rebellion  which  occasionally  flared  up 
among  the  mission  Indians,  as  well  as  the  peaceful 
and  industrious  life  which  for  the  most  part  they 
followed  under  the  civilizing  influence  of  the 
Fathers. 

In  his  folk  stories  of  the  sea  Wilbur  Bassett 
tells  us  that  all  the  tales  of  "Wander-Ships"  (Open 
Court  Publishing  Co.;  $1.50)  are  variations  from 
five  familiar  types:  phantom-ships,  devil-ships, 
death-ships,  reward-ships,  and  punishment-ships. 
"The  Flying  Dutchman,"  for  instance,  is  technically 
a  punishment-ship.  Still  it  is  reassuring  that  each 
new  appearance  of  a  wander-ship  tale,  bringing 
with  it  something  of  glamor  and  mystery,  makes  its 
own  uncritical  appeal  to  lovers  of  the  sea.  In 
these  days  one  wonders  whether  the  advent  of  the 
submarine  may  not  produce  a  whole  new  literature 
of  sea  legends.  And  the  submarine  itself — is  it 
to  add  a  sixth  classification  to  Mr.  Bassett's  five, 
or  will  it  find  itself  at  home  among  the  devil- 
ships?  The  author's  notes  on  the  origin  of  wander- 
ship  legends  include  variants  of  the  narratives  which 
are  often  more  interesting,  because  less  elaborated, 
than  the  versions  he  has  selected. 


That  English  scholarship  pursues  its  wonted  way 
despite  the  abysmal  distractions  of  the  great  war 
within  hearing  distance  is  suggested  by  the  latest 
volume  of  "Transactions  of  the  Royal  Society  of 
Literature"  (Oxford  University  Press;  $2.40)  con- 
taining the  papers  read  during  the  session  1916-17. 
Aside  from  a  paper  on  Carlyle's  "French  Revolu- 
tion," which  cannot  avoid  letting  the  din  of  the 
present  in,  the  essays  concern  themselves  with  "The 
Romantic  Age  in  Italian  Literature,"  "Ann  Rad- 
cliffe,"  "The  Modern  Hindustani  Drama,"  "Dante 
and  Boethius,"  "Currents  of  English  Drama  in  the 
Eighteenth  Century,"  and  "Gongora."  Of  the 
"French  Revolution"  J.  Holland  Rose  remarks: 
"The  whole  work,  indeed,  belongs  to  the  poetry  of 
revolt — a  revolt  directed  against  the  new  Supply- 
and-Demand  England  quite  as  much  as  against  the 
shams  of  I'ancien  regime."  And  later:  "Was  not 
the  seer  of  Chelsea  right?  Has  not  our  modern 
civilization  blinkered  the  soul  and  hobbled  the  feet 
of  man?  Is  he  not  the  tool  and  victim  of  the 
machinery  created  about  a  century  ago?  And  is 
not  civilization  now  in  danger  of  perishing  under 
the  load  of  the  inventions,  of  which,  even  in  their 
initial  stages,  Carlyle  discerned  the  danger?"  This 
reminds  one  of  Bergson's  remarks,  at  the  beginning 
of  the  war,  about  the  swallowing  up  of  man  by 
the  machinery  he  has  created,  and  of  Emerson's 
line  of  long  ago,  "Things  are  in  the  saddle,  and 
ride  mankind." 

How  often  has  the  spectator  thought  of  the  ideals 
that  animate  the  actor? — the  great  actor,  for  it  is 
simple  enough  to  gage  the  standards  of  the  "my 
part"  performer.  How  much  is  the  product  of 
intellect,  how  much  of  emotion,  how  much  of  train- 
ing? Mrs.  Fiske  claims  in  the  book  "Mrs.  Fiske: 
Her  Views  on  Actors,  Acting,  and  the  Problems  of 
Production,"  by  Alexander  Woolcott  (Century;  $2.), 
that  from  the  beginning  good  acting  is  science  almost 
to  the  very  end,  although  "great  acting,  of  course, 
is  a  thing  of  the  spirit;  in  its  best  estate  a  convey- 
ance of  certain  abstract  spiritual  qualities,  with  the 
person  of  the  actor  as  medium."  But  as  for  her 
personal  taste,  "as  soon  as  I  suspect  a  fine  effect  is 
being  achieved  by  accident,  I  lose  interest.  I  am 
not  interested,  you  see,  in  unskilled  labor."  Mrs. 
Fiske  is  of  course  the  scientific  actor  par  excellence. 
Her  present  production  of  "Madame  Sand"  is  visi- 
ble proof  of  that.  She  appeared  on  the  stage  as 
soon  as  she  could  walk;  she  had  a  speaking  part  as 
soon  as  she  could  talk;  for  her  the  stage  has  never 
held  any  glamor.  It  is  as  natural  a  phenomenon 
as  the  air  or  the  sky.  Upon  such  a  biographical 
background  does  Mr.  Woolcott,  one  time  dramatic 
critic  of  the  New  York  "Times,"  base  his  table 
talks  with  Mrs.  Fiske.  They  contain  brilliance, 
humor,  sound  sense;  to  anyone  who  loves  the  thea- 
tre, they  are  enthralling.  For  Mrs.  Fiske  is  a 
scientist  no  less  in  regard  to  theatrical  production 
than  in  her  method  of  acting.  She  believes  implicitly 
in  the  artistic  integrity  of  the  professional  stage. 
Her  views  on  the  repertory  theatre  and  the  earnest 
students  of  the  drama  will  shock  and  astound  those 
ladies  and  gentlemen. 


500 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


The  Greek  Theater 
and  Its  Drama 

By  ROY  C.  FLICKINGER 

Professor  of  Greek  and  Latin,  Northwestern  University 

THE  noteworthy  features  of  ancient 
drama  and  its  production,  which  are 
usually  regarded  as  unrelated,  have  been 
marshaled  by  the  author  under  one  co- 
ordinating principle.  The  material  is 
freshened  at  every  point  by  conclusions  of 
the  latest  investigators.  The  range  of  topics 
discussed  is  unusually  wide ;  scores  of  books, 
magazines,  and  monographs  would  be  re- 
quired to  obtain  the  same  information. 
Moreover,  the  results  of  the  author's  own 
researches  appear  on  every  page.  The 
illustrative  material  is  profuse,  and  much 
of  it  appears  now  for  the  first  time.  The 
bibliographical  references  are  sufficient  to 
put  the  reader  in  immediate  touch  with  the 
latest  and  most  significant  works  in  the 
field. 

A  full  General  Index  makes  it  easy  to 
reassemble  the  material  and  examine  it  from 
a  different  point  of  view.  To  any  serious 
student  of  the  drama,  whether  ancient  or 
modern,  the  work  is  indispensable.  It  is 
written  in  a  style  attractive  to  the  general 
reader,  and  presupposes  no  knowledge  of 
the  Greek  language. 

The  complete  Index  of  Passages  which 
is  appended  to  the  volume  will  enable 
teachers  to  emphasize  the  salient  points  of 
antiquarian  interest  in  any  play  which  they 
may  be  reading  with  a  class. 

xxviii  :  342  paces,  cloth;  $3.00,  postage  extra 

Weight  2  lb«.  11  or.) 

THE  UNIVERSITY  OF 
CHICAGO   PRESS 

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CHICAGO  ILLINOIS 


COMMUNICATION 


THE  OXFORD  METHOD  IN  ENGLISH  INSTRUCTION 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

Your  reviewer's  article  of  April  11,  entitled  "The 
Oxford  Spirit,"  suggests  the  possibility  of  utilizing 
the  methods  of  Oxford  in  our  study  of  English. 
As  a  graduate  of  Oxford,  or  more  strictly  as  a 
holder  of  the  certificate  given  to  women  by  Oxford 
in  lieu  of  the  Honors  degree,  I  am  deeply  inter- 
ested in  the  point  touched  on  by  Mr.  Hack.  How 
far  the  general  doctrine  of  Oxford  could  be  applied 
to  our  secondary  system  I  am  unable  to  say;  but 
in  the  English  work  of  our  colleges  two  at  least 
of  its  methods  should  produce  far  better  results 
than  we  are  at  present  obtaining.  Those  two  meth- 
ods are  the  refusal  to  treat  English  composition  as 
a  separate  study,  and  the  system  of  "set  books." 

Every  student  of  letters,  ancient  or  modern,  at 
Oxford,  must  write,  write,  write  upon  the  books 
he  is  studying  and  the  affiliations  of  those  books. 
He  is  obliged  in  many  cases  to  extend  his  study  to 
other  literatures  and  he  must  invariably  relate  his 
literary  topic  to  its  historical  and  philosophical 
background.  Thus  the  realization  of  the  immense 
nexus  of  influences  spread  through  all  literature  and 
all  history,  of  the  binding  and  loosing  power  of 
personalities  and  of  systems,  of  the  recombinations 
which  we  call  "literary  periods"  comes  sooner  and 
more  clearly  to  Oxford  students  than  to  those  of 
other  universities.  And  the  power  of  expression  is 
not  there  cultivated  as  an  isolated  growth;  Oxford 
believes  that  only  the  developing  mind  can  set  free 
real  power  to  express,  and  that  the  growth  of  such 
power  proceeds  most  sanely  by  discussing  the  essay- 
ists, the  historians,  and  the  poets  whose  noble  and 
lucid  English  may  at  once  discipline  the  student's 
language  and  stimulate  his  thought.  The  mass  of 
trivial,  ephemeral,  and  personal  subject  matter  so 
frequently  offered  to  and  offered  by  students  of  our 
"required  theme"  courses  is  once  for  all  excluded. 

Inasmuch  as  the  great  majority  of  the  men  who 
conduct  these  Oxford  courses  have  themselves  un- 
dergone that  training,  they  are  as  able  to  criticize 
their  students'  expressive  power  as  to  criticize  their 
facts  or  their  logic.  The  prime  difficulty  in  apply- 
ing this  "Oxford  method"  throughout  our  letters 
and  history  courses  would  be  the  number  of  pres- 
ent day  instructors  who  are  insensitive  to  English 
speech,  and  insensitive  because  of  the  false  separa- 
tion of  their  study-discipline  from  their  expression- 
discipline  during  their  undergraduate  years. 

The  other  aspect  of  Oxford's  "English"  method 
of  which  I  would  speak  is  the  study  of  "set  books." 
The  so-called  "rapid  reading"  courses  of  some  of 
our  colleges  are  no  parallel  to  the  Oxford  work. 
One  play  by  such  an  author,  two  poems  by  such 
another,  part  of  a  novel  by  another,  one  canto  of 
So-and-so's  epic,  so  many  chapters  of  a  certain  his- 
tory— these  and  a  score  of  similar  extracts  are  to 
give  the  American  student  his  idea  of  the  "period." 
And  when  this  is  covered  at  the  rate  required  by 
our  short-term  colleges,  it  is  next  to  impossible  that 
a  clear  impression  of  any  single  work  or  of  the 
interrelations  of  those  works  should  be  received 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


501 


or  retained.  Oxford  selects  a  few  works  from 
each  "age";  these  are  read  in  part  in  class,  dis- 
cussed as  wholes  in  class  and  in  the  papers,  with 
their  values,  their  influences,  their  relations.  Col- 
lateral readings  are  advised  and  urged;  and  in  the 
Honors  Finals  the  student  has  to  show  not  only 
knowledge  of  the  "set  books,"  but  related  reading 
and  thinking  not  done  under  guidance. 

I  write  "knowledge" ;  but  at  Oxford  neither  read- 
ing nor  knowledge  is  a  substitute  for  thought. 

ELEANOR  PRESCOTT  HAMMOND. 
Chicago,  Illinois. 


A5TD 

Edward  John  Moreton  Drax  Plunkett,  Baron 
Dunsany,  is  well  known  not  only  by  his  plays,  upon 
which  he  comments  in  the  letter  printed  in  this 
issue  of  THE  DIAL,  but  also  by  his  volumes  of  fan- 
tastic tales:  "The  Gods  of  Pegana,"  1905;  "Time 
and  the  Gods,"  1906;  "The  Sword  of  Welleran," 
1908;  "A  Dreamer's  Tales,"  1910;  "The  Book  of 
Wonder,"  1912;  "The  Last  Book  of  Wonder" 
(all  published  in  America  by  Luce)  ;  and  "Fifty-One 
Tales,"  1915  (Kennerley).  He  is  now  an  officer 
in  the  Coldstream  Guards. 

J.  E.  Spingarn,  whose  "Creative  Criticism" 
(Holt)  was  reviewed  in  the  leading  article  of 
THE  DIAL  for  August  16,  1917,  was  formerly  Pro- 
fessor of  Comparative  Literature  in  Columbia  Uni- 
versity. At  present  he  is  on  active  duty  as  a  Major 
of  Infantry  in  the  United  States  Army.  Among 
his  earlier  books  was  "New  Criticism"  (Lemcke). 

R.  E.  Neil  Dodge,  whose  edition  of  the  poems 
of  Edmund  Spenser  appeared  in  1908,  is  an  Assistant 
Professor  of  English  in  the  University  of  Wisconsin. 

As  an  undergraduate  Herbert  J.  Seligmann  was 
an  editor  of  "The  Harvard  Monthly."  He  has 
since  been  connected  with  "The  New  Republic" 
and  is  now  engaged  in  newspaper  work  in  New 
York  City. 

Poems  by  Clara  Shanafelt  have  appeared  in 
"Poetry"  and  "The  Egoist." 

The  other  contributors  to  this  issue  have  pre- 
viously written  for  THE  DIAL. 


Joseph  Jastrow's  "Psychology  of  Conviction"  is 
on  the  May  list  of  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

"The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace,"  by  H.  M. 
Kallen,  which  was  concluded  in  THE  DIAL  for 
February  28,  is  about  to  appear  in  book  form  under 
the  imprint  of  the  Marshall  Jones  Co. 

Among  the  May  books  of  D.  Appleton  &  Co.  are 
"An  Ethical  Philosophy  of  Life,"  by  Felix  Adler, 
and  "Problems  in  Cost  Accounting,"  by  DeWitt 
C.  Eggleston. 

The  Harpers  have  just  issued  a  new  edition  of 
Creasy's  "Fifteen  Decisive  Battles  of  the  World," 
enlarged  to  include  chapters  on  the  battles  of  the 
present  war. 

The  Lichnowsky  "memorandum"  is  announced  by 
G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons  under  the  title  "The  Guilt 
of  Germany."  The  volume  will  include  Von 
Jagow's  reply  and  a  preface  by  Gilbert  Murray. 


EUROPE'S  FATEFUL 
HOUR 

By  Gnglielmo  Ferrero 

Author    of    "Ancient    Rome    and    Modern    America," 
"Greatness  and  Decline  of  Rome,"   etc. 

This  great  Italian  writer  and  publicist  in  his  new 
book  takes  up  the  problems  of  the  war  not  in  the 
narrow  sense  of  Italy's  national  aspirations,  but  rather 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  fundamental  causes 
and  issues  of  the  struggle  so  vitally  affecting  civiliza- 
tion. Mr.  Ferrero's  studies  of  Roman  history  have 
made  him  world  famous  as  an  interpreter  of  the 
human  aspects  of  the  conflicts  attending  the  rise  and 
fall  of  nations.  Demi  8vo.  $2.00 

THE  GRAFTONS 

By  Archibald  Marshall 

Author  of  "Exton  Manor,"  "Abington  Abbey,"  etc. 

More  of  the  delightful  new  English  family  Mr. 
Marshall  introduced  in  "Abington  Abbey"  where  we 
left  the  daughters  of  the  Abbey  still  unmated  with 
the  promise  of  further  revelations  in  a  book  to  come. 
That  book  is  here  in  "The  Graftons."  A  great  deal 
of  Mr.  Marshall's  delicate  humour  and  many  joys  are 
combined  in  a  novel  that  reads  exactly  like  life  itself. 

$1.50 

PSYCHICAL  PHENOM- 
ENA AND  THE  WAR 

By  Hereward  Carrington 

Author    of    "The    Physical    Phenomena    of    Spiritual- 
ism," etc. 

A  discussion  of  the  psychology  of  the  soldier  in 
action,  the  psychology  of  German  "frightfulness,"  and 
various  phenomena  of  death  which  have  been  noted 
during  this  war,  at  the  battle  front  and  by  rela- 
tives at  home.  $2.00 

THE  MIRACLE  OF 
ST.  ANTHONY:    A  Play 

By  Maurice  Maeterlinck 

A  humorous  satire  contrasting  the  attitudes  of  the 
rich  and  the  poor  toward  spiritual  things.  This  is 
the  authorized  translation  by  Teixeira,  With  a  bio- 
graphical sketch  of  Maeterlinck  by  Edward  Thomas. 
A  portrait  frontispiece.  Binding  uniform  with  the 
author's  other  works.  Cloth,  $1.50 

PATRIOTIC  PLAYS 
FOR  YOUNG  PEOPLE 

By  Virginia  Olcott 

There    has    been    a    strong    demand    in    our    public 
libraries   for  just  such  plays  as  these,  and  they   will 
meet  with  the  enthusiastic  approval  of  parents,  teach- 
ers  and  children.    These  plays   deal 
with    such    timely   subjects    as    food 
conservation,    industry,    thrift,    and 
Red  Cross  work.    Illustrated  in  color 
and    in    black    and    white,    showing 
costumes,  etc.  $1.25 


New  Books  Published  by 

DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 


502 


THE    DIAL 


[May  23 


"I  visited  with  a  natural  rapture  the 
largest  bookstore  in  the  world." 

See  the  chapter  on  Chicago,  page  43,  "Tour 
United  States,"  ~by  Arnold  Bennett 

It  is  recognized  throughout  the  country 
that  we  earned  this  reputation  because  we 
have  on  hand  at  all  times  a  more  complete 
assortment  of  the  books  of  all  publishers  than 
can  be  found  on  the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
dealer  in  the  entire  United  States.  It  is  of 
interest  and  importance  to  all  bookbuyers  to 
know  that  the  books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  procured  from  us  with 
the  least  possible  delay.  We  invite  you  to 
visit  our  store  when  in  Chicago,  to  avail  your- 
self of  the  opportunity  of  looking  over  the 
books  in  which  you  are  most  interested,  or  to 
call  upon  us  at  any  time  to  look  after  your 
book  wants. 

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in  this  special  branch  of  the  book  business, 
combined  with  our  unsurpassed  book  stock, 
enable  us  to  offer  a  library  service  not  excelled 
elsewhere.  We  solicit  correspondence  from 
Librarians  unacquainted  with  our  facilities. 

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The  Century  Co.  have  forthcoming  a  translation 
of  the  latest  Goncourt  Prize  winner,  "La  Flamme 
au  Poing,"  by  Henry  Malherbe,  and  "The  Fighting 
Engineers,"  by  Francis  A.  Collins. 

The  Bible  Institute  Colportage  Association,  826 
North  LaSalle  Street,  Chicago,  wishes  to  get  in 
touch  with  writers  who  make  a  specialty  of  evan- 
gelical religious  stories  of  moderate  length. 

Volume  IV  of  Eden  and  Cedar  Paul's  transla- 
tion of  Treitschke's  "History  of  Germany  in  the 
XlXth  Century,"  covering  the  years  1819  to  1830, 
is  one  of  the  May  issues  of  Robert  M.  McBride 
&  Co. 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  announce  for  early  issue  an 
addition  to  their  "Musician's  Book  Shelf  Series" — 
"On  Listening  to  Music,"  by  E.  Markham  Lee 
— and  Arnold  Wright's  "Early  English  Adventurers 
in  the  East." 

"The  Waste  Basket,"  which  is  published  from 
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exclusively  by  young  people  between  the  ages  of 
sixten  and  twenty-one.  It  offers  prizes  for  prose 
and  verse. 

Next  month  the  Macmillan  Co.  will  publish 
"Your  Negro  Neighbor,"  by  Benjamin  Brawley, 
whose  book  "The  Negro  in  Literature  and  Art" 
was  issued  this  spring  by  Duffield  &  Co.  The  lat- 
ter contained  a  supplementary  chapter  first  printed 
in  THE  DIAL  of  May  11,  1916.  Mr.  Brawley  is 
also  the  author  of  "A  Short  History  of  the  Ameri- 
can Negro"  (Macmillan). 

Hereafter  the  books  of  Thorstein  Veblen — "The 
Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class,"  "The  Instinct  of 
Workmanship,"  "Imperial  Germany  and  the  In- 
dustrial Revolution,"  and  "The  Nature  of  Peace" 
— will  appear  under  the  imprint  of  B.  W.  Huebsch 
at  the  uniform  price  of  $1.60.  Mr.  Huebsch  an- 
nounces that  other  volumes  by  this  author  are  now 
in  preparation. 

Among  the  late  May  publications  by  Dodd,  Mead 
&  Co.  will  be:  Maeterlinck's  "The  Miracle  of 
St.  Anthony,"  translated  by  Alexander  Teixeira  de 
Mattos;  "Out  There,"  a  play  by  J.  Hartley  Man- 
ners; "Great  Ghost  Stories,"  edited  by  Joseph  L. 
French;  "Psychical  Phenomena  and  the  War,"  by 
Hereward  Carrington;  and  "The  Revolution  Ab- 
solute," by  Charles  Ferguson. 

Brentano's  are  publishing  this  month  the  first  two 
volumes  of  their  series  of  "Harvard  Plays"  (boards, 
$1.  each).  Volume  I  contains  recent  plays  from 
the  "47  Workshop,"  the  laboratory  of  Professor 
George  Pierce  Baker's  course  in  dramatic  com- 
position, "English  47";  and  Volume  II  contains 
some  recent  plays  of  the  Harvard  Dramatic  Club. 
Professor  Baker  has  edited  the  collections  and  has 
supplied  an  introduction. 

May  non-fiction  issues  of  George  H.  Doran  Co. 
include:  "The  Achievements  of  the  British  Navy 
in  the  World  War,"  by  John  Leland;  "Aircraft  in 
War  and  Commerce,"  by  William  H.  Barry; 
"Winged  Warfare,"  by  Major  W.  A.  Bishop; 
"Frontiers  of  Freedom,"  by  Secretary  Baker;  "Ja- 
pan or  Germany,"  by  Frederic  Coleman;  a  volume 
of  verse  by  Amelia  J.  Burr,  "The  Silver  Trumpet"; 
and  two  books  by  Annette  Kellermann — "How  to 
Swim"  and  "Physical  Beauty:  How  to  Keep  It." 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


503 


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[The  following  list,   containing  152  titles,  includes 
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cott  Co.  Boxed,  $5. 

Bombs  and  Hand  Grenades:  British,  French,  and 
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Letters  from  an  American  Soldier  to  His  Father. 
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Soldiers  Both.  By  Gustave  Guiches.  Translated  by 
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The  Man  Who  Survived.  By  Camille  Marbo.  Trans- 
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DR.  SIGMUND  FREUD 
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During  the  German  spring  drive  over 
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116  We.t  32d  Street,  NEW  YORK 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY 
OF  CONVICTION 

BY  JOSEPH  JASTROW 

PROFESSOR  JASTROW'S  new  book 
takes  up  the  following  subjects:  The 
Psychology  of  Conviction ;  Belief  and  Cre- 
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War-Time   Bread   and    Cakes.      By   Amy    L.    Handy. 

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Health  and  the  Woman  Movement.     By  Clelia  Duel 

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25   cts. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


507 


JUVENILE. 

A  Short  History  of  Discovery*  From  the  Earliest 
Time-;  to  the  Founding  of  Colonies  on  the  Ameri- 
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David  McKay.  $1.50. 

Some  Nursery  Rhymes  of  Belgium,  France,  and  Rus- 
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Broadwood.  Illustrated,  4to.  The  Macmillan 
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THE    DIAL 


[May  23,  1918 


THE  LAST  OF  THE  ROMANOFS 

By   Charles   Rivet,   the  Petrograd  correspondent  of  the  Paris  Temps 

Translated,  with  an  Introduction  by  Hardress  O'Grady  Illustrated.    Net,  $3.00 

The  New  York  Herald  says :  "A  distinct  addition  to  the  important  literature  of  the  part  Russia  has  played 
in  the  world  struggle.  Mr.  Rivet  knows  Russia  and  the  Russians,  and  he  has  the  happy  faculty  of  being  able  to 
impart  his  information  convincingly  and  strikingly.  In  this  book  he  gives  the  whole  story  of  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion and  tells  why  it  had  to  be.  And  in  conclusion  he  says  that  it  would  be  a  crime  against  humanity  not  to 
rejoice  greatly  at  what  has  happened  in  Russia." 

GONE  TO  EARTH 

By  Mary  Webb,  Author  of  "The  Golden  Arrow,"  "The  Spring  of  Joy"  Net,  $1.50 

About  what  novel  of  recent  days — or  years — could  the  Literary  Editor  of  a  newspaper  of  the  standing  of 
The  Sun  (New  York)  say  (in  a  review  covering  a  whole  page)  : 

REBECCA  WEST'S  VERDICT  :  "Let  us  recall  what  Miss  West  said  about  it :  'The  year's  discovery  has  been  Mary 
Webb,  author  of  "Gone  to  Earth."  She  is  a  genius  and  I  shouldn't  mind  wagering  that  she  is  going  to  be 
the  most  distinguished  writer  of  our  generation.'  " 

THE  IMPRESSIVENESS  OF  "GONE  TO  EARTH."  "  'Gone  to  Earth'  is  the  most  impressive  English  novel  since  Thomas 
Hardy  gave  us  'Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles.'  It  has  many  points  of  resemblance  to  'Tess.'  " 

THE  AUTHOR'S  HIGH  LITERARY  LINEAGE.     "Mary  Webb  is  of  the  line  of  Meredith.     In  'Gone  to  Earth'  are  many 
Meredithean    traits    of   style,    but    the   fantasticalness    which  Meredith  allowed  himself  is  not  present." 
THE  CHARACTERS  OF  THE  STORY.     "They  are  put  before   us   with   exquisite    and    unobtrusive   humor   and   under- 
standing.    There  is  fun  in  this  book ;  make  no  mistake  about    that.      There    is    comprehension,    which    is    of    far 
more  importance ;   and   there  is  the  power  to  convey,   which    is   most   important   of  all." 

THE  AUTHOR'S  LITERARY  IMMORTALITY.  "  'Gone  to  Earth'  will  be  read,  it  will  be  remembered.  Its  author  is 
assured  of  something  more  than  mere  notice  hereafter." 

SALT,  OR  THE  EDUCATION  OF  GRIFFITH  ADAMS 

By  Charles  G.  Norris,  Author  of  "The  Amateur"  Net,  $1.50 


This    novel   tells    the   story    of    an    American    boy    w 
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collegian — only  that   his   is   perhaps   the   more   fortunate, 
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THE  UNWILLING  VESTAL 

By  Edward  Lucas  White  Net,  $1.50 

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ho    went    through    school    and   college    but    who    was    not 
the    methods    of    which    our    young    men    are    fitted    for 
ousands  like  him.     His  story  is  the  history  of  'the  average 
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THE  RETINUE  and  Other  Poems 

By  Katharine  Lee  Bate*  Net,  $1.50 

Containing  the  principal  war-poems  of  this  dis- 
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OVER  THERE  WITH  THE 
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THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


three  big  summer  books! 


The  Gilded  Man 

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by 

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Introduction  by 
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A  real  summer  story  of  mystery,  love,  and 
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bined with  a  genial  and  soothing  humor. 
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June  publication — $1.50. 


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This  is  the  first  volume  of  short  stories  by 
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New  Appleton  Books  for  Summer  Reading 


Dr.  Felix  Adler's 

welcome  book  of  practical 
philosophy 

An  Ethical 
Philosophy 
of  Life 


Out  of  the  experience  of  over  forty  years  spent  in 
active  social  service,  Dr.  Adler  records  a  philosophy, 
strong  and  thoughtful,  that  will  prove  helpful  to  all 
who  feel  the  need  of  a  finer  life  basis.  Not  dogmatic, 
but  suggestive  and  practical.  A  remarkably  interesting 
psychological  study  of  the  progress  of  a  fine  mind  from 
the  accepted  standards  of  religious  and  social  thought 
to  new  and  constructive  ideals  of  belief  and  conduct. 

$3.00  net. 


From  the  Front 

An  Anthology  of  Trench 
Poetry 

Compiled  by 
LIEUT.  C.  E.  ANDREWS 

Some  of  the  best  verses  written 
in  the  shadow  of  the  firing  line 
by  such  famous  men  of  action  as 
Rupert  Brooke,  Alan  Seeger, 
Patrick  MacGill,  Robert  Ser- 
vice, and  others.  Poems  of  war 
by  men  who  know.  $1.00  net. 


Out  There 

By 
CHARLES  W.  WHITEHAIR 

The  complete  account  of  what 
this  eminent  Y.  M.  C.  A.  man 
saw  during  his  three  years  on 
all  battlefronts — in  the  trenches, 
in  the  hospitals  and  prison- 
camps  and  in  the  towns  behind 
the  lines.  "The  most  human  of 
the  personal  war  narratives — 
thrilling  and  moving." — Chicago 
Post.  Illustrated.  $1.50  net. 


American 
Negro  Slavery 

By  ULRICH  B.  PHILLIPS 

The  history  of  the  African  slave 
trade  in  the  New  World  and  an 
accurate  discussion  of  plantation 
management  and  labor  and 
economic  conditions  on  large 
plantations  in  the  south. 
Authoritative  and  interesting 
throughout.  $3.00  net. 


Emerson  Hough's 

brilliant  story  of  the  mountaineer 
who  brought  education  to  the  shut- 
in  feud  district  of  the  Cumberlands. 

The  Way  Out 

An  inspiring  novel  of  the  Kentucky  moun- 
tains, telling  of  David  Joslin's  great  fight 
to  save  his  people  from  poverty  and 
degredation.  Based  upon  actual  fact. 

Illustrated.    $1.50  net. 


J.  C.  Snaith's 

interesting  romance  showing  how 
class  distinctions  are  falling  under 
the  spirit  of  the  times  in  England. 


The  story  of  a  little  foundling  who  after- 
ward becomes  a  charming  actress  and 
upsets  British  social  traditions.  By  the 
'author  of  "The  Sailor." 

Illustrated.    $1.50  net. 


Fighting  France        The  A.  E.  F.       A  Surgeon  in  Arms 


By 
STEPHANE  LAUZANNE 

The  distinguished  Paris  editor 
tells  why  France  is  fighting  and 
what  her  war  aims  are. 

$1.50  net. 


By  HEYWOOD  BROUN 
The    first    story    of    Pershing's 
Army  in  France  from  the  time 
they   sailed    until    they    entered 
the  trenches.  $1.50  net. 


By  CAPT.  R.  J.  MANION 

The  wonderful  work  of  the 
medical  men  in  the  war  told 
through  the  personal  experiences 
of  a  Canadian  doctor. 

Illustrated.    $1.50  net. 


These  Are  Appleton  Books  At  All  Booksellers 

D.  APPLETON  &  COMPANY,  PUBLISHERS,  NEW  YORK 


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512 


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[June  6 


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The  distinguishing  feature  of 
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that  each  in  itself  is  a  commend' 
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Rand-McNally  Rand-McNally  Juveniles. 
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1918]  THE   DIAL  513 


The  Bishop  of  South  Carolina  says  of 

Comrades  in.  Courage 

By  Lieut.  Antoine  Redier 

"When  I  bade  my  eldest  son  'good-bye'  the  other  day  before  he 
went  overseas  as  a  member  of  the  Machine  Gun  Battalion,  I 
gave  him  'Comrades  in  Courage,'  telling  him  that  I  knew  of 
no  book  I  would  rather  have  him  read,  or  one  more  calculated 
to  make  him  fight  with  devotion  and  courage  on  French  soil." 

This  book  makes  clear,  in  the  words  and  thoughts 
of  the  men  in  the  trenches,  the  ideals  for  which 
the  united  democracies  of  the  world  are  fighting. 

Net,   $1.40 

The  Chicago  Post  says  of 

The  Holy  City 

JERUSALEM  II. 

By  Selma  Lagerlof 

"We  find  very  attractive  her  simple,  strong  folk  style,  her  homely 
poetic  phraseology,  her  fine  characters,  so  human,  so  heroic.  It 
is  an  epic,  moving  in  its  strength,  its  simplicity,  its  tragedy,  its 
joy,  its  loves — in  its  very  artistry." 

While  this  book  is  complete  in  itself,  it  really  is 
the  continuation  of  the  story  of  the  Dalecarlians, 
those  Swedish  peasants  whose  religious  pilgrim- 
age to  Jerusalem  was  so  magnificently  told  in 
"Jerusalem."  Ingmar  Ingmarsson  in  particular  is 
a  central  character  in  this  new  book. 

Net,  $1.50.     (Leather,  $1.75) 

The  Boston  Post  says  of 

Aliens 

By  William  McFee 

"  'Aliens'  is .  not  only  an  absorbing  story, — it  is  much  more.  It 
transports  the  reader  to  far  and  dark  corners  of  the  earth;  it 
reveals  men  and  women  who  are  extraordinarily  real ;  it  is  packed 
with  ripe  observation  upon  human  wisdom  and  folly." 

It  is  Mr.  McFee's  personality  that  makes  this  a 
great  story.  The  sea  seems  to  inspire  work  of 
this  nature  and  it  is  good  as  the  sea  is  good,  big 
elemental,  cleansing  of  sham  and  foolish  pride. 
The  author  has  the  quality  of  genius. 

Net,  $1.50 

Doubleday,  Page  and    Company 

Garden    City  New    York 


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514 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


Would  you  like  to  live  for  a  little  while  in  Imperial  Rome  at  the  time  of  her  greatest 
power  and  splendor — the  period  which  Gibbon  declared  to  have  been,  of  all  the  world's  his- 
tory, the  time  and  place  most  worth  living  in?  Actually  and  intimately  share  in  the  daily 
life  of  the  Roman  aristocracy  during  the  reign  of  Marcus  Aurelius?  It  would  be  a  unique 
experience  thus  to  go  back  from  the  twentieth  to  the  second  century — but  you  can  have  it 
by  reading — 

THE  UNWILLING  VESTAL 

BY  EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE 

Whose  remarkable  South  American  historical  romance,  "El  Supremo,"  established  his 
ability  to  make  the  past  live  again  in  the  very  life  and  color  of  its  daily  habit.  In  "The 
Unwilling  Vestal"  he  repeats  and  even  betters 

THE  MIRACLE  OF  RE-CREATION 
HE  ACCOMPLISHED 

in  "El  Supremo."  Mr.  White  is  a  keen  student  of  the  life,  literature  and  history  of  the 
Romans,  he  knows  perfectly  their  manner  of  living  and  has  saturated  himself  with  their 
spirit.  He  sees  them  with  the  same  vivifying  eye  and  accurate  knowledge  with  which  the 
Italian  historian  Ferrero  has  written  about  them,  and  he  has  put  their  daily  life  into  a 
lively,  dramatic,  swiftly  moving  romance,  glowing  with  the  gorgeous  color  of  pageants,  cir- 
cuses and  ceremonials,  rilled  with  stir  and  bustle,  the  men  and  women 


The  chorus  of  praise  which  has  everywhere  greeted  the  book  emphasizes  the  tense,  dra- 
matic interest  of  the  story  it  tells,  the  graphic  coloring  and  accurate  depiction  of  the  daily 
life  of  the  time,  and  the  human,  flesh-and- blood  quality  of  its  people,  so  different  from 
the  paper-dry,  lamp-smelling  characters  of  most  novels  of  ancient  Rome.  These  few  ex- 
tracts, which  might  be  multiplied  many  times,  give  an  idea  of  the  cordial  reception  the  novel 
is  having  from  reviewers: 

The  Outlook:  "Mr.  White,  in  his  fascinating 
story  of  Old  Rome,  purposely  makes  Emperor, 
Vestal  Virgins,  slaves  and  everyone  else  talk 
like  the  people  you  see  at  movies  or  meet  on 
the  railway.  For  once  we  have  a  story  of 
classical  days  over  which  we  do  not  go  to 
sleep.  We  get  closer  to  social,  every-day  life  in 
Rome  than  anywhere  else,  except  in  some  of 
the  Latin  comedies,  which  not  many  people 
read." 


Boston  Transcript:  "Rome  as  he  portrays  it 
seems  very  near  to  us." 

New  York  Sun:  "Action?  From  the  first 
word  of  the  first  sentence  Mr.  White  hardly 
ever  lets  up.  As  a  story  pure  and  simple,  'The 
Unwilling  Vestal'  is  technically  miles  ahead  of 
'El  Supremo.'  Like  his  first  novel,  this  tale  of 
Rome  in  the  years  between  100  and  200  A.  D., 
is  related  mostly  by  episodes.  But  the  story 
does  not  lack  continuity.  And  it  has  suspense 
to  a  notable  degree,  to  a  degree  far  beyond  the 
power  of  many  novelists  to  achieve." 

New  York  World:  "He  has  brought  his  Ro- 
mans and  their  lives  right  up  to  the  pitch  of 
the  moving  picture  age." 


New  York  Times:  "A  vivid  picture  of  the 
time  with  which  it  deals." 

San  Francisco  Chronicle:  "Edward  Lucas 
White,  the  author  of  that  remarkable  novel,  'El 
Supremo,'  in  this  new  story  makes  the  life  of 
ancient  Rome  as  vivid  as  yesterday." 

Town  and  Country:  "As  a  sane,  understand- 
able, thoroughly  rounded  picture  of  Roman  so- 
ciety in  the  time  of  the  Antonines,  it  is  one  of 
the  most  absorbingly  interesting  novels  we  re- 
member having  read  of  recent  years.  For  the 
first  time  in  our  knowledge  we  have  read  a 
writer  who  treats  the  ancient  Romans  as  if  they 
had  really  existed  and  had  been  flesh  and  blood 
creations.  His  fund  of  knowledge  is  absolutely 
voluminous." 

Baltimore  Evening  Sun:  "Described  by  Mr. 
White,  the  great  Roman  city  teems  with  life 
and  incident.  Marcus  Aurelius  and  Commodus, 
his  son,  emerge  from  the  mists  of  time  and  be- 
come men  of  today." 

Philadelphia  Record:  "There  is  real  romance 
in  Mr.  White's  story.  Rome  of  old  lives  again, 
its  ancient  spirit  is  revived.  The  story  has  not 
a  wearisome  moment  in  its  pages." 


'The  Unwilling  Vestal"  reached  its  third  edition  within  six  weeks  of  publication 


Price,  Net,  $1.50 


At  all  bookstores 


Postage  extra 


E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company,  681  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York 


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1918] 


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515 


The  Best  Portable  Entertainment—  Books! 

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RUSSIA  IN  UPHEAVAL 

By  EDWARD  ALSWORTH  Ross 

An   authoritative  and  fascinating  account  of  Russia's  year  of  revolution  by  the 

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Russia  during  1917.     With  his   usual  penetration    and   vivacity   he   discusses   Labor 

and   Capital  in  Russia,  Russian  Women,  the  Church  and  the  Sects,  Land  Redistribu- 

tion, etc.,  etc.     Uniform  with  "South  of  Panama,"  etc.           80  illustrations.     $2.50 

THE  ROOTS  OF  THE  WAR 

By  WILLIAM  STEARNS  DAVIS 

Professor  Davis  of  the  University  of  Minnesota,  in  collaboration  with  William 

Anderson  and  Mason  W.  Tyler,  reveals  the  origins  of  the  war  in  the  history  of  all 

the  various  European  countries  during  the  epochal  years,  1870-1914. 

With  fix  map*.     $1.50 

FLASHES  FROM  THE  FRONT 

By  CHARLES  H.  QRASTY 

FICTION  OF  UNUSUAL 

The  cream  of  the  material  gathered  in  Europe  by 
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QUALITY 

Grasty    of    "The    New    York    Times."     Foreword    by 

General   Pershing. 
Illustrated  from  photograph*  and  drawing*.     $2.00 

THE  RETURN  OF 

"LADIES  FROM  HELL" 

THE  SOLDIER 

By  R.  DOUGLAS  PINKERTON 

By  REBECCA  WEST 

War    experiences    of    the    famous    London    Scottish 

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Regiment.   A   flaming  book   written   in   the  trenches. 

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Illustrated.     fl.OO 

The  thrilling  experiences  of  an  American  moving- 
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THE  HAPPIEST  TIME 
OF  THEIR  LIVES 

Illustrated  from  photograph*.      $2.  00 

By  ALICE  DUER  MILLER 

RUNAWAY  RUSSIA 

In   this  new  novel  the  author  of 

By  FLORENCE  HARPER 

"Come  Out  of  the  Kitchen  1"  strikes 

The  Russian  revolution  as  seen  through  a  woman's 
eyes,   with  special  reference  to  the  part  played  in   it 
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HISTORY  OF  THE  WAR 

world. 
Illustrated  by  Paul  Meylan.     $1.40 

FILM  FOLK 

By  Louis  RAEMAEKERS 

The  first  collection  of  this  world-famous  cartoonist's 

By  ROB  WAGNER 

work   to   be   issued   at   a   strictly   popular   price  ;   the 

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toon*  with  supplementary  text.                                    $1.50 

life  behind  the  scenes   of  the  men, 

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RUSSIA-ILIODOR 

graph*.                                            $2.  00 

By  SERGIUS  M.  TRUFANOFF    ILIODOR) 

The  life  and  confessions  of  the  famous  friend  and 

CASTE  THREE 

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By  GERTRUDE  M.  SHIELDS 

THE  WONDERS  OF  INSTINCT: 

Chapters  in  the  Psychology  of  Insects 

A  fascinating  story  of  society  life 
in  the  Middle  West:    told  with  vigor 
and  verve  and  with  the  fresh  touch 

By  JEAN-HENRI  FABRE 

of  a  new  writer. 

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JUST  OUTSIDE 

The  WOMAN  VOTER'S  MANUAL 

By  STACY  AUMONIER 

By  S.  E.  FORMAN  AND  MARJORIE  SHULER 

The    latest   novel    of   the   delight- 
ful   author    of    "Olga    Bardel"    and 

A   handbook    of   politics    especially    adapted   to   the 

that     famous     short     story,      "The 

needs    of   the   woman   voter.    Introduction  by  Carrie 

Friends." 

Chapman  Catt.                                                                    fl.OO 

Frontispiece  in  color.     $1.35 

[  THE  CENTURY  Co.,  Publishers,  353  Fourth  Avenue,  New  York  j 

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1918] 


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WORRYING  WON'T 

WIN    By  Montague  Glass 

Author  of  "Potash  &  Perlmutter" 

Always  on  the  spot  with  expert  ad- 
vice and  comment — always  hitting  the 
nail  right  on  the  head — Abe  and  Maw- 
russ  in  war  time  are  more  entertaining 
than  ever. 

If  you  want  a  book  that  bubbles  over 
with  fun  and  humor — a  book  that  has 
an  under  current  of  sound  common 
sense,  go  to  the  nearest  bookstore  and 
ask  for  this  new  book  with  a  laugh  on 
every  page.  $1.50 

MY  BOY  IN  KHAKI 

By  Delia  Thompson  Lutes 

Editor  of  American  Motherhood 

The  heart-story  of  an  American 
mother,  whose  only  son  is  in  the  army — 
"Somewhere  in  France."  The  book  _  is 
certain  to  reach  and  comfort  and  in- 
spire thousands  of  mothers  whose 
hearts  are  sore  with  the  struggle 
between  Love  of  Son  and  Love  of 
Country ;  to  bring  to  each  real  help 
in  gaining  victory  over  self  and  vision 
of  what  the  man-child  she  has  borne 
and  nurtured  can  be  and  must  be  in 
the  world's  Battle  for  Freedom.  It  is  a 
greatly  patriotic  story.  Post  8vo,  $1.00 

THE  YELLOW  DOG 

By  Henry  Irving  Dodge 

Author  of  "Skinner's  Big  Idea" 

A  story  for  all  patriotic  Americans. 
One  that  will  help  them  to  unearth  the 
"yellow  dogs"  who  lurk  round  every 
corner,  dropping  an  unpatriotic  word 
here  or  a  seditious  remark  there.  A 
piece  of  splendid  patriotism  and  a  cork- 
ing book. 

16mo.   Paper,  26c.    Cloth,  50c 

A  FLYING  FIGHTER 

By  Lieut.  E.  M.  Roberts,  R.F.C. 

There  lay  the  Huns,  huddled,  menac- 
ing— and  over  them  swooped  the  fast 
plane,  dropping  death.  Shells  burst 
around  the  bird  man — he  was  hit — his 
pilot  wounded — and  still  he  drove  on. 
What  was  the  outcome?  Read  this  book. 

Roberts  was  two  years  in  the  wilds 
of  Canada  before  he  knew  the  war  was 
on.  Then  he  heard — went  straight  to 
the  front,  where  he  fought  in  until  he 
was  discharged,  permanently  disabled 
by  wounds.  He  has  been  gassed  and 
wounded  and  shell-shocked ;  he  was 
brought  down  from  the  air  four  times 
in  four  days  by  the  Germans. 

He  has  volumes  to  tell  and  has  packed 
it  all  into  one  gorgeous,  vivid,  thrilling 
book.  Illustrated,  $1.50 

WAR  GARDENS 

By  Montague  Free 

Head    Gardener,    Brooklyn    Botanical 

Gardens 

If  you  have  a  yard,  a  garden  or  the 
smallest  piece  of  land — get  this  book ! 
A  convenient,  practical  guide  for  home 
vegetable  growers  by  a  gardening  ex- 
pert. The  author  is  not  only  head 
gardener  of  the  Brooklyn  Botanical 
Gardens,  but  has  been  trained  at  the 
famous  Kew  Gardens,  London,  England. 
He  has  had  vast  experience  in  back- 
yard gardening  and  in  the  most  econ- 
omical way  of  using  up  small  pieces  of 
ground.  16mo.  Cloth,  50  cents 


OUTWITTING 
;THE  HUN- 

by  Lieut.  PAT  O'BRIEN 


fo        »«,„ 

X 


THE  REAL  FRONT 

By  Arthur  Hunt  Chute 

This  is  a  vital  story — a  story  of  the 
inner  beauty— of  the  high  idealism  of 
the  men  who  fight  and  die  in  battle. 
The  words  are  living,  burning  things 
that  leap  and  flash  even  as  the  battle- 
sounds  of  which  the  author  tells.  Here 
at  last  is  a  war  book  with  a  style 
so  brilliant  that  it  may  well  be  called 
literature.  Illustrated,  $1.50 

OUTWITTING  THE 
HUN 

By  Lieut.  Pat  O'Brien,  R.F.C. 

You  Americans  who  want  to  know 
how  a  plain  Chicago  boy  can  play  tricks 
with  the  German  army — read  this  tale 
by  Lieutenant  Pat  O'Brien. 

This  is  what  he  did — or  part  of  it. 
He  fell  in  his  aeroplane  8,000  feet  into 
the  German  lines.  He  was  nearly  dead. 
They  started  him  on  the  way  to  prison. 
But  that  couldn't  hold  our  young  man. 
He  leaped  from  the  window  of  the  fly- 
ing train. 

Then  for  72  days  he  ran  and  hid  and 
crawled  and  swam  and  cajoled  and 
fought — through  Luxembourg — through 
Belgium — to — but  read  the  story  your- 
self. $1.60 

MIMI 

By  J.  U.  GIESY 

An  idyl  of  the  Latin  Quarter,  a 
miracle  of  faith,  friendship,  loyalty, 
and  the  beauty  of  motherhood.  There 
is  the  sunshine  of  the  happy  life  of  the 
Latin  Quarter  in  Paris  clouded  by 
the  call  to  war.  The  story  of  Mimi 
traverses  the  whole  gamut  of  emotion, 
closing  with  a  paean  of  love  fulfilled. 

Post  75  cents 

FOOD  AND  FREE- 

DOM          A  Household  Book 
By  Mabel  Dulon  Purdy 

A  book  which  has  been  prepared  for 
the  patriotic  American  woman  who 
would  serve  her  country  in  the  home 
while  her  men  serve  it  on  the  battle- 
field. 

In  addition  to  the  carefully  selected 
housekeeping  facts,  there  are  one 
hundred  best  recipes,  scientifically  re- 
corded, which  have  been  thoroughly 
tested  by  th«  author  in  her  own  home 
for  their  economy,  ease  of  preparation, 
food  value,  and  artistic  excellence. 

Illustrations.    16mo.    Cloth,  $1.00 

THE  MAN  WHO 
SURVIVED 

By  Camille  Marbo 

Translated  from,   the   French   by  Frank 

Hunter  Potter 

What  happened?  By  what  myster- 
ious force  had  this  thing  come  to  pass? 
For,  though  he  knew  himself  to  be 
Jacques,  the  mirror  showed  the  face  of 
Marcel — his  friend — who  had  been  killed 
in  that  last  battle.  This  is  one  of  the 
greatest  novels  that  has  come  out  of 
the  war.  Bigger  and  stranger  than 
"Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde,"  it  is  hard 
to  imagine  a  more  charming  idyl,  more 
unusual  characters,  or  a  more  absorb- 
ing plot  than  this  story  provides. 

Post  8vo.    Cloth,  $1.25 


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THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


Doran  Books 


for  Particular  Readers 


THE  PRETTY  LADY 


London    under 
the     strain     of 
war.     "The  20th 
Daily   Telegraph. 


Arnold  Bennett 

century    incarnate." — London 

The  Manchester  Guardian  says,  "Bennett's  most 

brilliant  novel."  12mo.   Net,  $1.50 

THE  AMAZING  INTERLUDE 

Mary  Roberts  Rinehart  «An  intensely 
human  story  of  enthusiasm,  courage,  romance 
and  youth,  revealing  the  heart  of  a  young  girl, 
and  her  awakening  capacities." — New  York 
Tribune.  12mo.  Net,  $1.40 


NOCTURNE 

r,         w     c  Introduction  by   H.    G. 

frank  3  winner  ton  wells,  who  says:  "A 
book  that  will  not  die.  Perfect,  authentic  and 
alive."  Arnold  Bennett  calls  it  "perfect,  con- 
sumate."  12mo.  Net,  $1.40 

THE  FLYING  POILU 

Marcel  Nadaud  A  most  delicate  yet  realis- 
tic romance  of  the  French  aviation  service. 
Humor,  excitement,  pathos,  gaiety.  Frances 
Wilson  Huard,  translator.  Charles  Huard  pic- 
tures. 12mo.  Net,  $1.35 


ROUGH  RHYMES  OF  A  PADRE        THE  SILVER  TRUMPET 


Woodbine  Willie,  M.C.,  C.S. 

If  some  Padres  are  "solemn  blokes"  not  this. 
Something  altogether  new  in  war  poetry.  Has 
swept  England.  12mo.  Boards.  Net,  50  cents 


Amelia  Josephine  Burr  niumines  the  psy- 
chology of  those  who  are  left  at  home,  or  con- 
centrates into  a  few  lines  poignant  bits  of  drama 
from  the  war  zone.  12mo.  Net,  $1.00 


THE  NEW  REVELATION 

Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  por  the  t>e_ 
reaved  seeking  comfort,  for  the  scientific 
investigator,  a  notable  contribution  to  the 
literature  of  spirit  communication. 

12mo.     Net,  $1.50 

THE  NEW  BOOK  OF  MARTYRS 

Georges  Duhamel  True  and  unforgetable 
tales  of  wonder,  of  unspeakable  sadness,  of  shin- 
ing glory,  by  a  French  surgeon.  12mo.  Net,  $1.35 


MAN  IS  A  SPIRIT 

J.   Arthur  Hill  Most   interest- 

Author  of  "Psychical  Investigation*' '     ing     evidence 

by  one  of  the  leaders  in  the  movement  of  Psy- 
chical Research.  12mo.    Net,  $1.50 

THE  HEART  OF  A  SOLDIER 

Major  Lauchlan  Maclean   Watt 

Touching  eloquence  of  the  hearts  of  the  soldiers 
by  "a  quiet  witness  to  the  courage  of  the  faith 


he  preaches." 


12mo.     Net,  $1.35 


GERMANY  AS  IT  IS  TODAY 

Cyril  Brown  A  careful,  authoritative  study 
of  economic,  social  and  financial  conditions  in 
Germany  which  wastes  no  words  in  calling 
names  but  gets  down  to  the  facts. 

12mo.    Net,  $1.35 

JAPAN  OR  GERMANY 

Frederic  R.  Coleman,  F.R.G.S. 

"A  book  of  copious  information,  cogent  reason- 
ing and  sound  conclusions,  and  supremely 
timely." — New  York  Tribune.  12mo.  Net,  $1.35 

THE  REAL  COLONEL  HOUSE 

Arthur  D.  Howden  Smith  of  the  many 
astonishing  things  here  told,  one  disclosure  re- 
casts America's  whole  part  in  the  war.  The 
intimate  story  of  a  World  diplomat. 

12mo.    Net,  $1.50 


WHEN  THE  SOMME  RAN  RED 

Captain  A.  Radclyffe  Dugmore 

For  hair-breadth  escape  and  completeness  this 
record    of    personal    experience    is    one    of    the 
most  remarkable  that  ever  got  by  the  censor. 
Illustrations,  maps,  etc.    12m o,    Net,  $1.75 

WINGED  WARFARE 
Major  W.  A.  Bishop 

V.C.,  D.S.O.,  M.C.,  British  Royal  Flying  Corps 

The  self-told  story  of  the  most  famous  of  all 
airmen,  who  won  the  flying  honors  of  the  world 
in  a  single  fighting  season.  Illus.  8vo.  Net,  $1.50 


Sir  Oliver  Lodge  A  searching  study  of  the 
world-canker,  and  a  vision  of  the  Great  Crusade 
to  which  the  nations  of  the  earth  are  called. 

8vo.    Net,  $1.50 


GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY  ::  Publishers  ::  New  York 


PUBLISHERS 


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THE 


VOLUME  LXIV 


No.  768 


CONTENTS 


ANNOUNCEMENT  ..... 
PILGRIM  SONS  OF  1920  .  .  .  . 
LETTERS  TO  UNKNOWN  WOMEN 

To  Helen. 

GARDENS  .  .  .  Verse  .  . 
AN  IMPERTURBABLE  ARTIST  .  . 

OUR  PARIS  LETTER 

CONSCIOUS  CONTROL  OF  THE  BODY 
THE  MIDDLE  WAY  IN  MYSTICISM 
LORDS  OF  LANGUAGE    .... 
A  VARIED  HARVEST  . 


The  Editors 

P.W.Wilson,  . 
Richard  Aldington 

Annette  Wynne  . 

Ruth  Mclntire  .  . 

Robert  Dell     .  . 

H.M.Kallen  .  . 

C.  K.  Trueblood  . 

Scofield  Thayer  . 


521 

522 
525 

526 
527 
530 
533 
534 
536 
539 
540 


Henry  B.  Fuller   . 

PURPOSE  AND  FLIPPANCY Randolph  Bourne  .     . 

BRIEFS  ON  NEW  BOOKS 542 

Denmark  and  Sweden  with  Iceland  and  Finland. — Pictures  of  War  Work  in 
America. — America's  Message  to  the  Russian  People. — The  Russian  Revolution. — 
The  Jugo-Slav  Movement. — Letters  of  John  Holmes  to  James  Russell  Lowell  and 
Others. — The  Less  Familiar  Kipling  and  Kiplingana. 

NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 544 

Professor  Latimer's  Progress. — Flood  Tide. — Rekindled  Fires. — Twinkletoes. — 
The  Long  Trick. — The  Country  Air.— The  Restless  Sex.— The  Best  People.— The 
Bag  of  Saffron. — Days  of  Discovery. — Lord  Tony's  Wife. — The  Pawns  Count. 

CASUAL  COMMENT  . .  547 

SUMMER  READING  LIST .     .  549 

COMMUNICATION ' 550 

"Le  droit  de  reponse." 

NOTES  AND  NEWS 551 

LIST  OF  NEW  BOOKS  ,  553 


GEORGE  BERNARD  DONLIN,  Editor 


Contributing  Editors 


HAROLD  E.  STEARNS,  Associate 


CONRAD  AIKEN  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS  H.  M.  KALLEN 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE  PADRAIC  COLUM  CLARENCE  BRITTEN 

ROBERT  DELL  HENRY  B.  FULLER  SCOFIELD  THAYER 

THE  DIAL  (founded  in  1880  by  Francis  F.  Browne)  is  published  fortnightly,  twenty-four  times 
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eign subscriptions  $3.50  per  year. 

Entered  as  Second-class  matter  Oct.  8,  1892  at  the  Post  Office  at  Chicago,  under  the  Act  of 
March  3,  1879.  Copyright,  1918,  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Inc. 

Published  by  THE  DIAL  Publishing  Company,  Martyn  Johnson,  President;  Willard  C.  Kitchel, 
Secretary-Treasurer,  at  608  South  Dearborn  Street,  Chicago. 


520 


THE   DIAL 


[June  6,  1918 


Ernest    Poole's    New    Novel 

HIS  SECOND  WIFE 

"Mr.  Poole  is  one  of  the  foremost  of  our  modern  novelists." 


"A  novel  of  which  American  literature  may  well  be  proud, 
done  better  work."— N.  Y.  Tribune. 


Seldom  has  any  American  writer 

$1.50 


FOE-FARRELL 

Sir  Arthur  Quiller- Couch's  New  Novel 

"One  of  the  most  authentic  works  of  creative 
genius  that  have  enriched  our  literature  for  many 
a  year." — N.  Y.  Tribune.  $1.50 

IN  THE  FOURTH  YEAR 

H.  C.   Well*'  New  Book 

A  review  of  the  war  and  the  great  forces  at  work 
in  the  allied  countries  to  establish  a  new  order. 

$1.25 

"THE  DARK  PEOPLE": 
RUSSIA'S  CRISIS 

Ernett  Poole '•  New  Book 

"The  most  important  book  about  Russia  that  has 
appeared  since  the  Revolution— deep  in  under- 
standing and  deserving  careful  attention." 

III.    Second  Edition.    $1.50 

CO-OPERATION:  THE  HOPE 
OF  THE  CONSUMER 

By  Emerton  P.  Harris 

The  Failure  of  Middlemanism.  Reasons  and  the 
Remedy,  Practical  Cooperation,  Background  and 
Outlook  are  the  titles  of  the  parts  into  which 
this  new  work  is  divided.  $2.00 

AMERICA  AMONG 
THE  NATIONS 

H.  H.  Powers'  New  Book 

Our  relation  to  foreign  nations  in  terms  of  the 
great  geographical,  biological  and  psychic  forces 
which  shape  national  destiny.  $1.50 

THE  DEVELOPMENT 
OF  JAPAN 

By  Kenneth  Scoff  Latourett* 

A  sane,  lucid  account  of  the  history  of  the 
Japanese  Empire.  Ready  May  SI 

THE  LOST  FRUITS  OF 
WATERLOO 

John  Spencer  Bassett's  New  Book 

A  careful  historical  examination  of  the  idea  of 
a  federation  of  nations  to  establish  permanent 
peace.  $1.50 

TOWARD  THE  GULF 

Edgar  Lee  Masters' New  Poems        . 

Another  series  of  fearlessly  true  and  beautiful 
poems  revealing  American  life  as  few  books 
have  done.  $1.50 


HISTORY  OF  LABOR  IN 
THE  UNITED  STATES 

By  John  R.  Commons 

With  collaborators,  John  B.  Andrews,  Helen  L. 
Sumner,  H.  E.  Hoagland,  Selig  Perlman,  David 
J.  Saposs,  E.  B.  Mittelman,  and  an  introduction 
by  Henry  W.  Farnam.  A  complete  authentic  his- 
tory of  labor  in  the  United  States  based  on 
original  sources.  Zvols.  $6.60 

A  TRAVELLER  IN  WAR  TIME 

Wintton  Churchill's  New  Book 

A  most  unusual  picture  of  actual  conditions  in 
England  and  France,  vivid  descriptions  of  the 
great  battle  front  and  the  story  of  America's  con- 
tribution. Ready  in  June 

WAR  BREAD 

By  Alonzo  E.   Taylor 

It  is  the  duty  of  every  American  to  know  what 
the  wheat  problem  is ;  here  an  authority  vigor- 
ously presents  the  facts  which  should  be  commonly 
understood.  60  cts. 

THE  MARTIAL  ADVENTURES 
OF  HENRY  AND  ME 

William  Allen  White's  New  Book 

"Truly  one  of  the  best  books  that  has  yet  come 
down  war's  grim  pike  ...  a  jolly  book." — 
N.  Y.  Post.  III.  $1.50 

WHAT  IS  NATIONAL  HONOR  ? 

By  Leo  Perla  with  an  introduction  by 
Norman  Angell 

The  first  analysis  of  the  psychological,  ethical  and 
political  background  of  "national  honor."  $1.50 

THE  END  OF  THE  WAR 

Walter  E.  Weyl's  New  Book 

The  relation  of  this  war  to  the  history  of  Ameri- 
can thought  and  action,  forecasting  our  future 
policy.  $2.00 

THE  ABOLITION  OF 
INHERITANCE 

By  Harlan  E.  Read 

A  complete  statement  of  the  case  against  in- 
herited wealth.  $1.50 

A  COMMUNITY  CENTER,  What 
It  Is  and  How  to  Organize  It 

By  Henry  E.  Jackson 

A  book  of  constructive  democracy.  III.   $1.00 


Mary    S.    Watts'    New    Novel 

(Third  Edition  Now  Ready) 

THE  BOARDMAN  FAMILY 

"An   achievement   in   realistic  fiction     .    .     .     She  is  both  artist  and  realist,  consistent,  vigorous  and 
sane     .     .     .     Her  portraits  are  real  people     .     .     .  exceedingly  interesting  and  excellent." — N.  Y.  Times. 

$1.50 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY,  Publishers,  New  York 


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Announcement 


THE  DIAL  announces  that  on  July  1  its 
publication  offices  will  be  moved  to  New 
York  and  that  on  October  3,  1918  it  will 
begin  weekly  publication. 

This  step  is  taken  in  order  to  consider 
more  comprehensively  the  shifting  forces 
which  are  now  making  for  a  new  social 
order.  Contemporary  ideas  change  and 
crystallize  more  rapidly  today  than  at 
any  previous  period  in  history.  Even 
literary  criticism,  if  it  attempts  to  reflect 
the  intellectual  temper  of  the  day,  must 
be  more  alert.  No  journal  can  now  retain 
any  reality  or  vigor  which  does  not  react 
to  the  tendencies  characteristic  of  our  age. 

THE  DIAL  is  not  content  to  present  to 
its  readers  discussions  of  these  significant 
forces  merely  through  the  medium  of  book 
reviews.  For  this  reason  it  has  deter- 
mined to  extend  the  editorial  policy  to 
include,  in  addition  to  the  present  literary 
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eral spirit  of  intellectual  curiosity  and  con- 
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its  literary  policy  in  the  past. 

The  present  features — the  book  review 
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not  use  the  excuse  of  tolerance  or  of 
flabby  intellectual  good  will  to  evade  the 
task  of  formulating  definite  opinions.  But 
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clusion before  the  discipline  of  new  facts. 
With  a  sympathetic  attitude  toward  the 
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tory provides.  Committed  to  no  dogma 
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authoritative. 

The  editorial  cooperation  of  those  rec- 
ognized as  the  most  effective  thinkers  in 
their  particular  fields  has  been  secured. 
The  Editors  will  be :  John  Dewey,  Thor- 
stein  Veblen,  Helen  Marot,  and  George 
Donlin.  The  Associate  Editors  will  be: 
Harold  Stearns,  Clarence  Britten,  Ran- 
dolph Bourne,  and  Scofield  Thayer. 

John  Dewey  is  known  in  America  for 
his  creative  contributions  to  the  problems 
of  education.  Abroad  he  is  accepted  as 
America's  senior  thinker  and  philosopher 
since  the  death  of  William  James.  Mr. 
Dewey  will  write  for  THE  DIAL  on  educa- 
tional subjects. 

Thorstein  Veblen,  who  will  contribute 
articles  dealing  with  economic  and  indus- 
trial reconstruction,  is  perhaps  best  known 
through  his  volume  "An  Inquiry  into  the 
Nature  of  Peace."  Mr.  Veblen  com- 
bines with  an  accurate  knowledge  of  facts 
a  ruthless  power  of  analysis  and  a  brilliant 
irony  which  makes  his  style  an  intellectual 
adventure. 

Helen  Marot,  who  for  many  years  has 
been  associated  with  American  labor  or- 
ganizations, brings  to  the  problems  of 
readjustment  both  imagination  and  prac- 
tical understanding.  She  has  published  one 
book,  entitled  "American  Labor  Unions." 

THE  DIAL'S  present  editor,  George 
Donlin,  will  act  in  the  capacity  of  Editor- 
in-Chief. 


522 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


Pilgrim  Sons  of  1920 


The  United  States  contains  a  people 
which  has  been  recruited  in  the  main  from 
Europe.  Today  some  millions  of  Ameri- 
cans, most  of  whom  have  never  seen 
Europe,  are  returning  thither  to  fight  for 
the  cause  of  the  Allies.  Many  will  lay 
down  their  lives.  A  few  may  find  new 
homes  in  the  Old  World.  But  most  will 
come  back  again,  bringing  with  them 
thousands  of  comrades  who,  having  been 
informed  about  America,  will  wish  to 
settle  here.  I  am  told  that  of  the  Aus- 
tralian troops  forty  thousand  have  chosen 
British  wives,  many  of  whom  have  sailed 
for  the  Commonwealth  in  advance  of  their 
husbands.  American  soldiers  also  may 
marry  European  girls,  who  will  set  forth 
across  the  Atlantic  to  build  up  homes. 
Most  of  these  girls  are  likely  to  be  British, 
but  in  any  event  each  state  and  each  city  in 
the  Union  will  have  in  its  midst  a  new 
type  of  citizen,  young,  with  many  years  of 
activity  ahead,  and  with  special  memories 
— a  special  experience  for  mental  back- 
ground. 

We  have  seen  how  the  texture  of 
American  life  has  been  woven  of  racial 
elements  from  Ireland,  Poland,  Germany, 
and  other  lands.  The  retired  soldier  will 
tell  his  story  to  his  children  and  his  grand- 
children. No  later  research  by  scholars 
will  materially  alter  his  first-hand  impres- 
sion. He  is  today  serving  on  a  jury, 
taking  evidence  on  the  spot,  examining 
witnesses,  and  drawing  up  the  verdict.  The 
future  opinion  of  America  rests  not  with 
editors,  special  correspondents,  and  lec- 
turers but  with  "the  boys"  who  have  seen 
things  for  themselves.  Their  views  will 
determine  national  policy  and  their  hopes 
will  inspire  national  ideals.  They  are 
crossing  the  ocean  and  leaving  a  bridge 
behind  them.  Americans  cannot  appre- 
ciate in  advance  what  a  difference  will  be 
made  by  "the  boys"  when  they  get  talk- 
ing here  among  their  friends,  after  the 
war. 

At  the  moment,  this  vast  human  force 
is  directed  against  a  foreign  foe.  Whether 
in  camp  or  in  trench,  the  American  soldier 
has  disappeared  from  civil  life  and  we  do 


not  know  what  opinion  he  is  forming. 
In  Europe,  the  talk  of  soldiers  is  already 
beginning  to  tell.  Russia  has  found  that 
out,  and  so  has  Italy.  The  United  States 
will  discover  that  the  pilgrim  sons  of  1920 
will  make  as  much  history  as  the  pilgrim 
fathers  of  three  hundred  years  earlier. 
We  expect  in  Britain  that  whatever  is 
academic  or  unreal  in  our  political  ma- 
chine will  be  swept  away.  Liberalism  will 
embrace  Labor,  the  Socialists,  Free 
Trade,  the  International  Ideal.  Conser- 
vatism will  be  a  sincere  and  vigorous 
reaction,  not  on  the  old  Tory  lines  but 
rather  along  the  principle  set  up  by  Sir 
Robert  Borden  in  Canada.  In  the  United 
States  also  the  Republican  and  Democratic 
parties  must  become  instruments  of  definite 
popular  impulses  and  aims,  or  vanish  in 
the  furnace. 

An  editor  in  this  country  receives  news- 
papers from  Europe.  He  is  startled  by 
their  contents  and  often  takes  refuge  in  a 
cautious  silence.  He  does  not  quite  like 
the  evidences  of  war-weariness  which 
greet  his  eye.  He  is  worried  by  the 
growth  of  Socialism  in  Italy  and  France 
and  Britain.  I  am  not  criticizing  his  ret- 
icence. Possibly  he  is  a  wise  guide.  War 
is  surgery  which  requires  an  anaesthetic. 
But  when  the  American  soldier  is  billeted 
somewhere  in  England  or  France  he  does 
not  close  his  eyes  or  stop  up  his  ears. 
He  is  doubtless  most  interested  in  the  very 
paragraphs  which  American  editors  are 
most  reluctant  to  emphasize.  He  will 
come  back  to  tell  his  neighbors  that  in 
Britain  the  state  runs  railroads,  tramways, 
gas,  water,  telephones,  telegraphs,  savings 
banks,  shipping,  tubes,  and  even  food 
supply  and  coal  mines.  He  will  add  that 
in  every  European  country,  including  Ger- 
many, Austria,  and  Hungary,  trade- 
unionists  sit  in  the  legislature.  He  will 
describe  great  schemes  of  national  housing. 
He  will  describe  how  in  no  European 
country  are  rich  men  debarred  from  poli- 
tics or  poor  men  looked  at  askance  if  they 
enter  politics.  He  will  discover  wage 
earners  in  the  British  Parliament  who 
spend  years  in  public  life  without  amassing 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


523 


one  penny  for  themselves.  It  may  be  that, 
stirred  by  these  object  lessons,  he  will  him- 
self seize  on  the  American  citizenship 
which  he  has  defended  and  will  make  of 
politics  something  nobler  than  has  yet  been 
imagined,  whether  in  Europe  or  America. 
Witnessing,  as  they  will,  parliaments  in 
London  and  in  Paris  where  ministers  are 
constitutionally  responsible  to  the  legisla- 
ture, it  may  easily  happen  that  the  pilgrim 
sons  of  1920  will  open  interesting  dis- 
cussion about  Congress,  its  powers, 
responsibilities,  opportunities.  There  is 
not  an  institution  in  your  land  that  will 
escape  a  searching  comparison. 

Hitherto  American  statesmanship  has 
preserved  a  dignified  isolation  from  for- 
eign responsibilities.  In  the  future  the 
manhood  of  America  will  hold  a  construc- 
tive opinion  on  world  progress.  Other 
countries,  even  Britain,  will  be  entities 
for  which  American  blood  and  treasure 
will  have  been  poured  out — in  which 
American  funds  are  heavily  invested.  To 
know  those  countries  intimately  will  be  a 
simple  matter  to  men  who  have  spent 
months,  possibly  years,  in  them.  The 
knowledge  which  one  country  has  of  an- 
other is  always  likely  to  be  out  of  date 
and  it  is  the  duty  of  responsible  writers 
to  bring  the  impressions  of  the  past  into 
accurate  conformity  with  the  facts  of  the 
present.  These  American  soldiers  will 
have  seen  the  last  of  the  old  British  Em- 
pire. London  is  no  longer,  and  will  never 
again  become,  the  money  market  of  the 
world.  She  is  borrowing  from  New 
York.  Britain  is  no  longer  the  chief 
carrier  of  the  world.  While  her  ships 
sink,  America  builds.  Nor  is  Britain  the 
keystone  of  the  alliance  against  Germany. 
That  influence  also  has  passed  to  Wash- 
ington. And  all  this  means  that  in  the 
diplomatic  reconstruction  of  the  peoples  of 
the  earth  America  will  be  heavily  involved. 
She  must  sit  at  the  peace  table;  she  must 
act  as  arbitrator  and  mediator,  not  only 
between  allies  and  enemies  but  between 
ally  and  ally.  The  time  is  probably  far 
distant,  if  not  in  years  at  least  in  agony 
and  supreme  effort,  before  this  situation 
can  arise.  But  I  am  here  writing  for 
responsible  Americans,  who  have  the  duty 
of  thinking  things  out  in  advance.  The 


most  dangerous  unpreparedness  is  not  of 
munitions  but  of  mind. 

Britain  has  led;  she  is  now  obviously 
following.  It  may  be  because  her  states- 
manship in  Russia  and  Austria-Hungary 
lacked  imagination.  It  may  be  because 
neither  Mr.  Asquith  nor  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  discovered  a  counterpart  to  Mr. 
House.  Or  it  may  be  sheer  public  spirit 
which  cares  nothing  if  others  get  the  credit 
provided  that  the  thing  required  is  done. 
But  the  fact  remains  that  no  President  has 
ever  wielded  such  influence  within  Great 
Britain  as  Mr.  Wilson,  and  a  problem 
which  must  be  faced  is  in  two  words — the 
British  Empire.  I  will  be  quite  frank 
about  it — I  am  proud  of  that  Empire.  To 
keep  four  hundred  millions  of  people 
from  murdering  one  another  is  a  notable 
achievement.  And  it  is  not  done  by  com- 
pulsion. But  does  anybody  suppose  that 
the  British  Empire  will  be  unchanged  by 
the  war?  He  lives  in  a  fool's  paradise. 
The  British  Empire  must  be  restated  in 
international  terms.  It  must  be  woven  into 
the  League  of  Nations.  Its  sanction  must 
be  not  Britain  alone  but  mankind.  And 
America  will  help  in  the  quiet  transforma- 
tion. At  least,  one  hopes  so. 

People  still  talk  as  if  this  or  that  colony 
"belonged"  to  Great  Britain — as  if  terri- 
tory were  ua  possession."  How  much  land 
in  India  is  owned  by  or  pays  rent  to  any 
white  British  subject?  British  rule  is,  in 
the  main,  and  always  ought  to  be  merely 
a  form  of  social  service.  The  multitude 
of  officials  who  go  forth  from  public 
schools  and  universities  and  "govern" 
native  races  return  when  they  are  fifty  as 
poor  in  pocket  as  when  they  set  out,  except 
for  a  pension  which  in  America  would  be 
called  nominal.  I  am  not  claiming  any 
infallibility  for  these  men.  Usually  their 
mental  bent  is  conservative.  Often  they 
are  proud,  reserved,  and  even  prejudiced 
against  ideals  and  theories.  But  their  life 
work  is,  in  the  main,  to  help  the  weak,  to 
maintain  order,  to  combat  famine  and 
disease,  to  build  railroads  and  highways, 
to  cut  away  corruption  among  tax- 
gatherers  and  blackmail  among  police. 
The  self-governing  dominions  are  mas- 
ters of  their  own  fiscal  arrangements,  and 
in  such  matters  they  are  independent  of 


524 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


all  Imperial  control.  But  India  and  the 
Crown  Colonies,  which  are  ruled  under 
specific  instructions  from  London,  are  as 
open  to  international  as  they  are  to 
British  trade.  Our  view  has  been  that, 
by  seeking  no  commercial  privileges,  we 
shall  get  our  share  of  commerce  without 
encountering  jealousy  from  other  powers 
which  do  not  exercise  so  wide  a  sovereignty 
as  our  own  happens  to  be.  It  has  been  at 
Germany's  hands  alone  that  we  have 
received  bitter  enmity,  not  because  we  ex- 
cluded German  enterprise — on  the  con- 
trary, it  was  prospering  in  many  parts  of 
our  Empire — but  because  Germany  wished 
to  substitute  for  our  conception  of  service 
her  conception  of  dominion. 

President  Wilson's  messages  have  com- 
mitted America  forever  to  a  world-wide 
foreign  policy.  As  he  expresses  it,  he 
stands  by  Russia  as  well  as  by  France.  No 
words  are  fuller  of  meaning  than  those. 
They  signify  that  American  influence  in 
Russia  and  the  Near  East  will  be,  not  per- 
haps the  same  thing,  but  none  the  less  as 
real  a  thing  as  British  influence  in  India. 
Britain  has  labored  under  the  badge  of 
sovereignty.  The  watchword  for  America 
may  be,  let  us  say,  brotherhood,  coopera- 
tion, a  partnership  in  responsibility  with 
other  well  disposed  powers.  She  will  work 
in  harmony  with  Japan,  France,  Britain, 
and  with  the  Russians  themselves.  But 
if  this  should  be  her  destiny,  then  there  is 
nothing  in  substance  to  differentiate  her 
aims  and  motives  and  methods  from  those 
which  animated  the  founders  of  modern 
Uganda  or  the  reformers  of  modern 
Egypt. 

To  many  Americans  such  a  field  for 
activity  offers  serious  pitfalls.  "We  are 
not  ready"  is  what  they  say.  They  know 
that  there  is  a  seamy  side  to  relations  be- 
tween the  white  man  and  the  colored  or 
Asiatic  races.  They  are  not  reassured  by 
the  language  of  altruism.  To  all  of  such 
unconvinced  and  skeptical  persons  I  would 
submit  that  somebody  will  have  to  accept 
responsibility  for  Jerusalem,  and  Bagdad, 
and  Africa,  and  German  islands  in  the 
South  Seas.  This  war  was  fought  not  for 
the  expansion  of  the  British  Empire  but 
for  the  safety  of  democracy,  and  Britain 
cannot  assume,  unaided,  the  whole  "white 


man's  burden."  The  financial  resources 
at  her  disposal  will  be  insufficient.  There 
must  be  guarantors  of  her  good  faith  and 
partakers  of  her  obligations. 

In  due  course  events,  including  the  re- 
turn of  American  troops  and  especially 
of  men  trained  previously  in  universities, 
will  force  these  considerations  on  the 
notice  of  the  people.  I  suggest  that  the 
press  should  lead  the  way.  Editors  are 
doubtless  confused  by  the  bewildering 
complexity  of  a  world  in  chaos.  Head- 
lines cause  headache.  There  is  now  a  su- 
preme opportunity  for  the  detached,  well 
informed,  impartial  leader-writer.  He 
should  be  free  from  all  idea  of  making  a 
case.  Clear,  continuous,  interpretative 
treatment  of  foreign  news  should  be 
assured  for  every  American  citizen  who 
pays  his  two  cents  for  the  journal  of  his 
district.  Today  the  craft  of  writer  is 
war  work  of  the  highest  importance.  It 
may  make  the  difference  between  Ameri- 
can idealism  in  the  world  and  something 
very  much  lower. 

And  is  American  thought  so  ill  equipped 
as  some  Americans  seem  to  believe  for 
contributing  to  the  solution  of  inter- 
national difficulties?  I  am  by  no  means 
convinced  of  this.  Great  Britain  has  ex- 
perience— that  is  true.  But  America  has 
a  fresh  outlook  and  a  detachment  from 
entangling  traditions.  In  every  case,  al- 
most, she  has  approached  native  races  as 
a  missionary  and  not  as  a  trader  or  a 
soldier  or  as  a  magistrate.  Her  weapon 
has  been  persuasion  and  reason,  not  power 
and  secular  authority.  Her  achievement 
has  been  limited,  doubtless,  in  actual  bulk 
— missionaries  are  few  and,  according  to 
political  standards,  they  are  weak.  But  in 
concentrating  as  they  have  done  on  medi- 
cine and  on  education  the  missionaries  have 
seen  further,  I  think,  than  the  statesmen. 
It  will  be  the  statesman  who  will  grad- 
ually absorb  into  his  policy  the  mission- 
ary's foolishness,  not  the  missionary  who 
will  need  to  absorb  the  statesman's  wis- 
dom. Many  Americans  and  American 
organizations  have  therefore  studied  the 
world  from  the  right  angle — as  a  place 
where  all  men  and  women  should  enjoy  a 
certain  divine  status  and  receive  the 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


525 


acknowledgment  thereof  from  kings  and 
governors.  To  combine  the  ideals  of 
America  with  the  experience  and  sagacity 
of  Europe  is  the  great  and  urgent  duty, 
I  suggest,  of  American  and  European 
journalists.  We  need  to  work  together, 
realizing  that  the  matters  on  which  we 
discourse  are  no  longer,  if  they  ever  were, 
merely  academic  or  sensational.  For  mil- 
lions they  involve  the  issues  of  life  and 
death.  I  have  said  something  of  the 
mind  of  the  soldier.  The  messages  of 


President  Wilson  have  a  military  value 
just  because  they  affect  the  minds  of  sol- 
diers. They  put  a  case  for  which  brave 
and  enlightened  men  are  prepared  to  die. 
Mere  detestation  of  the  enemy  is  not 
enough.  In  a  long  war  like  this  you  must 
add  a  principle  of  hope,  a  larger  loyalty, 
embracing  the  true  interests  of  all  man- 
kind, if  an  international  army,  with  an 
international  navy,  fighting  an  inter- 
national battle,  for  an  international  cause, 
is  to  prevail.  R  w_  WILSON< 


Letters  to  Unknown  Women 


HELEN 


To  Helen  the  Queen: 

Had  I  lived  in  your  own  time  it  is  most 
probable  that  I  should  never  have  spoken 
to  you.  I  might  have  seen  you  or  have 
been  killed  before  your  indifferent  eyes 
when  all  Hellas  contended  for  possession 
of  you.  But  now  you  are  dead  and  your 
lovers  also  are  dead,  your  name,  your 
reputation,  your  beauty  are  at  the  service 
of  any  slave  or  descendent  of  Thersites 
who  chooses  to  make  you  the  subject  of  his 
desecrations.  In  this  way,  O  Queen,  pos- 
terity is  revenged  upon  all  who  were  emi- 
nent for  beauty,  talent,  or  courage  in  the 
past.  Lucian  has  shown  us  your  skull 
bleaching  in  Hades,  but  could  you  know 
all  that  has  been  said  of  you  by  poets  of 
many  tongues  and  races  you  would  con- 
sider Lucian  the  least  insulting  of  those 
who  are  unable  to  respect  the  dead.  Thus 
a  poet  of  my  own  country,  some  four  hun- 
dred years  ago,  dared  to  place  upon  the 
stage  a  scene  in  which  you  revisited  the 
world  as  the  mistress  of  a  conjurer.  Had 
you  remained  loyally  with  Menelaus  your 
fame  would  never  have  been  thus  ques- 
tionably published.  It  is  not  for  me  to 
censure  a  great  lady  and  a  queen,  but  you 
must  consider  the  ignorance  of  a  barbar- 
ian and  a  slave,  and  pardon  my  indelicacy. 

I  pose  a  question.  Did  you  exist?  In 
the  flesh,  I  mean,  and  tangibly — a  woman 
mortal  and  attractive  who  began  this  tra- 
dition of  adultery  which  has  had  so  many 
terrifying  consequences  for  the  world?  Or 
rather,  O  gold-sandaled  one,  are  you  a 
dream  of  the  poet,  a  lovely  symbol  of  an 


unrealizable  desire,  a  type  chosen  to  rep- 
resent the  eternal  Ate's  apple  that  is 
woman,  the  source  of  the  contention  of 
men — a  (forgive  me)  sexual  abstraction? 
Assuming  that  you  did  exist,  you  would, 
if  you  were  still  sentient,  consider  this 
question  absurd  and  irrelevant.  But  I  am 
one  of  a  diseased  generation.  We  do  not 
live  as  you  lived,  in  yourself,  for  yourself, 
and  by  yourself,  but  vicariously,  through 
arts  and  literature — diseases  that  were  un- 
known  to  you.  And  your  story  is  part  of 
our  lives.  Therefore  it  concerns  us  to 
know  whether  you  were  a  woman  or  a 
symbol. 

You  are  altogether  elusive — that  tale 
of  your  preserving  wifely  fidelity  ten  long 
years  in  Egypt,  while  your  lover  embraced 
a  cloud,  needs  a  faith  which  our  skepti- 
cism cannot  muster.  Moreover  we  know 
too  much  to  regard  you  altogether  with 
awe  and  reverence — you  have  a  patholog- 
ical interest  for  us.  We  debate  about 
you;  our  more  emotional  writers  consider 
that  your  mere  name  gives  their  verse  an 
incomparable  embellishment.  Others  feel 
that  your  case  is  over-rated,  too  emphati- 
cally stressed.  But  in  any  event  you  elude 
us. 

I  am  not  familiar  with  the  queens  of  my 
day — those  I  have  seen,  at  a  respectful 
distance,  were  neither  young  nor  lovely. 
No  man  would  be  so  foolish  as  to  run 
away  with  them,  and  it  must  need  the 
force  of  great  reasons  of  state  to  compel 
the  kings,  their  husbands,  to  act  the  part 
of  lovers.  Thus,  taking  into  account  all 


526 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


that  the  poets  who  lived  nearest  to  you 
have  recorded,  we  cannot  believe  that  you 
resembled  the  ordinary  queen  of  our  pres- 
ent life.  You  were,  it  appears,  beautiful. 

Well,  you  were  beautiful.  But  how? 
Sometimes  we  think  of  you  as  the  dream 
created  by  the  Greeks,  of  that  material 
loveliness  which  moved  them  far  more 
than  it  ever  can  us  sluggish  barbarians. 
Were  you  that  beauty,  that  unattainable 
beauty  who  forever  flees  the  Menelaus  of 
reality  to  live  with  the  Paris  of  romance? 
Were  you  that  tenuous  loveliness,  that 
flowerlike  fragility,  that  misty  instability? 
If  so,  yours  is  a  great  destiny — to  repre- 
sent the  yearning  of  all  Hellas,  to  be  the 
immortal  projection  of  that  yearning! 

But  there  is  Clytemnestra,  your  sister. 
Was  adultery  a  strain  in  your  heredity? 

Grant  that  you  were,  that  you  existed. 
You  still  elude  us.  Were  you  a  sort  of 
Madame  Bovary  fretted  by  the  inanity  of 
life  in  a  provincial  sort  of  court,  sur- 
rounded by  frigid  soldiers  and  unintelli- 
gent lawyers  who  would  have  died  rather 
than  salute  your  cheek  unchastely?  An 
Hellenic  Madame  Bovary,  who  threw  her- 
self into  the  arms  of  the  first  charming 
young  man  who  cared  to  solicit  her  favors? 
This  at  least  would  explain  the  tenacity 
of  your  husband,  who  was  not  content  to 
leave  your  punishment  to  swift  disillusion- 
ment, but  who  prolonged  your  guilty 
honeymoon  for  ten  years  by  his  incredible 
obstinacy.  You  were  indeed  fortunate 
both  in  your  husband  and  in  your  lover. 

But  that  is  only  half  the  story.  Some- 
times we  picture  you  a  sort  of  Gudrun,  a 
brutal  kind  of  sensual  woman  imposing 
your  passion  upon  an  unsophisticated  boy, 
taking  pleasure  in  tearing  him  from  his 
country  sweetheart,  forcing  yourself  upon 
his  family  and  delighted  in  a  gross  way 
by  the  slaughter  and  suffering  you  caused. 
It  is  indeed  but  the  justice  of  the  world 
as  we  know  it  that  you  should  escape  from 
the  consequences  of  your  adultery,  while 
Andromache,  the  faultless  wife,  Hecuba, 
the  venerable  mother,  and  Cassandra,  the 
virgin,  all  suffer  horror  upon  horror 
through  you.  The  cynicism  of  this  pleases 
our  somewhat  frigid  skepticism,  though 
here  again  we  begin  to  suspect  that  you 
are  a  symbol.  Menelaus  is  too  stupid  a 


man  to  be  so  easily  moved  by  his  aesthetic 
mood — you  are  too  much  like  the  dream 
of  Hellas  at  the  moment  when  you  are 
forgiven.  Still,  nothing  can  spoil  our  en- 
joyment of  this  savory  injustice. 

Yet  again  you  elude  us  and  we  fumble 
with  the  concept  of  Fate.  Are  you  a  mar- 
ionette in  the  great  game,  a  puppet  of  Fate 
using  Aphrodite  to  jerk  the  string  that 
moves  you?  The  golden  apple — was  it 
not  Fate  that  sent  Herakles  to  pluck  it? 
Are  you  the  motive  that  dislodges  upon 
Hellas  its  pre-ordained  confusion?  Can  we 
really  believe  that  ten  thousand  ships 
would  furrow  the  ^Egean  because  your 
face  was  beautiful?  Must  we  not  rather 
believe  that  Fate  sent  some  strange  mad- 
ness into  men's  hearts,  so  that  they  mur- 
dered each  other,  in  appearance  for  you, 
in  reality  for  some  inscrutable  Fate?  Are 
you  that  error  in  the  lives  of  just  men 
which  brings  them  to  destruction,  to  terror, 
to  death?  Are  you  that  smiling  poison, 
that  disastrous  loveliness?  We  cannot  tell. 
But,  O  Queen,  O  deathless,  smiling,  golden 
one,  this  we  can  tell,  that  the  memory  of 
your  beauty — whether  real  of  feigned — 
still  afflicts  our  hearts,  and  for  your  sake, 
because  of  you,  we  are  sick  and  desolate 
with  a  wild  yearning  that  nothing  can 
appease,  not  the  cold  wind  of  our  hills, 
not  the  drab  insipidity  of  our  cities,  not 
the  confusion  of  our  disordered  thought. 
Queen,  it  is  said  that  reverence  is  gone 
from  the  world;  certainly,  if  you  returned 
to  the  earth  you  would  not  know  it  as  the 
place  where  you  walked  with  gold-braided 
hair  upon  white  turrets  to  watch  the  chiv- 
alry of  Troy  and  Hellas  battle  for  your 
sake.  But  at  least  this  same  old  yearning 
for  inexplicable  loveliness  remains,  and 
you  would  find  a  few  who  would  bring 
you  flowers  to  remind  you  of  the  smooth 
lawns  below  Ida. 

RICHARD  ALDINGTON. 


Gardens 


Far  green  stretches  where  the  summer  plays 
On  golden  English  holidays, 
A  scarlet  streak  on  some  Italian  hill — 
And  these  pale  struggling  greens  upon  my  win- 
dow-sill! ANNETTE  WYNNE. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


527 


An  Imperturbable  Artist 


Though  it  give  aid  and  comfort  to  the 
enemy,  I  must  confess  that  my  heart  still 
goes  out  in  gratitude  to  one  Bernard 
Tauchnitz  of  Leipzig,  from  whose  paper 
edition  I  first  came  to  know  Leonard  Mer- 
rick.  "While  Paris  Laughed"  is  a  new 
volume  of  his  stories,  soon  to  be  published, 
which  carry  one  back  indeed  to  the  days 
when  those  jolly  knaves  of  Montmartre — 
Tricotrin  the  dramatist,  Pitou  the  com- 
poser, and  Lajeunie  the  novelist — first 
played  their  pranks  for  us,  they  the  tragic 
and  the  impoverished,  breakfasting  on 
brave  hopes  and  warming  their  hands  be- 
fore the  "sacred  fire,"  inheritors  of  the 
imperishable  vagabond  spirit  that  defies 
the  boundaries.  Into  these  new  tales  Leon- 
ard Merrick  the  story-teller  has  put  some 
of  his  best  effort. 

To  define  the  fascination  which  is  the 
chief  and  most  enduring  attraction  of 
Leonard  Merrick  the  novelist,  is  a  difficult 
matter.  His  talent  in  this  field  is  at  once 
more  profound,  more  delicate,  and  less 
apparent  to  the  average  reader  who  knows 
him  for  the  .most  part  through  his  short 
stories  alone.  Mr.  Howells,  who  was  one 
of  his  earliest  critics  in  this  country,  was 
first  impressed  by  the  "singular  shapeli- 
ness" and  the  form  of  his  novels.  His 
feeling  for  proportion  and  emphasis  in 
writing  is  to  be  compared  with  the  same 
qualities  in  a  good  architect  or  in  a  painter. 
He  leads  the  mind  to  grasp  what  is  essen- 
tial, for  his  form  is  an  intrinsic  part  of 
the  emotion  he  wishes  to  convey.  Divorce 
his  style  from  his  subject  and  you  have 
mere  scaffolding — or  to  change  the  meta- 
phor, mere  uncoordinated  oils  and  colors. 
Is  it  this  "singular  shapeliness"  that  con- 
stitutes his  charm?  Not  wholly,  I  think. 
Briefly,  it  consists  for  me  in  the  intimate 
treatment  of  his  subject  matter,  combined 
with  his  emotional  reserve,  and  in  the  evi- 
dent, sincere,  and  deep-rooted  enchant- 
ment which  his  own  work  holds  for  him. 
Though  he  writes  of  poverty  and  cheap- 
ness he  does  not  grovel,  and  though  the 
emotion  of  his  story  would  tempt  an 
ordinary  writer  to  exhaust  it  by  abandon- 
ment he  has  intensified  it  by  his  restraint. 


Probably  it  is  this  reserve,  so  unaccus- 
tomed to  it  are  we  modern  readers,  that 
has  prevented  the  immediate  popularity 
of  his  work.  Frequently  an  author  needs 
but  to  mention  the  stage  to  obtain  a  flock 
of  readers;  but  Mr.  Merrick's  books — 
filled  with  actors,  actresses,  authors,  and 
managers — have  attracted  only  a  small 
circle.  To  be  sure,  he  depicts  almost  with- 
out exception  the  struggles  of  these  people, 
not  their  successes,  and  rather  holds  up 
to  ridicule  the  adulation  of  the  public.  The 
romance  of  the  "romantic  couple"  Blanche 
and  Royce  Oliphant  of  "The  Actor-Mana- 
ger" existed  chiefly  in  the  imaginations  of 
the  public  who  saw  them  behind  the  foot- 
lights and  not  behind  the  breakfast  dishes; 
and  if  the  public  could  have  had  a  private 
view  of  Peggy  Harper,  the  marionette 
made  into  the  semblance  of  an  actress  by 
months  of  managerial  coaching,  its  en- 
thusiasm might  have  been  tempered  by 
something  approaching  disgust. 

Mr.  Merrick  applies  a  realism  to  its 
darlings  of  which  the  public  can  hardly 
be  expected  to  approve.  Times  have 
changed  since  he  began  to  write,  and  the 
public  is  interested  as  it  has  never  been 
before  in  the  private  lives  of  the  writers 
and  the  actors  who  provide  its  amuse- 
ment; but  the  interest  is  purely  personal 
and  Mr.  Merrick's  dictum  still  holds  true: 
"To  choose  an  author  as  the  protagonist 
of  an  English  play — or  of  an  English  novel 
— is  to  handicap  the  thing  from  the  word 
'go.'  '  That  he  sees  this  fact  so  clearly, 
that  he  can  treat  it  with  humor  and  with- 
out bitterness,  that  he  does  in  fact  make 
copy  out  of  his  own  misfortune  and  con- 
tinue to  let  it  make  not  a  jot  of  difference 
in  his  choice  of  a  subject,  is  in  itself  a 
warrant  of  his  abiding  sense  of  humor  and 
his  artistic  imperturbability. 

Sainte-Beuve  considered  it  necessary  for 
the  proper  comprehension  of  an  author  to 

*  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.,  Mr.  Merrick's  publishers  in  this 
country,  have  announced  a  uniform  edition  of  his  books 
with  introductions  by  English  writers.  "Conrad  in  Quest 
of  his  Youth,"  with  an  introduction  by  Sir  James  Barrie, 
will  be  published  early  this  summer.  It  will  be  followed 
by  "The  Position  of  Peggy  Harper,"  with  an  introduction 
by  Sir  Arthur  Pinero ;  "The  Man  Who  Understood  Women," 
with  an  introduction  by  W.  J.  Locke ;  and  "When  Love  Flies 
out  o"  the  Window,"  with  an  introduction  by  Sir  William 
Robertson  Nicoll. 


528 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


frame  the  man's  work  in  his  life:  Tel 
arbre,  tel  fruit.  This  is  more  than  usually 
true  of  Merrick.  In  "The  Worldlings" 
we  read  of  his  heartbreaking  years  in  the 
South  African  diamond  fields;  in  "The 
Actor-Manager,"  of  the  lonely  years  in 
London  when  he  was  struggling  for 
theatrical  and  literary  recognition,  and 
when  he  met,  one  may  imagine,  with  some- 
thing resembling  Logan  Ross's  reply  to 
Tatham  in  "Peggy  Harper" : 

"We  don't  want  human  beings,  my  boy,  we  want 
parts.  The  audience  don't  want  to  hear  why  he 
wasn't  drowned.  Show  him,  my  boy;  it  doesn't 
matter  how  he  was  saved,  bring  him  on:  'That  / 
am  here  to  prove!'  Terrific  round  of  applause. 
See  what  I  mean?  You  lose  your  grip  if  you 
explain  things." 

A  clerk  with  whom  he  took  lodgings 
during  those  days  of  struggle  and  dis- 
appointment, and  who  is  now  well  known 
in  the  New  York  business  world,  wrote  to 
his  friend  on  the  publication  of  "Peggy 
Harper" :  "How  I  remember  some  of 
those  lodgings  you  describe  in  your  new 
book."  Let  us  take  a  look  at  them,  and 
incidentally  review  a  very  fine  scene.  It 
is  in  "Cynthia."  On  the  eve  of  Kent's 
marriage  Kent  and  Turquand,  who  have 
shared  lodgings,  share  also  a  melancholy 
farewell  dinner  at  the  Suisse  and  return 
early  to  their  rooms : 

There  was  a  pause,  while  the  pair  smoked  slowly, 
each  busy  with  his  thoughts,  and  considering  if 
anything  of  what  he  felt  could  be  said  without  its 
sounding  sentimental.  Both  were  remembering  that 
they  would  never  be  sitting  at  home  together  in 
the  room  again,  and  though  it  had  many  faults,  it 
assumed  to  the  one  who  was  leaving  it  a  "tender 
grace"  now.  He  had  written  his  novel  at  that 
table;  his  first  review  had  come  to  him  here. 
Associations  crept  out  and  trailed  across  the  floor; 
he  felt  that  this  room  must  always  contain  an 
integral  portion  of  his  life.  And  Turquand  would 
miss  him. 

"Be  dull  for  you  to-morrow  evening,  rather,  I'm 
afraid,  won't  it?"  he  said  in  a  burst. 

"Oh,  I  was  alone  while  you  were  in  Dieppe,  you 
know.  I  shall  jog  along  all  right.  .  .  You've 
bought  a  desk  for  yourself,  haven't  you?" 

"Yes.     Swagger,  eh?" 

"You  won't  'know  where  yer  are.'  .  .  What's 
that — do  you  feel  a  draught?" 

"No — I — well,  perhaps  there  is  a  draught  now 
you  mention  it.  Yes,  I  shall  work  in  style  when 
we  come  back.  Strange  feeling,  going  to  be 
married,  Turk." 

"Is  it?"  said  Turquand.  "Haven't  had  the  ex- 
perience. Hope  Mrs.  Kent  will  like  me — they 


never  do  in  fiction.  .  .  You  might  tell  her  I'm 
not  a  bad  sort  of  a  damned  fool,  will  you?  And — 
er — I  want  to  say,  don't  have  the  funks  about 
asking  me  to  your  house  once  in  a  way,  old  chap, 
when  I  shan't  be  a  nuisance;  take  my  oath  I'll 
never  shock  your  wife,  Humphrey — too  fond  of 
you.  .  .  Be  as  careful  as — as  you  can,  I  give 
you  my  word." 

His  teeth  dosed  round  his  pipe  tightly.  Neither 
man  looked  at  the  other;  Humphrey  put  out  his 
hand  without  speaking,  and  Turquand  gripped  it. 
There  was  a  silence  again.  Both  stared  at  the 
dead  ashes.  The  clock  of  St.  Giles-in-the-Fields 
tolled  twelve,  and  neither  commented  on  it,  though 
they  simultaneously  reflected  that  it  was  now  the 
marriage  morning. 

"Strikes  me  we  were  nearly  making  bally  asses  of 
ourselves,"  said  Turquand  at  last  in  a  shaky  voice. 
"Finish  your  whisky  and  let's  to  bed." 

It  is  in  scenes  like  this  that  Mr.  Mer- 
rick shows  his  greatest  power.  In  every- 
thing he  writes  he  grasps  the  essential 
spirit  of  human  relationships;  and  though 
one  may  laugh  at  his  humor,  and  de- 
light in  his  turns  of  speech,  or  suffer 
acutely  with  his  people  when  they  strike 
hard  times,  still  it  is  the  picture  like  this 
that  remains  in  one's  mind  after  the  plot 
and  the  humor  and  the  words  are  lost.  The 
spirit  of  his  relationships  remains — and 
the  people  who  made  them.  His  character- 
ization is  like  his  style — exact,  and  at  the 
same  time  infinitely  suggestive.  How  well 
we  know  Blanche  Ellerton  in  her  various 
moods,  from  the  time  that  she  lies  awake 
after  the  candle  is  put  out  repenting  of 
her  engagement  seven  hours  after  its  con- 
summation, to  that  other  moment  when, 
after  tempting  Fairbairn  to  wrong  his 
friend,  her  husband,  "the  woman  whom  he 
had  yet  to  understand  lay  back  upon  the 
sofa  with  her  eyes  closed — thinking  too." 
Blanche  Ellerton,  under  the  author's  hand, 
becomes  a  person  infinitely  more  real  to 
us  than  many  of  our  so-called  friends.  We 
see  her  at  the  table,  red-eyed,  her  face 
bathed  in  tears  and  eau-de-cologne,  com- 
posing her  advertisement  of  "her  little 
angel  in  Heaven,"  while  Oliphant  sits  in 
the  next  room,  stunned  beside  his  boy's 
cot.  We  see  her  attending  lawn  parties 
where  fashion  was  "being  charitable  in 
elaborate  toilettes,"  and  posing  with  her 
husband,  to  whom  in  private  it  was  hardly 
worth  while  to  speak.  And  there  are 
twenty  others  in  his  novels  all  as  carefully 
drawn,  as  clearly  conceived. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


529 


Mr.  Merrick's  "heroes"  are  so  real 
that  one  does  not  even  notice  their  reality. 
He  never  describes  them  directly  and 
rarely  speaks  of  them  through  his  other 
characters;  for  the  time  being  they  are 
Merrick,  and  Merrick  they.  One  shpuld 
use  the  singular  however;  there  is  but  one, 
profoundly  studied,  represented  in  all  the 
boundless  wealth  of  possibility  offered  by 
the  conception  of  an  absorbing  personality. 
This  hero  is  like  Mr.  Merrick,  as  we  have 
seen,  in  many  superficial  ways.  But  what 
of  the  real  Merrick?  His  impersonality 
is  extraordinary.  It  is  as  if  he  said:  "The 
greatest  compliment  you  can  pay  me  is  to 
be  so  enthralled  by  my  stories  that  the 
writer  of  them  does  not  interest  you — not 
even  exist  to  you  as  a  separate  entity."  It 
is  the  reserve  of  a  man  whose  life  is  so 
completely  in  his  work  that  other  self- 
expression  and  all  self-assertion  are  un- 
necessary. 

But  what  is  his  real  philosophy  of 
writing?  What  are  the  literary  ideals 
that  underlie  these  delicately  constructed 
stories  of  struggle  and  disappointment  or 
fulfillment,  of  tragedy  and  humor?  "My 
business  is  to  present,"  he  remarks,  "not  to 
defend.  Were  tales  tellable  only  when 
the  hero  fulfilled  both  definitions  of  the 
word,  reviewers  would  have  less  to  do." 
To  this  business  of  his  he  keeps  very 
closely.  He  does  defend,  but  it  is  through 
creating  sympathy  for  the  object  of  his 
own  sympathy,  never  by  objective  protag- 
onism.  But  on  the  other  hand,  he  speaks 
of  "life,  which  has  no  construction  and 
no  moral,"  and  the  first  impulse  of  the 
critic  is  to  pounce  upon  an  inconsistency. 
For  Mr.  Merrick  does  construct  and  he 
does  imply  a  moral,  although  he  does  not 
point  it.  Yet  life  and  art  in  his  mind  are 
as  distinct  as  mirror  and  portrait  in  the 
conception  of  a  painter.  His  realism  is 
the  product  of  his  imagination,  which 
transforms  life  in  the  construction  of  art. 
Much  the  same  interpretation  is  to  be 
found  in  his  own  words;  and  it  is  impos- 
sible not  to  believe  that  Oliphant's  ambi- 
tion of  the  "dream  theatre"  embodies 
Merrick's  own  hope  for  literature: 

The  men  and  women  live!  They  are  not  pup- 
pets pulled  by  inexorable  strings  through  four  acts 
to  a  conventional  end.  Reward  for  virtue  and 


punishment  for  vice  are  shown  to  exist  in  the  soul, 
and  not  in  material  success  and  failure.  To  depict 
the  world  as  a  school,  where  virtue  wins  the  prize 
and  vice  gets  a  flogging,  is  immoral.  The  drama- 
tist who  comes  to  me  is  free:  free  to  be  true  to 
his  convictions  and  his  art  .  .  .  and  the  love 
within  him  for  all  humanity  would  point  the  moral 
when  it  needed  pointing.  .  .  The  one  command 
laid  upon  him  is  to  see  things  nobly — that  his  deeper 
vision  shall  help  the  crowd. 

If  Wilde's  dictum  remain  true,  that  "in 
a  novel  we  want  life,  not  learning,"  then 
Leonard  Merrick  is  indeed  a  novelist. 
That  he  contemplates  life  through  the 
comparatively  small  opening  of  the  stage 
does  not  prevent  him  from  obtaining 
fundamental  breadth  of  vision.  His  sur- 
face action  may  lack  variety,  his  essential 
motivation  never.  His  people,  though 
confined  to  a  narrow  sphere,  exhibit  the 
emotions  of  human  beings,  not  of  actors, 
actresses,  and  managers  only  as  such.  In 
modern  novels  the  tendency  is  to  plaster 
modern  ideas  onto  life,  and  the  ideas  have 
a  way  of  interesting  the  authors  more  than 
the  life  interests  them.  The  result  ^  of 
attempting  to  tell  a  story  with  living 
characters,  to  make  them  utter  consistent 
propaganda,  and  to  make  the  story  repre- 
sent an  Idea  with  a  capital  /is  likely  to 
be  a  rather  hazy,  incomplete,  and  discord- 
ant patchwork.  Mr.  Merrick  does  not  at- 
tempt this  alluring  task;  but  he  does  gain 
and  give  a  sense  of  completeness  which 
many  more  famous  than  he  are  lacking  in. 
Primarily  he  is  a  writer,  not  a  philosopher. 
This  qualification  may  have  kept  him  from 
a  place  among  the  greatest  writers,  but  at 
least  his  perfection  in  the  work  he  aspires 
to  do  lifts  him  far  above  the  ranks  of  the 
spurious  philosophers  in  literature. 

To  have  lived  his  life,  to  have  faced 
his  struggles — still  more  difficult,  to  have 
faced  the  lack  of  appreciation  of  that 
public  for  whom  he  wrote;  and  yet  to 
have  kept  the  delicate  edge  of  his  irony 
unblunted  by  bitterness,  and  his  humorous 
optimism  unspoiled,  indicates  an  independ- 
ent devotion  to  his  art  that  is  indeed  rare. 

"  'I  mean  to  be  true !'  cried  Humphrey 
Kent.  'I  won't  sell  my  birthright  for  a 
third  edition.'  .  .  The  man  was  an 
artist,  and  he  could  not  help  the  care  he 


took.' 


RUTH  MclNTiRE. 


530 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


Our  Paris  Letter 


I  have  been  reading  again  Matthew  Arnold's 
essay  on  "The  Literary  Influence  of  Academies" ; 
it  has  not  converted  me.  I  am  still  of  the  opinion 
that  I  expressed  in  THE  DIAL  four  months  ago 
— that  academies  are  the  bane  of  literature  and 
art,  and  the  enemies  of  individuality.  Matthew 
Arnold  thought  that  English  literature  would 
have  gained,  and  the  purity  of  the  English  lan- 
guage would  have  been  better  preserved,  had 
there  been  in  England  an  institution  like  the  Aca- 
demic Franchise.  He  says  with  truth  that  Riche- 
lieu intended  the  Academy  to  be  "a  high  court 
of  letters  for  France,"  a  "sovereign  organ  of 
opinion,"  and  he  adds,  "This  is  what  it  has,  from 
time  to  time,  really  been ;  by  being,  or  tending  to 
be  this,  far  more  than  even  by  what  it  has  done 
for  the  language,  it  is  of  such  importance  in 
France."  It  is  true  that  the  Academy  has  at 
certain  epochs  since  its  foundation  nearly  three 
centuries  ago  exercised  such  an  authority  in  mat- 
ters of  intellect  and  taste  as  Matthew  Arnold 
indicates  and  desires.  Sometimes  that  authority 
may  have  been  well  exercised,  but  it  would  be 
very  difficult  to  prove  that  in  the  long  run  the 
Academy  has  benefited  French  literature.  Cer- 
tainly one  may  be  thankful  that  it  has  had  no 
such  an  authority  for  a  long  time  past.  For  had 
the  Academy  been  able  to  do  so,  it  would  have 
suppressed  every  new  movement  in  French  lit- 
erature during  the  last  fifty  years. 

Even  if  it  be  possible,  as  Matthew  Arnold 
supposed,  to  discover  a  "law  of  good  taste" — 
and  for  my  part  I  doubt  it — he  forgot  that  such 
a  law  could  only  be  relative  and  provisional.  "Je 
comprends  tout,  mais  il  y  a  des  choses  qui  me 
degoutent,"  says  Felicie  Nanteuil  in  "Histoire 
Comique."  The  tendency  of  an  official  academy 
is  to  try  to  stereotype  taste  and,  by  means  of  tra- 
dition, to  impose  the  taste  of  one  generation  on 
all  its  successors.  That  is  very  evident  in  the  case 
of  art:  the  "tradition"  which  the  Academic  des 
Beaux  Arts  maintains  and  tries  to  impose  in  its 
school  is  merely  the  taste  of  the  epoch  of  Louis- 
Philippe  exalted  into  a  doctrine. 

The  attempt  to  stereotype  a  language  is  as  per- 
nicious as  that  to  stereotype  taste.  I  contest 
Matthew  Arnold's  view  that  the  Academic  Fran- 
c.aise  has  rendered  great  services  to  the  French 
language.  It  has  fought  against  every  new  word 
and  expression  and  admitted  an  innovation  only 
when  it  could  resist  no  longer.  Only  quite  re- 


cently have  we  been  officially  permitted  to  say 
"chic"  or  "epatant,"  which  every  inhabitant  of 
France  except  a  few  pedants  has  said  for  years. 
The  tendency  of  an  academy  is  not  to  embellish 
the  language  but  to  impoverish  it;  in  the  seven- 
teentlj  and  eighteenth  centuries,  when  the  Aca- 
demic Franchise  was  at  the  height  of  its  power 
and  influence,  the  French  language  was  impover- 
ished to  a  deplorable  extent  in  obedience  to  a 
"law  of  good  taste."  The  loss  is  irreparable  and 
it  has  ruined  French  poetry.  Prose  has  over- 
come the  disadvantage,  although  the  paucity  of 
words  in  the  French  language  makes  it  one  of 
the  most  difficult  in  the  world  to  write  well; 
but  modern  French  is  not  a  poetical  language, 
thanks  to  the  academic  pedants  of  the  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  centuries,  whereas  the  French  of 
the  fifteenth  century  was  one.  Even  Voltaire, 
perhaps  the  greatest  prose  writer  that  the  world 
has  ever  known,  must  share  the  blame.  In  litera- 
ture and  art,  as  in  everything  else,  I  am  for' 
liberty  against  authority;  both  have  their  disad- 
vantages, but  experience  shows  that  those  of 
liberty  are  the  less. 

The  Academic  Frangaise  seems  to  recognize 
that  its  authority  as  a  "high  court  of  letters"  is 
impaired,  for  it  shows  a  tendency  to  set  itself  up 
as  an  arbiter  of  civic  and  military  virtue  and  an 
organ  of  patriotic  manifestations.  Just  before 
the  war  it  elected  General  Lyautey,  and  the  only 
new  Academician  elected  since  the  war  began 
until  the  other  day  was  Marshal  Joffre.  What- 
ever may  be  the  military  qualities  of  these  two 
eminent  generals,  neither  of  them  has  the  small- 
est qualification  for  membership  of  an  institution 
whose  objects  are  those  set  out  in  Richelieu's 
statutes.  The  other  day  the  Academy  met  to 
fill  the  vacancies  caused  by  the  deaths  of  Henri 
Roujon,  Jules  Lemaitre,  and  Albert  de  Mun; 
there  are  still  six  vacancies,  for  ten  Academicians 
had  died  since  June,  1914  and  only  one  election 
— that  of  Marshal  Joffre — had  been  held  since 
then.  M.  Anatole  France,  who  has  returned  to 
the  Academy  since  the  war,  after  refusing  for 
several  years  to  attend  its  meetings,  took  part 
in  the  election ;  but  his  conversion — or  reaction — 
which  most  of  his  friends  profoundly  regret, 
cannot  obliterate  the  scathing  irony  with  which 
the  pretensions  of  the  Academy  are  demolished  in 
"Les  Opinions  de  Jerome  Cogniard."  Certain 
Academicians  had  proposed  that  Cardinal  Lugon, 
Archbishop  of  Reims,  should  be  elected  as  the 
successor  of  Count  Albert  de  Mun  as  an  homage 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


531 


to  the  city  which  has  suffered  so  terribly  from 
the  war.  The  cardinal  however,  who  must  have 
a  sense  of  humor,  solved  the  problem  by  refusing 
to  be  a  candidate.  In  the  "Temps"  on  April  29 
M.  Paul  Souday,  one  of  the  few  independent 
critics  left  in  the  Parisian  press,  congratulated 
Cardinal  Luc.on  on  his  good  sense.  If  Reims  is 
to  have  a  representative  in  the  Academy,  the 
natural  person  to  choose,  as  M.  Paul  Souday 
remarked,  would  be  the  Mayor  of  the  town,  who 
has  shown  no  less  courage  and  devotion  than  the 
Archbishop.  But  M.  Souday  rightly  maintained 
that  it  is  not  the  business  of  the  Academy  to 
reward  public  services  and  that  it  was  not 
founded  to  be  "an  organ  of  civic  manifestations 
or  a  salon  of  notables  of  every  description."  This 
development  however  is  a  sign  that  the  original 
functions  of  the  Academy  are  becoming  obsolete. 
Its  recourse  to  those  who  are  in  the  public  eye 
is  a  desperate  attempt  to  recover  its  lost  prestige, 
and  at  the  same  time  an  admission -that  it  is  no 
longer  able  to  fulfil  its  original  purpose. 

Long  since  the  Academic  Franchise  became 
political,  and  the  political  opinions  of  candidates 
have  much  more  influence  on  their  chances  than 
their  literary  qualities.  It  is  a  great  disadvantage 
to  be  a  Republican,  even  a  moderate  one;  the 
Academy  likes  bien-pensant  gentlemen,  even  if 
they  write  bad  French.  The  two  Academicians 
just  elected  both  fulfil  that  condition:  one  of 
them,  Mgr.  Baudrillart,  completely;  the  other, 
M.  Barthou,  relatively ;  and  neither  of  them 
writes  bad  French.  Mgr.  Baudrillart  is  the 
Rector  of  the  Catholic  Institute  of  Paris  and  the 
author  of  many  historical  works;  it  seems  for 
some  reason  to  have  been  generally  agreed  that 
an  ecclesiastic  should  be  chosen  to  succeed  M.  de 
Mun  and,  as  M.  Souday  said,  Mgr.  Baudrillart 
seems  to  be  the  only  ecclesiastic  with  any  pre- 
tensions to  a  chair  in  the  Academy.  M.  Barthou, 
who  succeeds  M.  Roujon,  was  Prime  Minister 
in  1913  and  was  the  author  of  the  Three- Year 
Service  Law;  to  the  latter  fact  he  owes  his  elec- 
tion, although  he  has  literary  tastes  and  is  the 
author  of  works  on  Mirabeau  and  Lamartine. 
The  chair  occupied  by  Jules  Lemaitre  was  not 
filled;  in  four  ballots  no  candidate  obtained  the 
clear  majority  required  by  the  statutes.  The  two 
serious  candidates  were  M.  Abel  Hermant  and 
M.  Henri  Bordeaux.  M.  Hermant  is  not  a 
great  writer,  but  he  has  produced  some  interest- 
ing and  amusing  novels  showing  considerable 
powers  of  observation  and  some  psychological 


gifts.  M.  Bordeaux  is  a  prolific  producer  of  sen- 
timental trash — which  since  the  war  has  become 
patriotic  trash — and  thirteen  of  the  twenty-seven 
Academicians  present  thought  him  worthy  to 
succeed  Jules  Lemaitre,  who  after  all  was  some- 
body both  as  a  writer  and  as  a  critic.  The 
reason  is  that  M.  Bordeaux  is  bien-pensant — 
which  has  not  always  prevented  him  from  being 
more  or  less  pornographic — whereas  M.  Hermant 
has  a  shady  past,  politically  speaking.  Thus  does 
the  sovereign  organ  of  opinion  show  its  capacity 
to  impose  upon  us  a  high  standard  in  matters 
of  intellect  and  taste.  If  Matthew  Arnold  were 
still  living  he  might  revise  his  essay. 

Again  I  have  to  record  that  the  unofficial 
Academic  Goncourt  gives  no  more  support  to 
Matthew  Arnold's  thesis  than  its  ancient  rival. 
On  April  29  it  again  refused  to  admit  Georges 
Courteline  within  its  ranks;  M.  Henri  Ceard 
was  elected  to  fill  the  place  of  the  late  Judith 
Gautier.  M.  Ceard  was,  it  is  true,  chosen  by 
Edmond  de  Goncourt  in  1881  to  succeed  Paul 
de  Saint-Victor  as  a  member  of  the  Academy ;  but 
Goncourt  changed  his  mind  and  nominated  M. 
Rosny  nine.  Three  years  later  Edmond  de  Gon- 
court appointed  M.  Ceard  to  be  one  of  his  execu- 
tors (the  other  was  Alphonse  Daudet),  but  he 
again  changed  his  mind  and  substituted  M.  Leon 
Hennique.  Perhaps  it  was  to  console  M.  Ceard 
for  having  replaced  him  that  M.  Rosny  aine  and 
M.  Hennique  both  voted  for  him  the  other  day. 
They  could  hardly  pretend  that  they  honestly 
believe  his  gifts  to  be  more  remarkable  than 
those  of  Georges  Courteline,  who  would  have 
been  a  member  of  the  Academic  Franchise  long 
ago  if  that  institution  came  anywhere  near  to 
realizing  the  intentions  of  its  founders.  M. 
Ceard  is  the  author  of  some  novels  and  plays 
which  have  had  as  little  success  as  they  deserve 
and,  having  been  an  adept  of  the  naturalist 
school  and  a  disciple  of  the  Goncourts  and  Zola, 
he  has  in  recent  years  vilified  Zola  in  reactionary 
newspapers.  The  Academic  Franchise  has  nar- 
rowly escaped  setting  up  M.  Henri  Bordeaux  as 
one  of  the  forty  examples,  with  General  Lyautey 
and  Marshal  Joffre,  of  the  highest  obtainable 
standard  in  matters  of  intellect  and  taste.  The 
Academic  Goncourt  has  asked  us  to  regard 
"Terrains  a  vendre"  as  superior  to  "Boubou- 
roche"  and  "Le  Train  de  8h.47."  If  these  are 
the  laws  of  good  taste,  let  us  all  be  anarchists. 

At  the  Petit  Palais  an  opportunity  is  given  of 
comparing  the  results  of  officialism  in  art  with  its 


532 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


effect  on  literature.  A  Salon  is  being  held  there, 
the  first  since  the  war;  but  it  is  unlike  the  usual 
Salon  in  that  it  is  entirely  composed  of  works 
by  members  of  the  two  official  societies.  The 
absence  of  "outsiders"  exposes  the  poverty  of  the 
societies  more  plainly  than  ever;  never  has  it 
been  more  evident  that  the  outsiders  have  saved 
previous  Salons  from  utter  banality.  As  might 
be  expected,  the  rooms  of  the  Societe  Nationale 
des  Beaux  Arts  are  rather  more  interesting  and 
alive  than  those  of  the  Societe  des  Artistes  Fran- 
c.ais,  which  produce  a  depressing  sensation  of  life- 
lessness.  It  is  almost  miraculous  that  in  a  country 
which  has  initiated  all  the  great  movements 
in  modern  painting  it  should  be  possible  for  so 
considerable  a  number  of  painters  to  have  so 
completely  escaped  the  influence  of  those  move- 
ments as  have  these  who  claim  the  proud  title 
of  "Les  Artistes  Frangais."  One  would  imagine, 
as  one  walks  through  the  rooms,  that  even  Im- 
pressionism, now  made  respectable  by  age,  had 
never  existed.  And  one  has  the  sense  of  having 
seen  all  the  pictures  before:  one  has  seen  them 
all  before  at  successive  Salons  any  time  these 
twenty  years.  Only  the  numerous  portraits  of 
Marshal  Joffre  and  other  generals  and  a  few 
conventional  battle  pieces,  which  might  repre- 
sent any  war  at  any  epoch  except  the  present, 
attest  the  influence  of  the  war.  The  level  of  the 
Societe  Nationale  des  Beaux  Arts  is  higher  and 
it  includes  more  painters  of  real  talent;  but  even 
its  members  too  often  repeat  themselves  almost 
mechanically,  and  some  of  them  are  much  below 
their  own  standard.  At  present  the  influence  of 
the  war  on  art  does  not  seem  to  be  favorable. 
A  charming  distemper  painting  of  a  little  girl, 
rapidly  painted  and  purposely  unfinished,  by 
Albert  Besnard,  shows  the  great  qualities  of  the 
artist  whom  Degas  described  as  "un  prix  de 
Rome  qui  a  mal  tourne,"  from  the  point  of  view, 
that  is  to  say,  of  his  masters.  Not  often  has 
Besnard  come  up  to  this  in  recent  years.  Four 
paintings  and  a  pastel  by  Degas  only  serve  to 
emphasize  the  banality  of  the  rest  of  the  exhibi- 
tion; yet  none  of  them  is  a  particularly  fine  or 
characteristic  example.  An  exhibition  of  con- 
temporary French  art  is  just  opening  at  Madrid. 
Its  organization  has  been  entrusted  to  the  Aca- 
demic des  Beaux  Arts ;  thus  does  the  state  under- 
stand artistic  propaganda  abroad.  It  is  more 
than  probable  that  none  of  the  movements  that 
have  made  contemporary  French  art  what  it  is 
will  be  represented  in  the  exhibition. 


The  terrible  anxiety  of  a  month  ago  is  some- 
what relieved;  for  although  the  danger  is  not 
yet  over,  the  fact  that  after  six  weeks  the  Ger- 
mans have  not  attained  one  of  their  objects  greatly 
increases  the  possibility  that  they  will  never  attain 
them.  In  an  offensive,  time  is  on  the  side  of  the 
defenders.  In  spite  of  such  mishaps  as  the  loss 
of  Mont  Kemmel,  we  are  justified  in  believing 
it  to  be  probable  that  the  attack  will  be  definitely 
checked.  But  the  military  situation  is  still  grave. 
The  offensive  has  naturally  silenced  political  con- 
troversy to  a  great  extent,  but  the  Socialist  party 
has  been  violently  attacked  for  deciding  to  cele- 
brate the  hundredth  anniversary  of  the  birth  of 
Karl  Marx.  So  much  so  that,  by  a  small 
majority,  the  Executive  of  the  party  went  back 
on  its  previous  decision  to  hold  a  great  demon- 
stration for  the  whole  of  Paris,  and  there  will 
be  only  smaller  meetings  in  the  various  districts. 
The  party  has  however  issued  a  manifesto  on 
the  occasion,  the  work  of  M.  Bracke  and  M. 
Jean  Longuet  (a  grandson  of  Karl  Mark),  in 
which  the  importance  of  the  life  and  work  of  the 
founder  of  modern  Socialism  is  set  forth.  Some 
of  the  leaders  against  the  Socialist  party  show  a 
strange  ignorance  of  Marx's  character  and  doc- 
trines. Unfortunately  a  knowledge  of  economic 
questions  is  not  very  common  in  France  and  there 
is  a  certain  insularity  which  leads  to  ignorance 
about  everything  outside  France  itself.  But  a 
paper  of  the  reputation  of  the  "Journal  des 
Debats"  ought  not  to  say  that  the  theories  of  the 
greatest  economist  of  the  nineteenth  century  have 
no  merit  but  their  obscurity;  and  it  is  hardly 
worthy  of  the  "Temps"  to  declare  that  Marx 
was  a  bitter  enemy  of  France,  seeing  that  he  pro- 
tested against  the  annexation  of  Alsace-Lorraine 
as  "a  crime  which  revives  the  policy  of  conquest 
in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century"  and 
wrote  on  January  16,  1871  that  France  was 
fighting  "not  only  for  her  national  independence, 
but  for  the  liberty  of  Germany  and  of  the  world." 
Marx  has  even  been  represented  as  an  apologist 
of  German  militarism  and  an  apostle  of  the 
bureaucratic  state,  although  he  declared  the  aboli- 
tion of  the  state  as  now  understood  to  be  the 
object  of  Socialism.  The  remarkable  little  book 
by  M.  Emile  Vandervelde,  "Le  Socialisme  contre 
1'Etat,"  which  I  noticed  last  month,  refutes  such 
errors  as  these,  and  certain  journalists  might  read 
it  with  profit.  ROBERT  DELL. 

Paris,  May  6,    1918. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


533 


Conscious  Control  of  the  Body 

MAN'S  SUPREME  INHERITANCE:  Conscious  Guid- 
ance and  Control  in  Relation  to  Human  Evolu- 
tion in  Civilization.  By  F.  Matthias  Alexander. 
With  an  introduction  by  Professor  John  Dewey. 
Dutton;  $2. 

Nature  and  civilization  are  names.  Nature 
stands  for  the  conditions  of  human  life  that  we 
find ;  civilization,  for  the  conditions  of  human  life 
that  we  make.  In  neither  are  we  particularly 
prosperous  or  particularly  at  ease.  For  civilization 
is  the  adventure  of  a  race  seeking  to  escape  from 
nature,  and  nature  is  the  goal  of  a  race  seeking 
freedom  from  the  oppressions  of  civilization. 
"Back  to  nature"  is  the  universal  device,  employed 
even  by  Germans — and  no  people  is  more  wor- 
shipful of  its  own  Kultur-toxins.  There  exists  a 
widespread  and  distinguished  gospel  of  life 
summed  up  in  this  maxim;  and  its  apostles  vary 
from  the  pulpiteer  Wagner,  famous  for  his 
promulgation  of  "The  Simple  Life,"  through 
the  pietist  Tolstoy,  famous  for  his  practice  of  it, 
to  the  prophet  Edward  Carpenter,  famous  for 
his  definition  of  its  righteousness.  The  title  of 
Mr.  Carpenter's  definition  is,  indeed,  final  in  the 
condemnation  of  the  man-made  world — "Civil- 
ization, Its  Cause  and  Cure." 

To  the  fellowship  of  Wagner,  Tolstoy,  and 
Carpenter  may  be  added  F.  Matthias  Alexander. 
To  the  diversities  of  preacher,  pietist,  and  prophet 
may  b«;  added  that  of  scientist.  But  where  his 
predecessors  see  the  cure  for  civilization  in  an 
abandonment  of  it,  Mr.  Alexander  sees  the  cure 
in  a  growing  control  of  the  human  organism  at 
work  in  it. 

In  many  ways  Mr.  Alexander's  theory  and 
practice  bear  a  striking  resemblance  to  Freud's. 
It  may  be  said,  in  fact,  that  Mr.  Alexander  treats 
the  body  as  Freud  does  the  mind.  The  work  of 
the  two  men  seems  to  me  to  be  supplementary, 
and  I  am  not  sure  that  Alexander's  is  not  more 
fundamental. 

The  observations  on  which  he  bases  his  work 
are,  briefly,  these :  The  human  body  is  an  organ- 
ism having  an  inconceivably  ancient  inheritance 
of  adaptations  to  conditions  of  life  to  be  found 
only  in  nature.  The  instinctive  responses  of  the 
body — its  postures,  attitudes,  adjustments;  how 
it  walks,  sits,  runs,  attends,  moves  its  trunk  and 
arms,  and  so  on — are  responses  coordinate  with 
conditions  to  be  found  only  in  a  very  primitive 
world,  in  which  unreflective  bodily  activity  is 
at  maximum  and  thought  at  minimum.  The 
growth  of  the  body  did  not  keep  pace  with  the 


complications  of  the  nervous  system.  The  com- 
plication of  the  nervous  system  meant  the  coming 
thought  and  the  emergence  of  a  new  and  human 
world,  the  world  of  civilization.  But  the  physical 
organs  with  which  we  utter  and  obey  thought  are 
the  old  animal  organs  of  the  expression  of  instinct 
and  impulse  and  appetite.  These  organs  do  not 
fit  well  into  a  world  of  books,  desks,  skyscrapers, 
machines,  and  drinks.  The  physical  organs  with 
which  we  utter  and  obey  thought  are  mostly  not 
arranged  to  respond  to  the  evocations  of  postur- 
ings,  manners,  and  movements  which  are  the 
signs  of  social  consciousness  and  response.  The 
soldier's,  machinist's,  farmer's,  desk-worker's,  and 
gentlewoman's  postures  and  movements  are  dis- 
tortions and  cripplings  of  their  bodies.  There 
is  hardly  a  man  or  woman  in  the  civilized  world 
whose  efficiency  is  not  lower,  whose  energy  is  not 
wasted,  whose  physical  system  is  not  in  strife — 
"the  scene  of  a  civil  war,  and  the  heart,  lungs, 
and  other  semiautomatic  organs  are  in  a  state  of 
perpetual  readjustment  to  opposing  conditions," 
those  of  nature  and  those  of  civilization. 

The  effect  is  a  growing  depletion  of  the  nerv- 
ous life  of  civilized  mankind — breakdowns,  hys- 
terias, cripplings,  and  accompanying  quackeries 
like  physical  culture,  osteopathy,  and  mental  heal- 
ings, aimed  to  relieve  these  conditions  but  failing 
in  the  long  run.  The  cause  of  their  failure  is 
that  they  affect  symptoms,  not  causes.  And  the 
causes  here  are  conflicts  within  the  organism 
itself,  conflicts  generated  by  opposing  directions 
of  action  in  the  conditions  of  life  itself.  One 
way  out  would  be  to  abandon  civilization  as 
Tolstoy  and  Carpenter  suggest.  But  that  is 
neither  feasible  nor  courageous  nor  desirable. 
In  the  mind  which  has  created  civilization  man 
has  an  infallible  instrument  for  the  correction  of 
its  evils.  The  way  out  is  the  reintegration  of 
bodily  action,  by  means  of  conscious  control. 

To  attain  this  control  however  requires  a  long 
process  of  reeducation.  A  clinical  experience  of 
more  than  twenty  years  has  convinced  Mr.  Alex- 
ander that  most  people  are  the  victims  of  what 
he  brilliantly  calls  a  "debauched  kinaesthesia." 
They  have  a  sense  of  physical  ease  or  adjustment 
which  is  habitual  and  fixed.  That  sense  sets  the 
standard  of  posture  for  them.  Yet  from  the 
point  of  view  of  correctness,  the  feeling  of  com- 
fort and  ease  may  accompany  the  most  deleterious 
posture.  Thus  there  is,  in  terms  of  the  mechanical 
arrangement  of  the  body,  one  position,  and  one 
only,  which  is  the  position  of  "mechanical  ad- 
vantage," though  because  of  vicious  training  and 


534 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


long  standing  habit,  that  position  may  at  first 
make  the  subject  feel  as  if  he  were  set  out  of 
shape.  The  readjustment  of  the  organs  in  terms 
of  the  position  of  "mechanical  advantage,"  and 
the  attainment  of  a  new  kinaesthesia  are  thus  basic 
to  a  handling  of  the  body  at  maximum  advantage 
in  all  the  activities  of  life.  Conscious  guidance 
and  control  will  do  this ;  and  as  Professor  Dewey 
says,  Mr.  Alexander  "possesses  and  offers  a  defi- 
nite method  for  its  realization." 

H.  M.  KALLEN. 


The  Middle  Pf^ay  in  Mysticism 

A  MANUAL  OF  MYSTIC  VERSE.    Edited  hy  Louise 

Collier  Willcox.    Dutton  ;  $1.25. 

DREAMS  AND  IMAGES:    An  Anthology  of  Catholic 

Poets.      Edited    by    Joyce    Kilmer.      Boni    and 

Liveright;   $1.50. 

POEMS  OF   CONFORMITY.     By   Charles  Williams. 

Oxford  University  Press ;  $1.40. 

To-MoRROW,   and   Other  Poems.    By  Innes  Stitt 

and  Leo  Ward.    Longmans,  Green;  $1. 

That  person  would  be  not  only  polite  but  wise 
who  said  nothing  inflammable  concerning  the 
religious  poetry  of  others.  He  should  not  forget 
that  religious  poetry  is  probably  of  all  poetry  most 
seriously  an  affair  of  the  heart ;  he  ought  to  speak 
discreetly  therefore,  and  deal  with  reserve. 

Discriminations  however  should  not  be  dis- 
pensed with;  for  if  religious  poetry  is  to  be 
estimated  at  all,  it  obviously  can  be  estimated 
less  as  religion  than  as  poetry.  Once  the  reader 
commences  discrimination,  he  will  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  the  fear  of  the  Lord  is  not  neces- 
sarily the  beginning  of  poetry.  In  particular  he 
will  see,  even  if  he  but  skims  these  four  volumes, 
that  the  most  important  poetically — the  "Manual 
of  Mystic  Verse" — is  one  of  the  less  strictly  re- 
ligious. In  this  volume,  even  the  adverse  minded 
must  concede,  is  contained  much  of  -what  is 
excellent  in  poetry,  certainly  most  of  the  best  in 
mystic  poetry ;  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  exclud- 
ing of  the  mediocre  and  the  worst,  of  which 
there  is  a  good  deal  to  do,  has  been  thorough  and 
sure.  One  sounds  the  bass  strings  of  his  imagina- 
tion in  being  a  mystic;  and  when  one  goes  so 
low,  the  distinction  between  music  and  noise  is 
frequently  not  discoverable.  Yet  from  noise  this 
anthology  is  free:  there  is  practically  no  one  in 
this  various  company  of  the  mystic  and  the  mysti- 
cally inclined  whose  tone  loses  clarity  as  it  gains 
emotion.  Of  the  impression  made  by  the  collec- 
tion as  a  whole  hardly  less  can  be  said ;  it  is  an 
impression  much  removed  from  the  indistinctness, 


the  empty  symbolism  that  mars  so  much  mystic 
thought  and  verse.  You  are  really  not  sensible 
of  the  dangers  of  mysticism  when  you  read 
poetry  characterized  by  so  much  restraint,  by  so 
much  dignity  and  humanity.  The  poems  are 
freely  secular,  wide  ranging,  and  rich  in  the 
depth  of  experience  they  draw  upon;  and  as  a 
consequence  the  tones  with  which  they  speak  of 
Divinity  are  authoritative  and  final  rather  than 
fanatic.  These  poets,  you  feel,  praise  God  from 
well  filled  minds,  and  there  is  the  implication  in 
their  language  that  they  know  what  discipline 
of  the  heart  is.  For  with  all  their  positive 
intuitions,  their  "associations  with  eternity,"  they 
do  not  fail  to  see,  and  to  use  in  their  praise,  the 
many  things  that  the  excessively  mystic  would 
neglect  or  deny,  the  things  that  lend  themselves 
especially  to  poetry — not  only  the  inheritance  of 
sense  but  also  all  which  humanity  has  won  for 
itself  by  patience  and  degrees,  and  without  which 
it  is  only  accidental  that  the  inheritance  of  sense 
can  become  poetry.  In  fact  one  is  ready  to 
believe  that  the  debt  which  such  successful 
mysticism  owes  to  cultivation  is  not  slight;  for 
certainly  the  debt  is  not  a  small  one  which  poetry 
itself  owes  to  cultivation.  We  are  apt  to  grow 
negligent  in  our  recognition  of  such  debts  when 
we  contrast  the  urbane,  difficult,  and  slow  prog- 
ress of  cultivation  with  the  swift  and  vivid 
passions  that  kindle  poetry  and  religion;  and  the 
mystic,  in  proportion  to  his  degree  of  mysticism, 
is  likely  to  grow  contemptuous.  Yet  even  the 
mystic,  unless  he  is  bent  on  final  dissolution,  must 
pause  to  admit  that  if  cultivation  has  made  us 
artificial  it  has  also  made  us  articulate.  So  there 
is  countenance  perhaps,  in  view  of  the  original 
and  liberal  soundness  of  these  particular  mystics, 
for  the  question :  Does  not  he  love  God  best  who 
can  remember  otherwise  than  derogatorily  the 
force  of  "what  man  has  made  of  man"? 

Of  the  next  volume,  "Dreams  and  Images," 
one  regrets  that  so  much  cannot  be  said.  Like  the 
"Manual"  it  skirts  easily  the  dangers  of  mysti- 
cism ;  it  does  so  however  by  being  more  restricted, 
more  official,  and  more  partisan.  It  voices  a 
less  rich  and  varied  spiritual  experience,  and  it 
lacks  the  equanimity  and  resonance  that  make  the 
poems  of  the  "Manual"  the  excellent  praise  and 
spiritual  fortification  that  they  are.  There  is,  of 
course,  no  defect  of  fervor;  yet  one  feels  acutely 
a  thinness  of  expressive  resources,  and  if  not  a 
disavowal,  a  neglect  both  of  the  rich  poetic  tex- 
tiles that  the  senses  supply  and  of  the  valuable 
patterns  that  cultivation  furnishes.  The  urgent 
necessity  that  poetry  is  perpetually  under  of  being 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


535 


at  once  unique  and  inevitable,  novel  and  familiar, 
discloses  in  this  volume  a  good  deal  that  seems 
to  have  been  in  circulation  before,  and  leads  to 
the  suspicion  that  the  stores  here  drawn  upon  are 
not  copious.  These  poems  are  too  slightly  charged 
with  the  perception  which  chiefly,  perhaps  alone, 
clarifies-  passion  and  gives  it  authority.  The 
writers  seem  to  have  been  in  too  much  haste  to 
praise :  they  should  have  gone  about ;  they  should 
have  looked  at  the  world  less  narrowly;  they 
should  have  known  that  after  all  the  way  afield 
more  abounds  in  the  praise  of  heaven  which  they 
are  seeking  than  does  the  hard  high  road  of 
dogma.  Conceding  that  such  a  road  if  it  is  hard 
is  also  fine  and  smooth,  and  that  those  who  travel 
it  are  safe  from  the  amorphous  subjectivity 
which  overtakes  the  too  indulgent  mystic,  one 
still  feels  that  if  one's  companions  must  be  not 
only  orthodox  but  poetic,  their  view  should  have 
perspective  enough  to  include  the  art  as  well  as 
the  object  of  art.  The  Lord  is  better  praised  and 
man  more  lastingly  fortified  in  the  "Manual" 
than  in  "Dreams  and  Images,"  because  those  who 
wrote  the  former  made  haste  more  thoughtfully 
in  their  fashion  of  praise,  and  with  wider  con- 
sideration, than  those  who  wrote  the  latter. 

Yet  the  author  of  "Poems  of  Conformity" 
has  taken  thought  too,  one  finds,  after  having 
searched  somewhat  uncertainly  through  their 
adorned  and  intricate  convolutions.  Reviewing 
his  impressions  of  this  volume  one  is  surprised 
to  find  at  the  end  a  postscript  of  dissatisfaction 
that  he  can  scarcely  explain.  It  is  not  because 
of  thinness;  that  shortcoming  cannot  be  charged 
to  Mr.  Williams's  rather  complicated  maturity; 
his  verse  is  even  somewhat  euphuistic  in  its  ex- 
hibition of  craft  and  poetic  abundance.  His 
orthodoxy,  too,  is  richer  in  experience  and  has 
more  weight  certainly  than  that  of  most  of  the 
poets  in  "Dreams  and  Images."  Pursuing  the 
matter  one  comes  presently  to  the  conclusion  that 
it  is  the  poet's  sophistication  that  he  dislikes; 
and  almost  at  once  arises  the  suspicion  that  this 
sophistication  shelters  as  comprehensive  a  mystic 
as  one  has  yet  seen.  Mr.  Williams  possesses  an 
abundance  of  verse  ideas  of  a  valuable  sort;  the 
flights  of  his  imagination  are  somewhat  short,  but 
they  are  multifarious  and  very  skilfully  guided ; 
he  seems  markedly  absorbed  in  the  science  of 
distinction,  for  he  sins  by  virtuosity  sometimes; 
yet  in  spite  of  all  this  he  stands  rather  betrayed 
by  the  blank  mysticism  of  a  poem  like  "Rich- 
mond Park."  Such  a  betrayal  has,  indeed,  all 
the  appearance  of  an  accident,  for  the  author  has 
ordinarily  a  firmly  orthodox  religious  voice  and 


so  abundant  and  involved,  yet  so  well  modulated, 
an  utterance  that  one  is  inclined  to  credit  him 
with  being  better  practiced  in  the  art  of  felicity 
than  in  felicity  itself.  So  the  reader  is  forced 
to  return  upon  himself  and  ask  what  has  become 
of  his  distinction  between  the  "Manual"  and 
"Dreams  and  Images,"  of  his  impression  as  to  the 
greater  excellence  and  more  liberal  maturity  of 
the  former.  But  he  will  find  that  the  distinction 
still  holds,  for  it  is  not  hard  to  see  that  the 
"Poems  of  Conformity"  are  mature  in  a  more 
narrowly  specialized  way  than  those  in  the 
"Manual." 

One  becomes  the  more  convinced  in  this  im- 
pression when  he  turns  to  the  more  ingenuous 
emotion  and  less  skilfully  guided  impression- 
ability of  Mr.  Innes  Stitt  and  Mr.  Leo  Ward. 
The  same  distinction  which  is  to  be  seen  in  its 
outcome  by  a  comparison  of  the  "Poems  of  Con- 
formity" with  those  in  the  "Manual"  can  be 
seen  here  in  its  inception.  The  disparity  is  even 
emphasized  by  the  arrangement  of  the  poems  in 
the  volume,  for  those  dealing  with  the  same  or 
relative  aspects  of  religious  emotion  are  so  paired 
that  comparison  is  inevitable.  And  Mr.  Ward 
is  at  a  disadvantage  in  being  placed  so  close  to 
Mr.  Stitt,  who,  perhaps  no  richer  in  potentiality, 
is  yet  more  arresting  by  his  greater  clarity  and 
immediacy.  The  spiritual  unity  of  the  two  is 
doubtless  —  as  their  editor  says  —  complete,  but 
poetically  they  are  in  very  different  ways.  The 
reader  must  seek  the  frequently  remote  mean- 
ing of  Leo  Ward  through  intricacies  and  sub- 
versions which  do  not  always  justify  the  labor 
they  entail  —  as  those  of  Mr.  Williams  usually  do. 
One  sometimes  fails  of  ready  comprehension  and 
wonders  if  a  meaning  is  really  there.  The  result 
is  unfortunate  for  Mr.  Ward,  for  one  turns  to 
such  poems  as  "To-Morrow,"  by  Innes  Stitt, 
rather  predisposed  to  accept  their  easy  intelligibil- 
ity as  a  mark  of  superiority.  And  one  finds  them 
not  only  easily  intelligible;  they  are  at  once 
familiar  and  distinguished  ;  they  are  characterized 
by  sincere  inspiration,  by  lucid  perception,  and 
by  a  very  delicate  spirit  of  choice.  Really  such 
achievements  should  be  held  not  only  as  the 
better  art  but  also  as  the  better  religious  praise, 
the  better  spiritual  fortification.  In  such  achieve- 
ments is  not  forgotten  the  value,  so  greatly  prized 
by  Emerson,  of  "things  used  as  language,"  a 
value  the  too  partisanly  religious  neglect,  to 
their  own  detriment;  yet  neither  is  the  purpose 
of  such  praise  forgotten  in  the  business  of  com- 


posnS 


C.  K.  TRUEBLOOD. 


536 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


Lords  of  Language 

OSCAR  WILDE,  His  LIFE  AND  CONFESSIONS.  By 
Frank  Harris.  With  a  chapter  by  Bernard 
Shaw.  Two  vols.  Published  by  the  author;  $5. 

Oscar  Wilde  was  himself  too  good  a  story- 
teller not  to  have  relished  this  tactfully  reasoned 
account  of  his  own  life.  In  what  I  take  to  have 
been  Wilde's  most  mature  phase  and  accordingly 
that  in  which  his  personality  found  most  complete 
expression,  in  those  last  years  in  Paris,  we  know 
he  always  began  the  day  by  the  absorption  of 
aperitifs.  Like  the  conscientious  artist  that  he 
is,  Frank  Harris  has  modeled  his  book  upon  his 
hero  even  in  this  detail :  he  begins  with  a  twenty- 
two  page  report  of  the  trial  of  Oscar  Wilde's 
father,  a  distinguished  Dublin  oculist,  for  the 
seduction  of  one  of  the  younger  and  more  charm- 
ing of  his  patients.  We  already  know  the  book 
is  to  be  what  Oscar  would  have  called  "scarlet." 

It  is  appropriate  that  so  diverting  a  narrative 
should  now  be  issued  in  a  less  unpopularly  ex- 
pensive edition  than  the  form  in  which  the  book 
was  first  published  two  years  ago.  Incidentally 
this  life  of  Wilde  is  the  most  satisfying  we  pos- 
sess, not  merely  containing  much  personal  data, 
but  also  vivified  and  made  articulate  by  the 
dramatic  genius  of  the  author.  The  style  is  clear 
and  easy,  not  seldom  illumined  by  such  good 
things  as  this  reflection  on  Oscar's  talk:  "It  was 
all  like  champagne;  meant  to  be  drunk  quickly; 
if  you  let  it  stand,  you  soon  realized  that  some 
still  wines  had  rarer  virtues." 

This  hagiology  should  at  length  burke  those 
heretics  who  would  deny  the  importance  of  our 
most  aesthetic  martyr.  For  he  that  can  keep  the 
centre  stage  in  a  book  by  Frank  Harris  has  cer- 
tainly vindicated  his  right  to  wear  those  spurs 
which  in  his  case  were  so  early  won  across  the 
teacups  of  Oxford.  To  few  men  after  their 
death  is  it  given  to  carry  off  so  signal  a  triumph 
as  this  of  holding  through  two  volumes  our  undi- 
vided attention,  even  with  Harris  all  the  time  in 
full  view  and  of  course  not  allowing  us  for  a 
moment  to  forget  that  he  has  taken  out  all  the 
big  dogs  of  his  day  on  leash  for  airing.  Neither 
are  the  famous  dogs  of  other  days  allowed  to 
sulk  behind  the  wings.  The  book  includes  several 
score  and  among  them  such  diverse  thorough- 
breds as  Luther  and  Baudelaire,  Bentham  and 
Michelangelo,  Socrates  and  Bernhardt,  not  to 
mention  the  old  headliners,  Alexander  and  Cae- 
sar. But  our  producer  appears  to  see  in  Goethe 
his  best  drawing-card.  Indeed  we  find  him  on 
the  first  page  of  the  little  circular  sent  around 
to  advertise  the  show.  During  the  performance 


proper  we  are  treated  to  the  great  Boche  at  least 
once  in  every  number  solemnly  stalking  across  the 
scene  for  all  the  world  like  the  negro  giant  in 
"Chu  Chin  Chow."  Were  there  not  already  a 
rather  cumbersome  bunch  of  appendices  dangling 
from  the  end  of  volume  two,  I  should  recommend 
to  Mr.  Harris  that  in  his  next  edition  he  include 
a  "Who's  Who"  of  the  performers.  Harris's 
Wilde,  as  at  once  more  condensed  and  more 
readable,  might  well  supersede  in  the  education 
of  America  President  Eliot's  somewhat  diffuse 
"Harvard  Classics." 

But  I  have  no  right  to  treat  as  a  vaudeville 
what  the  word  "Confessions"  in  the  title  might 
well  have  admonished  me  was  to  be  a  tragedy. 
Also  in  that  same  little  annunciatory  tract  we 
read:  "Yet  his  ruin  and  death  were  an  exempli- 
fication of  the  moral  law;  he  was  punished 
wherein  he  had  sinned."  Yes,  a  tragedy  it  is, 
with  the  protagonist  likened  to  Milton's  Satan 
and  "the  wild  horses  of  Fate  had  run  away  with 
the  light  chariot  of  his  fortune."  Whether  or 
not  Shaw  be  correct  in  his  diagnosis  of  Wilde 
as  a  prey  to  an  obscure  disease  called  giantism, 
we  are  certain  that  Fate  at  any  rate  has  here 
contracted  a  like  complaint.  The  book  is  almost 
as  bad  as  a  play  by  Sophocles.  Were  it  not  for 
such  romantic  touches  as  the  thrice  repeated 
phrase  "strange  sins"  and  for  the  stimulating 
atmosphere  of  "The  Police  Gazette,"  I  fear  some 
of  us  moderns  could  not  have  survived  this  biog- 
raphy of  the  purest  modern  of  us  all.  Seriously, 
it  is  provoking  to  have  that  deft  master  of  the 
quirk  and  cigarette  silhouetted  against  a  not  less 
disturbedly  fumy  heaven  than  that  behind  the 
Dresden  Rubens  of  Christ  on  the  Cross. 

Together  with  these  impertinent  paraphernalia 
of  tragedy  we  find  a  not  less  impertinent,  if  less 
Greek,  moral  bias.  Not  only  does  Harris  exhaust 
us  as  well  as  Wilde  with  interminable  arguments 
against  his  friend's  peche  favori,  but  also  he  must 
needs  whitewash  Oscar  of  blasphemy.  He  for- 
gets that  he  is  not  writing  a  character  reference, 
that  all  the  good  words  in  the  world  cannot 
make  Oscar  a  curate  now.  We  have  startling 
evidence  of  how  potent  the  Puritan  tradition  yet 
is  when  a  writer  of  Harris's  ability  can  state  as 
a  truism  that  "all  high  humanity  is  the  reward 
of  constant  striving  against  natural  desires."  All 
through  the  book  we  are  aware  of  two  presences 
at  either  shoulder  of  our  author,  Melpomene  the 
trumpet-mouthed  and  the  more  nasal  Virtue.  In 
the  end  the  more  expansively  fateful  lady  gets 
in  the  last  word: 

Since  Luther  we  have  been  living  in  a  centrifugal 
movement,  in  a  wild  individualism  where  all  ties 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


537 


of  love  and  affection  have  been  loosened,  and  now 
that  the  centripetal  movement  has  come  into  power 
we  shall  find  that  in  another  fifty  years  or  so  friend- 
ship and  love  will  win  again  to  honor  and  affinities 
of  all  sorts  will  proclaim  themselves  without  shame 
and  without  fear.  In  this  sense  Oscar  might  have 
regarded  himself  as  a  forerunner  and  not  as  a  sur- 
vival or  "sport." 

Really  one  cannot  let  this  sort  of  guff  pass. 
What  has  social  solidarity  to  do  with  an  abnor- 
mal manifestation  of  sex?  And  if  in  fifty  years 
Wilde  is  to  be  honored,  why  not  now? 

Though  he  used  it  only  to  heat  the  curling- 
iron  for  his  complicated  coiffure  of  paradox,  yet 
Oscar  Wilde  undoubtedly  had  in  him  a  spurt  of 
the  divine  fire.  Try  to  read  a  man  like  Chester- 
ton and  you  will  not  go  far  before  your  nerves 
begin  to  blench  from  those  metallic  paradoxes 
which  come  with  all  the  precision  of  an  automatic 
alarum.  In  Wilde,  on  the  other  hand,  they  are 
never  the  mere  jolts  we  find  them  in  the  ordi- 
nary writer.  Each  has  a  peculiar  grace  and  flavor 
of  its  own  and  one  is  no  more  the  double  to 
another  than  are  two  persons  merely  because  both 
happen  to  be  dressed  in  other  than  the  expected 
costume.  Such  a  book  as  "The  Decay  of  Lying" 
has  only  one  fault:  the  argument  is  so  patently 
just  that  the  style  almost  wearies  us — charming 
though  it  be — and  we  desire  nuts  less  easy  to 
crack. 

Of  course  to  the  Philistines  these  ideas  were, 
are,  and  ever  will  be  very  real  paradoxes  indeed. 
Here  lies  the  secret  not  only  of  Wilde's  literary 
method,  but  also  of  his  life:  both  his  words  and 
his  poses  were  forever  addressed  to  the.  Philis- 
tines, and  that  he  should  have  found  them  worth 
mystifying  is  the  real  tragedy.  Nowhere  else 
than  in  England  could  a  man  of  Wilde's  intelli- 
gence have  been  bunkoed  into  taking  the  proper- 
tied classes  at  their  own  valuation.  There,  how- 
ever, so  inexpugnably  are  they  entrenched  that 
better  men  than  he  have  accepted  conditions  and 
become,  like  him,  despite  their  genius,  mere  snobs. 
Such  power  has  the  shell-fire  of  public  opinion 
when  kept  up  from  the  home  through  school 
and  university.  From  Lord  Byron  to  Lord  Al- 
fred Douglas  we  can  watch  file  by  the  terrible 
troop  of  the  damned.  Had  Dante  been  an  Eng- 
lishman he  would  have  constructed  in  hell  a  tenth 
circle  and  there  we  should  have  seen  no  more 
piteous  figure  than  Oscar  Wilde.  Yet  mediocrity 
remains  the  prime  condition  of  popularity,  and 
we  are  pleased  to  find  that  our  fop  of  genius 
never  was  quite  the  button  on  the  cap  of  London 
society  that  he  liked  to  imagine. 

But  if  we  feel  his  writing  to  be  self-conscious, 
let  us  remember  that  in  this  world  sanity  cannot 


be  otherwise;  and  of  such  affectations  as  there 
are  we  can  truly  say  that  they  take  our  heart  as 
no  sincerity  ever  could  do.  His  teaching,  too, 
was  essentially  good,  for  in  all  his  writings  we 
find  that  most  needed  and  most  difficult  of  les- 
sons :  to  perceive  the  value  of  the  passing  moment 
is  the  aim  of  all  sound  culture. 

Frank  Harris  was  a  staunch  friend  and  will 
always  be  sure  of  the  respect  and  honor  due  to 
one  who  had  the  generosity  to  stand  by  a  wronged 
man  when  all  England  forgot  the  meaning  of 
the  words  fair  play.  But  if  it  was  the  part  of  a 
friend  to  arrange  for  flight  and  to  counsel  it  with 
so  multiform  an  ingenuity,  yet  it  was  the  part 
of  a  Roman,  however  imperial  he  thought  him- 
self, to  stand  trial.  Harris  was  of  course  also 
right  in  urging  his  friend  to  conciliate  "Philis- 
tine jurymen."  But  knowing  Wilde  and  know- 
ing Anglo-Saxon  jurymen,  does  anyone  believe 
that  to  have  been  possible?  Wilde's  behavior 
at  the  trial  would  have  been  a  gesture  for  which 
we  could  now  have  little  but  admiration,  if  only 
in  the  sequence  he  had  carried  it  off.  Knowing 
what  followed,  we  fear  lest  of  the  many  explana- 
tions he  afterwards  gave  for  his  passivity,  the 
true  one  was  that  had  he  not  brought  suit  against 
Queensberry  and  had  he  later  fled  to  France, 
"everyone  would  be  laughing  at  me" — to  a  snob 
the  one  unthinkable  disaster. 

Even  so,  a  more  virile  character  would  have 
put  up  a  fight.  Reading  Wilde's  life  we  can 
well  believe  his  assertions  of  distaste  at  the  ani- 
malism of  Trinity  and  Oxford  and  his  friends' 
witness  that  he  always  shrank  from  any  gross  or 
crude  expression.  The  same  idiosyncrasy  of  tem- 
perament comes  out  in  his  inability  to  compre- 
hend Aubrey  Beardsley,  even  when  illustrating 
his  own  "Salome."  He  was  not  sufficiently  down- 
right to  savor  the  falcon-like  intensity  of  him  who 
so  sheerly  pounces  to  the  sanguine  heart  of  his 
subject.  It  would  have  been  better  to  have  kept 
complete  silence  than  to  have  spoken .  of  that 
divine  guttersnipe  as  an  "orchid-like  personality." 

"The  Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,"  says  Frank 
Harris,  "is  beyond  all  comparison  the  greatest 
ballad  in  English:  one  of  the  noblest  poems  in 
the  language."  Lord  Alfred  Douglas  in  that 
most  terrible  of  all  books,  "Oscar  Wilde  and 
Myself,"  demonstrates  to  his  own  satisfaction  the 
worthlessness  of  all  his  friend's  work.  I  am  not 
fond  of  the  word  demonstrate  applied  to  ques- 
tions of  taste,  but  surely  if  there  ever  can  be  a 
demonstration  in  such  matters,  we  have  it  in 
Harris's  juxtaposition  of  some  verses  from  "The 
Shropshire  Lad"  and  parts  of  "The  Ballad." 


538 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


In  such  company,  to  my  ear  at  least,  "The  Bal- 
lad" rings  second-rate:  the  best  one  can  say  of 
it  is  that  it  is  less  insipid  than  the  rest  of  Wilde's 
verse. 

Harris  speaks  of  the  "De  Profundis"  as  "the 
best  pages  of  prose  he  ever  wrote."  Here  again 
some  of  us  would  differ;  we  think  that  Oscar 
Wilde  wrote  better  things  than  this  pompous 
rigmarole  in  which  he  calls  his  grief  at  his  moth- 
er's death  "the  incommunicable  pageant  of  my 
purple  woe."  Despite  the  at  least  mauve  quality 
of  Lady  Wilde,  such  an  expression  seems  a  bit 
thick.  I  wish  Frank  Harris  had  not  liked  the 
"De  Profundis"  so  well:  the  influence  has  not 
been  good.  This  extraordinary  letter  is  an  ex- 
ample of  man's  attempt  to  persuade  himself  that 
all  is  for  the  best  and  in  particular  that  his  indi- 
vidual fortune,  whatever  it  be,  is  good.  When 
Oscar  was  proud,  he  did  not  have  to  reflect  much 
to  reach  the  decision  that  pride  is  a  virtue.  Now 
that  worldly  disaster  had  overthrown  his  pride, 
there  became  for  him  no  virtue  like  humility. 
In  the  light  of  his  pose  at  the  trial,  this  is  all 
rather  funny,  but  pitiful  too;  and  regarding  the 
"De  Profundis"  as  a  piece  in  the  structure  of 
Wilde's  whole  life,  it  assumes  truly  frightful 
proportions.  Written  to  expose  the  perfidy  of 
Douglas,  it  exposes  in  even  more  embarrassing 
fashion  the  writer  himself.  For  the  world  then 
saw  that  he  who  had  roared  so  prettily,  now  that 
the  lion-tonic  of  adulation  was  taken  from  him, 
could  only  bleat  those  damning  dicta  which  all 
humanity  inevitably  applaud. 

Harris,  like  everybody  else,  is  interested  in  the 
question  of  Wilde's  unproductiveness  those  last 
years  in  Paris.  Again  and  again  he  urged  his 
friend  to  write,  but  always  in  vain.  Why  would 
he  do  nothing?  Was  it  perhaps  that  literary 
composition  had  never  been  so  easy  for  him  as  he 
had  once  pretended?  Did  Wilde  analyze  justly 
when  he  said  he  could  write  only  of  joy,  and  his 
prison  life  had  made  that  henceforth  impossible? 
How  then  could  he  talk,  as  he  surely  did,  with 
the  old  verve  and  abandon?  Was  not  the  real 
reason  that  Oscar  Wilde  had  a!:  last  come  to 
know  himself  and  consequently  his  limitations? 
Did  he  not  see  that  of  his  writings  his  plays  were 
the  best?  And  was  not  their  worth  almost 
wholly  in  the  brilliant  dialogue?  A  true  artist, 
he  devoted  himself  to  what  was  best  in  him,  his 
conversation.  What  right  had  those  who  were 
privileged  to  hear  him  to  grudge  him  his  support  ? 
Is  there  any  earthly  reason  why  we  should  not 
pay  for  conversation  as  well  as  for  books?  It  is 


fitting  that  the  manner  of  payment  for  this  most 
haphazard  of  the  arts  should  also  be  unregulated. 
As  Wilde  himself  said,  "at  any  rate  we  who  talk 
should  not  be  condemned  by  those  to  whom  we 
dedicate  our  talents.  It  is  for  posterity  to  blame 
us."  In  favor  of  good  conversation  there  is,  be- 
sides, the  excellent  argument  that,  after  all,  those 
who  in  any  period  can  really  enjoy  the  best  of  a 
language  are  so  few  they  can  easily  be  reached  in 
the  more  intimate  manner.  Wilde  appears  to 
have  possessed  when  animated  a  rare  personal 
phosphorescence,  such  as  we  expect  to  find  only 
in  women  and  there  not  often.  This  combined 
with  the  genius  of  the  man  must  have  been  irre- 
sistible. Mr.  Harris  is  temerarious  so  lightly  to 
condemn  the  method  of  Socrates  and  of  Dr. 
Johnson. 

But  in  the  end  we  tire  of  all  these  facts  and 
theories,  so  cumbrously  do  they  hang  about  the 
gracious  figure  of  Oscar  Wilde.  Let  us  remem- 
ber him  an  undergraduate,  seated  in  Magdalen 
Lodge,  attended  by  the  Alice-in-Wonderland  por- 
ter, lazing  away  an  Oxford  afternoon.  The 
bright-eyed  commoners  hurry  through  on  willing 
feet  to  river  and  to  playing-field.  But  the  clever 
and  the  comely  stay  despite  themselves.  They 
collect  about  the  heavy  speaker  of  light  words, 
a  somewhat  young  and  oily  god  of  a  new  Sargasso 
Sea.  Meanwhile  the  captain  of  the  Eight  is 
cursing  that  there  should  be  no  other  less  peril- 
ous exit  from  Oxford's  first  rowing  college. 

Those  whom  the  world  loves  die  hard  and  so 
we  have  more  than  one  precious  conflicting  legend 
that  Oscar  Wilde  yet  lives.  Because  of  his  sacer- 
dotal physique  I  think  he  would  prefer  us  to 
think  of  him  as  a  monk  in  that  Carmelite  Monas- 
tery in  Spain.  Dear  lover  of  the  irresponsible, 
erstwhile  so  elaborately  an  idler,  cherisher  of  the 
ardent  nothingness  of  everyday,  now  he  habits 
where  only  the  vines  are  irresponsible  and  life 
is  a  carven  jade.  Perhaps  he  is  seated  even  now 
on  a  warm  stone  bench  and  looking  out  across 
the  Atlantic.  Perhaps  he  sees  the  doughty  figure 
of  Frank  Harris  astride  his  mustang  plunging 
along  over  the  blue  backs  of  the  waves,  one  hand 
easily  controlling  his  remarkable  mount  while 
with  the  other  he  holds  out  before  him,  still  wet 
from  the  printer,  the  sheets  of  this  book ;  for  he 
is  eager  and  liberal  of  his  own  as  only  a  cowboy 
can  be.  The  venerable  Carme  basking  in  the 
sunlight  perceptibly  smiles:  he  is  aware  that  this 
world  also  has  its  compensations. 

SCOFIELD  THAYER. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


539 


A  Varied  Harvest 

PEBBLES  ON  THE  SHORE.  By  "Alpha  of  the  Plough." 
Dutton;  $2. 

DAYS    OUT,    and    Other    Papers.      By    Elisabeth 
Woodbridge.     Houghton  Mifflin  ;  $1.25. 
SHANDYGAFF.     By  Christopher  Morley.     Double- 
day,  Page;  $1.40. 

Essays — three  sheaves  of  them,  garnered  by 
three  different  hands.  One  is  an  English  hand; 
one  is  a  New  England  hand,  gloved  after  the 
manner  of  the  "Atlantic  Monthly" ;  and  the  third 
is — well,  in  the  absence  of  positive  knowledge 
one  would  best  be  content  to  call  Mr.  Chris- 
topher Morley's  hand  Anglo-Saxon,  without  too 
pronounced  a  lunge  toward  the  specific.  Mr. 
Morley  calls  himself  an  American,  and  is  resident 
in  our  East;  but — his  name,  his  years  at  Cam- 
bridge University,  even  the  verb  "shews"  on  the 
jacket  advertisement  (the  author's  own  compo- 
sition). .  .  Though  the  reading  public  is  des- 
tined to  become  increasingly  aware  of  him,  and 
that  very  shortly,  Mr.  Morley  is  still  on  the 
right  side  of  thirty,  and  his  biography  therefore 
is  not  to  be  gathered  from  any  of  the  usual  works 
of  reference.  One  might  telephone  some  publish- 
ing office  or  other  literary  centre  for  his  origins 
and  his  life  thus  far;  but  somehow  one  rather 
enjoys  one's  own  surmises.  I  shall  continue  to 
figure  Christopher  Morley  as  an  English  univer- 
sity man  who  has  transferred  himself  to  the 
United  States  early  enough  to  undergo,  will- 
ingly and  quickly,  the  process  of  Americani- 
zation. Anyhow,  he  writes  as  cheerily  and 
intimately  of  New  York  and  Long  Island  as  of 
London  and  Suffolk. 

There  is  no  room  for  such  uncertainty  about 
"Alpha  of  the  Plough."  He  is  unqualifiedly 
British  through  and  through,  and  is  a  seasoned, 
practiced  hand.  His  book  is  made  up  of  papers 
reprinted  from  the  London  "Star."  He  tosses 
these  trifles  off  as  deftly  as  the  man  in  the  front 
window  of  the  restaurant  tosses  griddlecakes — 
and  almost  as  mechanically.  Nor  does  he  fail 
to  contribute  the  obligatory  piece  to  show  how 
the  trick  is  turned.  "On  Writing  an  Article" 
pleasantly  gives  the  method  away,  telling  how 
one  may  get  to  the  end  without  reaching  his 
subject  at  all.  But  the  book  is  a  reissue,  and 
the  text  calls  for  less  comment  than  the  pictures. 
These,  numerous  and  exceedingly  apropos,  are  by 
Charles  E.  Brock.  One  longs  to  write  a  book 
of  essays,  if  only  on  the  chance  of  getting  Mr. 
Brock  to  illustrate  them.  How  he  could  ever  be 
adequately  paid  for  putting  in  so  much  invention, 


understanding,  taste,  and  variety — but  that  is 
between  him  and  his  publishers. 

Miss  Woodbridge's  book  is  another  matter. 
She  relies  wholly  on  her  own  good  pen  and 
unillustrated  text.  She  too  is  deft,  and  she  is 
zestfully  original,  in  her  trig  New  England  way ; 
but  "Alpha"  has  a  richer  reservoir  to  draw  on 
and  is  steadied  by  long-established  conventions. 
If  you  find  "Alpha"  a  little  stale  and  cut-and- 
dried,  you  will  find  Elisabeth  Woodbridge  fresh 
and  unhackneyed.  The  Anglo-Saxon  world  has 
room  for  both. 

It  assuredly  has  room  also  for  Mr.  Morley — 
and  a  waiting  niche,  which  he  will  doubtless 
adorn,  if  he  does  not  allow  certain  second-rate 
phases  of  this  new  world  to  get  the  upper  hand 
of  him.  He  exhibits  both  sides  of  the  shield,  is 
on  both  sides  of  the  water — a  straddle  which 
he  accomplishes  with  ease  and  spirit.  His  spirits, 
indeed,  seem  uniformly  high,  and  one  credits  him 
with  a  good  hearty  young  mental  digestion.  He 
is  sprightly,  alert,  and  various.  He  is  skittish 
and  informal  too — in  the  fashion,  ofttimes,  of 
the  young  Englishman  who  is  away  from  home 
and  home  regulations.  He  can  strike  a  high 
note,  as  in  his  observations  on  President  Wilson 
or  on  the  German  Emperor;  and  he  can  fall, 
with  facility,  to  the  lower  strata  of  ordinary 
American  "humor,"  as  in  "Time  to  Light  the 
Furnace,"  or  in  "Febrifuge,"  where  he  handles 
unceremoniously,  as  elsewhere,  certain  of  his 
brethren  of  the  pen.  He  can  dexterously  blend 
English  memories  and  American  "actualities"  in 
such  a  paper  as  "The  Art  of  Walking" ;  and  he 
can  go  off  on  absolutely  unique  inventions,  full 
.of  "thick-coming  fancies,"  as  in  his  guidebook 
pages  descriptive  of  the  town  of  "Strychnine." 
If  there  is  anywhere  pattern  and  sanction  for 
such  a  jeu  d'esprit,  I  don't  know  where  it  is. 

Morley  is  interesting  to  read  and  interesting  to 
write  about;  but  I  must  go  back  to  the  others. 
He,  as  I  have  implied,  can  readily  dip  to  the 
level  of  the  shirt-sleeve  feuilleton,  and  he  is 
prompt  to  acknowledge  that  his  personal  asso- 
ciates are  literary  celebrities,  and  as  such  may 
be  put  to  any  informal  use;  but  Miss  Wood- 
bridge,  even  at  her  lightest  and  most  elastic, 
does  not  quite  forget  that  she  has  appeared  in 
the  Contributors'  Club  of  "The  Atlantic." 
Thought,  usually ;  fun,  often ;  but  with  decorum, 
whether  in  "Manners  and  the  Puritan"  or  in 
"Clubs  among  the  Cubs."  And  "Alpha"  is  gen- 
teel without  end.  Mr.  Morley's  literary  man- 
ners are  variable.  There  was  of  course  a  time, 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


forty  or  fifty  years  ago,  when  the  American 
reader — under  the  spell  of  Holmes,  Lowell, 
Longfellow,  and  the  rest — assumed  that  litera- 
ture was  primarily  a  vehicle  for  the  self-expres- 
sion of  the  gentleman.  We  know  better  now, 
when  the  rough-and-ready  is  having  its  day  as 
never  before.  But  the  essay  still  has  a  few  old- 
time  shreds  of  gqntility  clinging  to  it.  Perhaps 
it  will  be  the  last  of  the  literary  forms  to  be 
completely  informalized  and  rowdified.  Shirt 
sleeves,  if  swollen  by  the  afflatus,  might  better 
pass  the  essay  by  and  seek  other  accessible  media. 
In  the  case  of  Mr.  Morley  one  inclines  to  appeal 
from  a  Christopher  intoxicated  by  the  novelties 
and  freedom  of  a  new  world  to  a  Christopher 
sobered  by  a  consciousness  of  the  fine  things  he 
can  achieve  if  he  will  only  settle  down  to  the 


work. 


HENRY  B.  FULLER. 


Purpose  and  Flippancy 

His    SECOND    WIFE.      By    Ernest    Poole.      Mac- 

raillan;  $1.50. 

THE   BOARDMAN   FAMILY.     By   Mary   S.    Watts. 

Macmillan;  $1.50. 

Ernest  Poole's  latest  novel  is  of  a  pleasing 
brevity  and  of  a  sustained  interest — no  small  vir- 
tues among  so  many  works  of  fiction  in  which 
bright  and  disconnected  incident  seems  to  be  the 
one  imagined  artistic  value.  You  scarcely  expect 
him  to  have  abandoned  his  well  worn  American 
theme  of  redemption,  but  you  are  pleasantly  sur- 
prised to  find  that  his  sociological  emphasis  has 
been  much  mitigated.  In  his  other  books  his 
social  conscience  led  him  always  into  "problems," 
but  his  artistic  sense  seemed  incapable  of  holding 
him  back  from  pursuing  them  to  an  almost  crank- 
like  exaggeration.  The  great  engineering  project 
in  "The  Harbor,"  the  wonderful  school  in  "His 
Family"  swelled  to  an  apocalyptic  role  that  be- 
came slightly  absurd  even  to  the  sense  of  the 
most  inflamed  "social  worker"  or  youthful  ideal- 
ist. And  in  the  latter  book  the  process  of  living 
on  in  our  children's  lives  received  a  damnable 
reiteration  that  fairly  numbed  our  eugenic  good 
will.  Mr.  Poole  did  not  purport  to  be  writing 
large-mouthed  allegories  of  i  modern  engineering 
and  education.  After  all,  he  was  telling  a  living 
story  of  the  kind  of  people  that  we  all  know. 
But  what  chance  had  they  in  a  sociological  set- 
ting so  heavily  out  of  drawing?  How  could 
anybody  help  being  a  prig,  living  in  such  a  glare 
of  institutional  responsibility,  or  acting  always  so 
that  the  sociological  scriptures  might  be  fulfilled  ? 


In  the  present  novel  that  falseness  of  empha- 
sis has  been  much  relieved,  the  sociology  im- 
mensely deflated.  We  are  given  a  straight  story 
of  personal  redemption,  the  restoring  of  a  young 
architect  to  his  earlier  ideals,  back  from  the  mad 
materialistic  pursuit  of  money.  There  lingers 
an  odor  of  the  crank  in  that  idea  of  an  apartment 
house  built  up  in  receding  tiers.  But  it  is  a 
long  way  ahead  from  the  crazy  dream  of  Bruce's 
in  "His  Family,"  the  city  of  a  thousand  stories, 
with  elevators  and  subways  shooting  about  within 
it.  When  in  the  present  book  the  devil  takes 
Joe  up  into  the  high  mountain,  it  is  to  show  him, 
I  admit,  alternate  red,  white,  and  blue  apartment 
houses  on  Riverside  Drive,  named  after  the  presi- 
dents. But  "His  Second  Wife"  shows,  on  the 
whole,  the  slow  maturing  of  Mr.  Poole's  imag- 
ination. To  Mr.  Poole  these  ideas  do  not  yet 
seem  funny;  he  is  too  much  concerned  with  them 
as  symbols  of  the  struggle  between  mammon  and 
the  ideal.  He  does  not  feel  a  strain  on  our  credu- 
lity that  idealism  should  be  so  easily  taken  in  by 
the  grotesque,  or  express  itself  as  determinedly  in 
the  grotesque.  The  idealism  that  Mr.  Poole's 
heroes  usually  embody  is  of  a  very  inchoate  and 
disturbingly  inarticulate  nature.  But  in  this 
book  we  are  on  safer  ground.  The  motif  of 
Ethel,  the  second  wife,  who  brings  about  Joe's 
redemption  in  a  union  with  his  unmammonized 
old  associates,  is  the  familiar  culture-thirst.  She 
is  seeking  the  purposeful  people  who  talk  about 
Art  and  Music,  and  holding  herself  doggedly  to 
the  cultural  line  marked  out  by  her  fiercely 
feministic  little  professor  in  college.  The  solu- 
tion which  restores  her  husband  brings  her  to  the 
cultural  fountain  of  Greenwich  Village  in  the 
happiest  kind  of  an  ending  for  a  serious  story  of 
redemption.  And  in  the  absence  of  the  brooding 
institutional  problem  even  Ethel  seems  so  much 
less  priggish  than  the  characters  in  Mr.  Poole's 
other  books  that  we  are  almost  willing  to  excuse 
him  his  worn  and  faded  theme. 

His  people,  it  is  true,  still  sound  like  persons 
whom  we  have  never  met  ourselves,  but  whom 
we  hear  a  friend  talk  about  so  much  that  we 
come  finally  to  feel  almost  acquainted  with  them. 
The  feeling  of  intimacy  would  be  better  con- 
veyed perhaps  if  Mr.  Poole  were  more  detached 
from  them.  There  is  always  too  much  evidence 
that  he  is  sharing  their  immaturities  and  making 
out  a  case  for  his  motifs.  His  tone  is  always 
more  or  less  tight  and  protective,  as  if  the  ad- 
mission of  any  cynicism  or  even  speculation  about 
his  ideals  would  undermine  them.  Life  to  him 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


541 


seems  too  dangerous  to  be  allowed  to  run  around 
loose  in  a  novel.  It  will  not  do  to  give  the  nat- 
ural man  entrance  unless  the  plot  is  prepared 
to  knock  him  on  the  head  the  minute  he  en- 
ters. At  one  point  in  "His  Second  Wife"  the 
word  "sensual"  is  thus  properly  rebuked.  I 
can  hardly  think  that  Mr.  Poole  wants  to  write 
didactic  novels.  Yet  no  one  is  using  fiction  today 
more  devotedly  as  a  vehicle  of  old-fashioned 
moral  purpose.  And  the  strangest  thing  about 
Mr.  Poole  is  that  it  is  all  apparently  done  in 
the  name  of  modern  ideas.  Yet  after  all,  Ethel, 
who  finds  herself  so  unexpectedly  stepping  into 
her  dead  sister's  role,  with  the  necessity  to  fight 
back  the  latter's  ambitious  influence  that  had 
drawn  the  young  husband  away  from  his  dreams, 
is  a  soundly  and  conscientiously  conceived  char- 
acter. There  is  a  type  of  well-bred  American 
girl  who  does  exhibit  just  this  combination  of 
infantile  desire  and  sophisticated  introspection,  of 
Joan  of  Arc  enthusiasm  for  feministic  causes 
and  cringing  in  the  face  of  the  concrete  dominat- 
ing male,  of  extreme  sexual  timidity  and  curios- 
ity about  "modern"  notions.  She  is  the  girl  from 
whose  instincts  the  bloom  of  health  has  been 
rubbed  by  the  sterile  family  life  and  education 
which  have  worked  so  hard  over  her.  She  is 
already  beginning  to  seem  a  little  old-fashioned, 
but  her  hesitating  priggishness  is  worth  preserv- 
ing in  a  novel. 

In  Sandra  Boardman,  Mrs.  Watts  presents  us 
with  very  much  the  same  kind  of  girl,  but  the 
author's  imagination  is  unable  to  do  anything  else 
with  her  than  turn  her  into  a  sort  of  mummified 
professional  dancer.  There  is  nothing  inherently 
improbable  about  this  pleasant  girl's  leaving  the 
admirable  home  of  one  of  the  best  families  in  an 
Ohio  city  to  make  a  career  for  herself  in  New 
York.  But  having  got  her  there,  Mrs.  Watts 
reduces  this  young  person  of  good  sense  and  taste 
to  a  sort  of  mechanical  whirling  dervish  of  mu- 
sical comedy,  lets  her  become  preposterously  affi- 
anced to  her  unusually  awful  Jewish  manager, 
and  then  extricates  her  only  by  the  trick  of  send- 
ing them  to  England  on  the  Lusitania,  from 
which  she  rescues  only  Sandra.  Mrs.  Watts  fills 
her  pages  with  so  much  vulgarity  that  I  may 
perhaps  be  permitted  the  vulgarity  of  saying  that 
at  this  perfectly  obvious  trickery  I  felt  exactly 
as  if  my  pursuit  of  the  sincere  and  convincing  in 
American  fiction  had  been  met  by  an  unusually 
impudent  thumbing  of  the  nose.  One  is  the 
more  indignant  because  Mrs.  Watts  has  so  much 
talent.  She  writes  with  an  intimacy,  a  fluency, 


a  good  humor  that  show  her  a  competent  dis- 
ciple of  Thackeray.  You  are  really  acquainted 
with  her  characters.  She  has  the  jolly  attitude 
towards  life  that  Mr.  Poole  lacks,  and  she  is 
devoid  of  moralistic  bias.  But  her  glaring  de- 
ficiencies of  taste  spoil  one  book  after  another. 
With  her  ease,  humor,  and  astonishing  feeling 
for  the  commonplaces  of  American  existence,  she 
can  yet  cheapen  a  book  until  she  leaves  you 
with  a  feeling  of  utter  intellectual  ribaldry.  It 
is  not  only  because  she  has  the  most  hair-raising 
equipment  of  pseudo-current  slang  possessed  by 
any  American  novelist,  and  slaps  it  on  with  a 
hand  that  knows  no  mercy.  The  air  of  flippancy 
which  she  always  manages  to  reach  comes  from 
something  deeper  than  that.  I  think  it  is  that 
she  lacks  all  sense  of  the  value  of  her  material, 
or  at  least  of  the  proportionate  values.  The 
earlier  chapters  about  the  Thatcher  and  the 
Boardman  families,  the  boy  and  girl  life,  are 
charming.  This  homely  veracity  is  the  thing 
that  Mrs.  Watts  does  best.  Her  easy  careless 
style  is  suited  to  it.  It  is  her  metier.  But  the 
story  of  Sandra's  life  in  New  York  has  not  the 
least  artistic  relation  with  this  early  setting.  It 
is  another  novel  altogether,  and  only  a  feeble 
artistic  sense  could  run  it  so  placidly  along  after 
the  broad  and  vivid  picture  of  the  Boardman 
family.  This  family  was  her  theme,  and  Sandra's 
adventures  are  an  irrelevance  which  could  only 
be  justified  by  some  conscientious  development 
that  would  put  them  in  the  key  of  the  earlier 
picture.  Mrs.  Watts  however  attempts  no  such 
development.  The  last  touch  of  gaucherie  is  pro- 
vided by  the  recivilized  Sandra's  appearance  in 
an  army  camp,  married  to  the  honest  sweetheart 
of  her  youth.  "The  Boardman  Family,"  about 
whom  the  book  is  supposed  to  be,  have  long  since 
evaporated  from  their  biographer's  interest. 

Is  this  trickery  and  bad  taste  the  result  of  Mrs. 
Watts's  desire  for  an  interesting  plot?  Does  she 
pad  out  with  Sandra  because  she  feels  that  the 
light-minded  reader  is  tired  of  the  family?  Or 
is  it  just  American  artlessness  to  write  inverte- 
brate novels?  Mrs.  Watts  moves  inorganically 
about  with  her  slangy  youth  until  you  long  for 
the  prig  again.  Mr.  Poole's  plot  is  at  least  an 
honest  one,  organically  knit.  An  honest  plot  is 
better  than  a  tricky  one.  But  perhaps  American 
novels  would  be  better  if  the  writers  were  less 
concerned  with  plot  and  incident,  and  more  with 
the  task  of  telling  their  story  with  all  the  length 
and  depth  and  breadth  of  its  significance. 

RANDOLPH  BOURNE. 


542 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


DENMARK  AND  SWEDEN  WITH  ICELAND 
AND  FINLAND.  By  Jon  Stefansson.  Put- 
nam; $1.50. 

The  most  recent  addition  to  the  "Story  of  the 
Nation  Series"  is  a  history  of  the  Scandinavian 
lands.  The  author,  Dr.  Jon  Stefansson  of  King's 
College,  London,  is  an  Icelandic  scholar  of  some 
eminence,  perhaps  best  known  for  his  study  of 
Scandinavian  place-names  in  England.  In  the 
present  volume  Dr.  Stefansson  deals  particularly 
with  the  history  of  modern  times:  his  theme  is 
the  long  and  disastrous  strife  between  the  kings 
of  Sweden  and  Denmark  for  the  hegemony  in 
the  North  and  the  control  of  the  Baltic,  the  story 
of  Danish  power  in  the  sixteenth  century  and  of 
Swedish  leadership  in  the  seventeenth.  The 
account  is  reasonably  accurate  and  will  prove 
helpful  to  all  who  would  learn  the  main  facts 
of  Scandinavian  history;  it  is,  however,  thor- 
oughly conventional  and  possesses  no  outstanding 
excellences.  The  story  of  the  middle  ages  in  the 
North  is  told  in  the  most  meager  detail;  the 
author  apparently  does  not  appreciate  the  fact 
that  the  development  of  literary  culture  in  the 
earlier  centuries  was  probably  of  more  lasting 
importance  than  the  struggle  for  empire  in  later 
days.  Two  good  chapters  relate  the  separate 
histories  of  Iceland  and  Finland ;  but  there  is  no 
separate  treatment  of  Norway.  This  kingdom 
was,  it  is  true,  under  Danish  rule  for  four  cen- 
turies; but  in  the  middle  ages  Norway  was,  at 
times  at  least,  the  most  important  country  in 
Scandinavia;  and  it  has  again  enjoyed  a  century 
of  honorable  and  independent  history  since  1814. 
Dr.  Stefansson  seems  also  to  overestimate  the 
role  of  the  kings  and  scarcely  appreciates  the  parts 
played  by  the  great  statesmen.  On  the  whole 
his  account  is  too  much  a  history  of  the  doings 
of  courts  and  capitals;  the  great  popular  move- 
ments that  after  all  shape  the  life  of  a  nation 
are  not  given  the  prominence  and  detailed  treat- 
ment that  they  deserve. 

PICTURES  OF  WAR  WORK  IN  AMERICA. 

By  Joseph  Pennell.    Lippincott ;  $2. 

Joseph  Pennell  has  been  at  work  supplying  a 
substitute  for  the  tremendous  inventory  of  war- 
time achievement.  In  his  new  book  "Pictures  of 
War  Work  in  America"  he  has  given  us  thifty- 
six  lithographs  of  the  new  America.  Quite  apart 
from  their  significance  as  images  of  our  country 
today,  they  carry  a  new  connotation  of  labor. 
One  feels  that  Mr.  Pennell  should  have  tried  for 
a  bigger  title  than  "War  Work":  in  his  preface 
there  is  a  reference  to  the  wonder  of  work,  and 
perhape  if  the  title  had  been  changed  to  "The 
Wonder  of  Production"  it  would  have  been  more 
in  keeping  with  the  remarkable  lithographs  it 


embraces.  Work  has  never  ceased  through  the 
ages.  Men  like  Millet,  Menzel,  and  Daumier 
have  shown  us  the  workman  and  his  sweat ;  while 
Pennell  deals  with  work  as  arduous  and  as  grim, 
he  features  the  boundlessness  and  immensity  of  it. 
Where  Millet  dealt  with  the  combat  of  hoe  and 
weed,  Pennell  swings  us  in  the  immensity  of  pro- 
duction. He  gives  us  man's  control  of  forces, 
where  before  we  had  a  drawn  battle  between  the 
two.  Seen  in  retrospect  Pennell's  early  work, 
while  always  full  of  artistry  and  technical  excel- 
lence, seems  to  have  been  inspired  by  a  certain 
prompting  of  dilletantism,  a  certain  facile  grace 
which,  though  it  made  his  cathedrals  beautiful, 
hardly  made  them  as  significant  monuments  of 
their  time  as  our  munition  works  are  of  our 
own.  In  romantic  days  the  hero  was  made  the 
first  swordsman  of  France.  Today  Pennell 
makes  steel  transcendental.  It  is  endowed  on 
his  lithographic  stone  with  the  same  power  and 
glory  that  the  Greek  gave  to  the  human  figure, 
that  the  quattrocento  painter  gave  to  God,  that 
the  landscapist  gives  to  the  sun.  Where  so  many 
war  artists  have  descended  into  cheap  commer- 
cialism in  their  strain  for  novelty,  it  is  interesting 
to  note  that  Pennell  keeps  his  new  strength 
within  the  bounds  of  art  and  also  without  any 
strain  on  his  medium.  His  massing  of  blacks  in 
"The  Prow"  and  "The  Riveters"  is  splendid. 
The  Government  has  shown  discernment  in 
deciding  that  Mr.  Pennell  should  be  the  one 
artist  to  see  and  record  the  newest  wonders. 

AMERICA'S    MESSAGE    TO    THE    RUSSIAN 
PEOPLE:   Addresses  by  the  Members  of  the 
Russian  Mission.     Marshall  Jones;  $1.50. 
THE  RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION.  By  Alexander 
Petrunkevitch,     Samuel    N.    Harper,    and 
Frank    A.     Goldberg.     THE    JUGO-SLAV 
MOVEMENT.     By  Robert  J.  Kerner.     Har- 
vard University  Press;  $1. 
It  has  taken  us  a  year  to  realize  how  tragically 
important  was  the  task  of  the  special  diplomatic 
mission  sent  to  Russia  to  carry  America's  greeting 
to   our  younger  sister   in   democracy.      It   then 
seemed  eminently  proper  that  Elihu  Root  should 
be  at  the  head  of  the  mission ;  he  was  our  fore- 
most statesman  and  diplomatist.     After  all,  his 
job  was  to  keep  Russia  in  the  war  and  to  capture 
its  wavering  good  will  for  the  Allies.    Today,  of 
course,  we  have  the  wisdom  that  comes  after  the 
event  and  can  see  that  probably  no  more  unfor- 
tunate choice  could  have  been  made.    There  is  a 
pathetic  staleness  now  in  Mr.  Root's  surmise  that 
the  Russian  revolution  was  something  more  than 
a  mere  conventional  political  phenomenon,  in  his 
warning  to  the  "better  classes"  that,  unless  due 
restraint   were   shown,    the    rights   of   property 
might  be  destroyed,  along  with  opportunities  for 
commercial  development  and  profit.     Yet   Mr. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


543 


Root  is  careful  never  to  mention  Socialism  by 
name — at  least  not  in  Russia.  He  reserves  his 
comment  for  a  speech  in  New  York  on  his  return, 
when  he  makes  an  engaging  analogy  between 
those  holding  the  doctrine  of  internationalism  and 
our  own  hard-harried  I.  W.  W.  This  book  is 
a  record  of  the  spiritual  obtuseness  and  lack  of 
imaginative  sympathy  on  the  part  of  our  chief 
messenger  to  the  new  Russia.  And  so  we  have 
to  turn  to  the  lesser  luminaries  who,  if  less  bril- 
liant, are  intellectually  less  stubborn.  Their 
chance  for  understanding  Russia  is  correspond- 
ingly greater.  Mr.  Harper  in  an  essay  called 
"Forces  Behind  the  Revolution"  sketches  the 
changes  following  the  overthrow  of  the  Czar. 
These  changes  are  noted  in  orderly  manner;  he 
gives  them  their  due  weight.  Perhaps  he  gives 
them  a  bit  more.  He  would  have  strengthened 
his  style  and  point  if  he  had  given  more  emphasis 
to  the  intense  longing  on  the  part  of  the  Russian 
people  for  peace — albeit  a  general  democratic 
peace — and  for  an  opportunity  to  work  out  their 
revolution  without  external  complications.  Mr. 
Petrunkevitch  discovers  that  the  intellectuals  in 
Russia  failed  to  understand  the  revolution.  Mr. 
Goldberg  contributes  an  interesting  account  of 
the  rottenness  of  the  Russian  court  prior  to  the 
debacle.  And  Mr.  Kerner  summarizes  the  strug- 
gle of  the  Jugo-Slavs  for  national  unity. 

LETTERS  OF  JOHN  HOLMES  TO  JAMES  RUS- 
SELL LOWELL  AND  OTHERS.  Edited  by 
William  Roscoe  Thayer.  With  an  introduc- 
tion by  Alice  M.  Longfellow.  Houghton 
Mifflin;  $2.50. 

Holmes,  Lowell,  Thayer,  Longfellow — amply 
buttressed  with  great  names  and  adorned  with 
expensive  illustrations,  this  somewhat  fragile  book 
is  ushered  into  a  warspent  world.  And  on  the 
whole,  though  John  Holmes  seems  to  have 
achieved  nothing  in  this  life  save  character,  the 
publication  of  his  letters  is  justifiable — maybe 
justified — first,  because  his  character  is  charm- 
ingly individual;  and  secondly,  because  it  is  sig- 
nificantly typical.  John — "There  is  but  one 
John,"  said  Lowell,  who  loved  him — was  the 
younger  brother  of  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes.  He 
was  born  in  1812  in  the  old  gambrel- roofed  par- 
sonage near  Cambridge  Common,  graduated  from 
Harvard  in  1832,  housed  with  his  mother  in  the 
old  house  as  long  as  she  lived  (which  was  very 
long),  and  then  moved  across  the  Common  to 
Appian  Way  No.  5,  where  he  remained  peace- 
fully through  his  old  age,  more  or  less  confined 
by  a  chronic  lameness.  Sometimes  he  could  not 
walk  at  all;  but  there  were  more  times  when  he 
hobbled  about  in  comparative  freedom.  His 
many  friends  agree  as  to  his  bright-mindedness 
and  keen  sense  of  the  droll,  his  quaintness  and 


courtesy.  He  knew  everybody  in  the  village,  at 
least  by  sight,  even  unto  the  cats. 

One  kind  of  population  is  plenty  at  No.  5  A.W.,  viz., 
cats.  They  seem  an  Ecumenical  Council.  Rose,  a 
great  favorite  with  Miss,  disappeared  from  Saturday 
night  till  this  forenoon,  when  she  sauntered  in  at  the 
front  gate  with  that  irrelevant  air  that  cats  have, 
and  showed  little  emotion  at  the  great  joy  she  caused. 

John  Holmes's  provincialism,  which  exceeded 
Oliver  Wendell's,  was  nearly  as  local  as  a  cat's. 
Playfully,  but  with  underlying  meaning,  he  wrote 
to  a  friend: 

I  shall  surprise  you  perhaps  by  telling  you  that  I  too 
am  going  to  make  an  excursion;  and  where  do  you 
suppose?  I  am  going  across  the  water.  What  do  you 
say  to  that?  I  am  going  to  leave  my  native  home — 
its  solitudes,  sweet  though  sad — its  associations — its 
group  of  familiar  friends — and  cross  the  dreary  waste 
of  waters  to  Boston. 

He  was  a  dear  old  courtly  droll  Brahmin,  whose 
like  we  shall  not  see  in  the  twentieth  century. 
He  died,  appropriately,  in  1899. 

THE  LESS  FAMILIAR  KIPLING  AND  KIP- 
LINGANA.  By  G.  F.  Monkshood.  Dut- 
ton;  $2. 

This  book  is  a  sufficient  refutation  of  the  claim 
that  Kipling's  reputation  is  extinct.  No  publisher 
would  produce  so  wholly  unnecessary  a  book 
about  a  forgotten  man.  There  is  probably  no 
modern  writer  whose  bibliography  is  so  confusing 
as  Rudyard  Kipling's.  No  list  even  approxi- 
mately complete  of  his  uncollected  works,  and 
of  the  original  places  of  publication  of  the  col- 
lected works,  has  ever  been  compiled.  Mr. 
Monkshood  has  done  nothing  to  better  our  knowl- 
edge. He  devotes  about  thirty  pages  to  sum- 
marizing the  sketches  reprinted  in  "Abaft  the 
Funnel,"  a  volume  which,  in  America  at  any 
rate,  is  not  so  scarce  as  to  justify  such  an  expendi- 
ture of  effort;  the  remainder  of  the  book  is  a 
hodgepodge  of  anecdotes,  brief  quotations  from 
uncollected  works,  parodies,  and  bibliographic 
notes.  Little  of  the  material  is  new,  and  most 
is  accessible  in  better  form  elsewhere.  The  most 
scathing  parody  ever  written — that  by  Hilaire 
Belloc  in  "Caliban's  Guide  to  Letters" — is  not 
given,  and  those  which  are  given  are  not  worth 
reprinting.  The  bibliographic  notes  add  nothing 
to  the  information  contained  in  the  bibliographies 
of  Yorke  Powell,  John  Lane,  Luther  Livingston, 
or  the  pretentious  and  unsatisfactory  "Kipling 
Dictionary"  published  five  or  six  years  ago.  Were 
Mr.  Monkshood's  pursuit  of  Kiplingana  as  inde- 
fatigable as  his  publishers  assert,  he  would  have 
found  the  series  of  articles  which  appeared  in 
"Notes  and  Queries"  early  in  1914,  and  would 
thereby  have  corrected  some  of  the  errors  which 
he  repeats  from  the  writers  just  named.  Some 
day  a  complete  biography  and  bibliography  of 
Rudyard  Kipling  will  be  written,  but  it  is  not 
likely  that  Mr.  Monkshood  will  be  the  author. 


544 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


NOTES  ON  NEW  FICTION 


What  quaint  forms  our  new  international 
idealism  may  take  in  an  American  mind  is  shown 
in  an  intellectual  extravaganza  like  the  anony- 
mous "Professor  Latimer's  Progress"  (Holt; 
$1.40.  The  author  is  apparently  relying  on  a 
certain  smart  frivolity  of  tone  to  charm  the 
reader  towards  a  serious  moral  and  to  comfort  any 
skepticism  the  war  may  have  given  him  about 
religion  or  society.  Professor  Latimer  is  a  kind 
of  American  Dr.  Pangloss  who  seeks  relief  from 
the  intellectual  oppressiveness  of  the  war  in  a 
walking  trip  through  the  countryside,  intent  on 
restoring  his  faith  in  the  best  of  all  possible 
worlds.  Movie  actresses,  amateur  sociologists, 
experimental  psychologists,  tuberculosis  experts, 
retired  reporters  liberate  his  mind;  and,  talking 
all  the  while,  he  returns  home  cured,  convinced 
that  the  evils  of  society  are  overrated.  He  demol- 
ishes a  young  puppy  who  has  insulted  Labor  by 
picturing  it  as  oppressed;  he  exposes  a  psycholo- 
gist who  wishes  to  destroy  his  soul  with  statis- 
tics;.he  has  a  dream  fight  with  their  father,  the 
Devil;  he  puts  the  modern  woman  in  her  place. 
Each  person  he  meets  becomes  a  means  of  his 
indignantly  reestablishing  for  himself  some  par- 
ticular bright  side  of  things.  If  the  author  were 
only  a  Voltaire  all  this  might  be  excellent  fun. 
But  unfortunately  he  really  wants  us  to  believe 
in  his  God  and  to  believe  that  in  his  process  of 
setting  the  world  straight  America  is  really  going 
to  set  the  eternal  verities  back  on  the  wall.  So 
his  entertaining,  if  somewhat  spinsterly,  satire 
ends  in  the  exquisite  banality  of  the  Professor's 
actually  achieving  comfort  and  consolation. 
Surely  nothing  is  flatter  than  satire  which  ends 
in  a  moral.  This  book's  denouement  makes  the 
whimsicality  of  the  style  highly  offensive.  The 
whole  thing  is  put  off  color.  You  suspect  a 
provincial  mind  which  has  wrapped  its  naive 
conservative  credulity  in  a  smart  sophisticated 
style.  The  mind  of  the  author,  which  one  might 
have  taken  as  acute,  betrays  itself  as  essentially 
frivolous.  With  the  best  will  in  the  world  to  be 
at  home  with  the  ideas  he  tosses  so  lightly,  he 
x  seems  to  lack  even  that  sense  of  their  significance 
which  would  justify  him  in  ridiculing  them. 

"Flood  Tide"  by  Daniel  Chase  (Macmillan; 
$1.50)  is  the  kind  of  book  one  hesitates  to  varnish 
over  with  too  high  a  gloss — out  of  sheer  liking  for 
the  honest  grain  of  the  thing  as  it  is.  Mr.  Chase 
surveys  his  hero's  progress  from  the  small  Massa- 
chusetts town  of  his  birth  to  college,  through 
business  in  Boston  and  New  York,  to  leisurely 
society — and  back  again.  A  young  man's  book, 
and  no  satire!  Further  marks  of  strength  are 
the  vividness  of  his  vision  and  his  unflinching 
style,  though  nowhere  do  you  catch  more  than  a 
profile  of  John  Coffin,  the  hero.  But  an  amiably 


American  work  it  is,  hero  or  no  hero.  There 
are  other  signs  of  nationality,  for  as  in  its  ances- 
tor "Silas  Lapham"  the  hero's  rise  comes  only 
after  his  financial  downfall.  Is  it  the  puritanic 
story  of  the  Rich  Young  Man  and  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven  that  makes  us  so  self-conscious  about 
money?  From  Whitehaven  John  Coffin  went 
on  to  college — very  evidently  Dartmouth — and  in 
the  chapters  on  undergraduate  life  Mr.  Chase 
really  begins  his  story.  Among  the  easily  recog- 
nizable types  is  one  Langdon,  editor  of  the  col- 
lege paper,  who  incidentally  gives  an  illuminating 
definition  of  college  as  "catalysis."  Coffin 
planned  to  return  to  college  as  an  instructor,  but 
was  diplomatically  thwarted  by  his  father.  He 
actually  did  start  in  a  wholesale  grocer's  in  Bos- 
ton. From  here,  according  to  the  monotonously 
and  conventionally  melodramatic  way  of  busi- 
ness men,  he  rose  to  be  head  of  a  chain  of  retail 
stores  in  New  York,  in  company  with  a  Jew 
named  Marks  and  his  boyhood  friend  Stowell. 
Quite  as  clearly  as  in  the  chapters  on  college  life, 
the  author  sketches  the  commercial  scenes  and 
figures  of  this  period: 

"There  was  also  an  old  ark  of  a  typewriter,  second 
cousin  to  a  drop  forge  and  related  by  sound  to  a 
McCormick  reaper.  Stowell  used  this  as  a  gymna- 
sium. .  .  In  the  yards  below  me  a  switching  engine 
crept  about,  coughing  apologetically  but  insistently, 
in  search  of  some  car  which  had  fallen  into  bad 
company." 

But  the  business  once  established,  Coffin  neg- 
lected it  for  North  Shore  society  and  even  a 
voyage  of  exploration  to  South  America.  This 
life,  hardly  more  congenial  than  business,  sent 
him  back  to  his  boyhood  home — and  a  love  affair 
tardily  renewed.  Again  in  Whitehaven  he  begins 
life  over  after  the  simultaneous  smashup  of  Marks 
and  the  Stores.  The  book  leaves  him  free  to 
pursue  a  latent  interest  in  painting.  Good  in 
many  ways,  "Flood  Tide"  is  exceptional  in  one 
respect:  it  improves.  Not  a  few  of  our  writers, 
Booth  Tarkington  for  one,  seem  rather  to  tire 
of  their  work  after  the  second  third  of  it.  Mr. 
Chase  lives  up  to  his  title.  It  is  the  early,  and 
probably  autobiographical,  chapters  which  are  the 
weakest  of  all.  This  will  not  be  Mr.  Chase's 
first  and  only  book. 

If  Joseph  Anthony  had  ended  "Rekindled 
Fires"  (Holt;  $1.40)  on  page  219  he  would 
have  had  a  most  charming  novel.  Stanislav 
Zabransky — Stanley  Zabriskie  for  scholastic  pur- 
poses— is  about  to  lead  a  strike  in  the  tobacco 
works  in  Creekville,  New  Jersey,  when  he  is 
most  amusingly  and  amazedly  sent  off  to  college 
under  the  patronage  of  his  patriarchal  Bohemian 
employer  and  the  local  Sons  of  Bohemia.  College 
is,  of  course,  the  inevitable  sequel  to  those  school 
days,  so  winningly  portrayed,  when  Stanley  is  the 
intellectual  pride  of  the  little  immigrant  com- 
munity, teaching  his  father  to  read  and  conduct- 


1918] 


THE   DIAL 


545 


ing  the  literary  affairs  of  union  and  saloon.  Life 
can  hardly  be  as  idyllic  and  entertaining  as  this 
among  the  Bohemian  and  German  factory  work- 
ers of  a  New  Jersey  village,  but  we  take  the 
picture  at  its  own  valuation  so  long  as  Stanley 
stays  strictly  at  home  and  the  world  is  only  as 
large  as  the  village.  The  author's  humor  plays 
delightfully  about  the  local  racial  and  political 
feuds,  the  union  and  the  school,  the  shrewd  old 
parents,  Stanley's  adventures  with  his  American 
boy  friend.  All  this  community  life  makes  very 
novel  material,  which  is  treated  by  the  author 
with  a  warm  intimacy  and  charm  that  is  alto- 
gether appealing.  But  the  college  life  that  fol- 
lows is  neither  novel  nor  interesting.  The 
pointlessness  of  Stanley's  adventures  betrays  the 
amateur's  hand,  which  was  concealed  while  the 
author  stayed  with  us  in  Creekville.  Our  imag- 
inations could  have  done  better  with  Stanley's 
progress  than  Mr.  Anthony  has.  And  incarcera- 
tion in  a  Missouri  college  as  instructor  in  philos- 
ophy seems  a  cruelly  banal  ending  for  so  charming 
a  boyhood  as  Stanley  Zabriskie's. 

"Why  the  'ell,"  one  can  imagine  Thomas 
Burke  saying  to  himself,  "wasn't  I  born  where 
cinnamon  and  aconite,  betel  and  bhang  hang  on 
the  air,  and  luxurious,  leisurely  revenges  are 
executed  with  poison  and  slender  knives?"  Why 
not  indeed,  except  that  then  there  would  have 
been  little  in  London's  Chinatown  to  stimulate 
his  interest.  His  senses  would  have  been  accus- 
tomed to  the  odors  and  sights  that  now  permeate 
him  with  an  exotic  feeling  of  mystery  and 
adventure,  and  every  Mongol  would  not  be  so 
crammed  with  delightful  dramatic  possibilities. 
Mr.  Burke's  "Limehouse  Nights"  was  melodrama 
carried  to  the  nth  degree:  melodrama  of  the 
senses,  of  the  imagination,  of  human  events,  of 
phrases  even.  There  he  was,  in  fact,  such  a 
passionate  young  melodramatist  that  one  forgave 
him  his  crudities.  But  these  stare  one  rudely  in 
the  eye  from  "Twinkletoes"  (McBride;  $1.35). 
No  matter  how  bad  the  company  a  story  writer's 
characters  keep,  they  really  ought  not  to  harbor 
"the  light  of  love-madness"  in  their  eyes.  Neither 
is  it  any  longer  fashionable  for  "torrents  of  bright 
curls"  to  "foam"  about  any  young  lady's  neck, 
nor  for  prize  fighters  to  talk  like  a  sick  school- 
girl about  love,  however  sentimental  they  become. 
Mr.  Burke's  melodramatic  bent  is  betraying  him. 
Twinkletoes,  for  example,  the  little  dancing  girl 
who  is  his  adored  heroine,  is  made  intolerably 
good  and  sweet  just  to  deepen  the  horror  of 
what  happens  one  night  when  she  goes  on  a 
little  party.  How  can  anyone  help  disliking  a 
heroine  who  had  "epigrammatic  legs  in  their 
darned  stockings,"  who  is  sentimental  about  her 
father  and  makes  everyone  including  Mr.  Burke 
sentimental  about  herself?  He  and  she  are  both 
at  their  best  when  Twinkletoes  is  living  as  well 


as  talking  the  vernacular.  But  vernacular  and 
local  color  do  not  make  the  man  or  the  story. 
When  Nemesis  descends  upon  Twinkletoes,  and 
Chinatown  learns  how  her  education  was  bought 
at  the  price  of  her  father's  crime,  when  she 
weeps  and  gets  drunk  and  goes  to  the  bad,  then 
Mr.  Burke  repents  him  of  some  of  his  ways. 
Then  too,  even  at  the  most  tear-stained  spot,  he 
has  the  hardihood  to  observe  that  "she  was  no 
longer  a  little  girl,  but  a  tortured  organism." 
Perfervid  critics  have  run  up  and  down  fame's 
ladder  plucking  the  busts  of  O.  Henry,  Robert 
Louis  even,  and  Lafcadio  Hearn  off  their  pedes- 
tals and  setting  Mr.  Burke's  in  the  vacant  niches. 
It  won't  do.  He  has  flashes  of  poetry,  imagina- 
tion, passion,  humor.  But  he  has  not  disciplined 
himself  and  he  writes  too  often  with  the  irre- 
sponsible excitement  of  a  police  court  reporter  or 
a  builder  of  thrupenny  thrillers. 

"The  Long  Trick"  by  "Bartimeus"  (Doran; 
$1.35)  resembles  nothing  so  much  as  a  group  of 
recruiting  posters,  drawn  from  life,  presenting 
scenes  on  the  Great  Fleet  in  the  North  Sea. 
"Groups  of  Droll  Officers  Chaffing  in  the  Ward- 
room," "Group  of  Midshipmen  Dining  in  the 
Gunroom,"  "A  Shore  Picnic,"  "Galley  Races, 
Sparring  Matches,  and  Other  Diversions  aboard 
Ship"  some  might  be  called.  The  term  novel, 
and  the  division  of  it  into  chapters  successively 
numbered,  is  accordingly  a  bit  misleading,  for 
otherwise  the  author  has  made  no  particular 
effort  toward  continuity.  "The  Long  Trick," 
"Bartimeus's"  first  "novel,"  is  a  natural  successor 
to  "Naval  Occasions"  and  "The  Tall  Ship"— the 
one  vivid  in  episode,  the  other  keen  in  local 
color.  Their  virtues  are  the  faults  of  "The  Long 
Trick"  as  a  novel ;  and  there  seems  to  be  no  real 
reason  for  insisting  that  this  is  a  novel.  If  it  is 
less  than  that  in  some  ways,  it  is  on  the  whole  a 
great  deal  more.  A  studied  plan  would  weaken 
the  natural  effect  of  "Bartimeus's"  unadorned 
narrative.  The  decks  of  these  ships  are  firm 
enough  to  walk  on ;  the  characters  have  substan- 
tial hands  to  shake;  and  the  same  ironic  tang 
flavors  the  conversation  of  these  enlisted  men  that 
marked  that  of  Kipling's  heroes  in  India.  Now 
and  again,  with  a  sweep  like  Conrad's,  "Bartim- 
eus" will  turn  such  a  descriptive  phrase  as:  "They 
passed  each  other  thus.  The  waves  that  washed 
over  the  raft  rolled  the  dead  man's  head  to  and 
fro,  as  if  he  found  the  situation  rather  preposter- 
ous." With  such  chapters  in  mind  as  that  re- 
counting the  Battle  of  Jutland,  one  has  no  wish 
to  disparage  "The  Long  Trick"  in  calling  it  a 
series  of  war  posters.  Real  artists  with  clear  eye 
and  firm  hand  are  also  making  them. 

It  would  be  difficult,  also,  to  apply  the  term 
fiction  to  any  of  the  six  sketches  comprising  Mr. 
L.  P.  Jacks's  "The  Country  Air"  (Holt;  $1.). 
"Farmer  Jeremy  and  His  Ways,"  the  first  and 


546 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


most  creditable,  is  what  a  somewhat  accelerated 
Addison  might  do  in  1917;  "Farmer  Ferryman's 
Tall  Hat"  is  a  distinctly  rustic  anecdote;  there 
is  a  flavor  of  the  sixteenth  century  in  "A  Grave- 
digger  Scene" ;  "Macbeth  and  Banquo"  seems,  in 
spite  of  its  address,  of  its  tramps  and  smells  and 
South  Africa,  and  in  spite  of  its  title,  to  be  some- 
thing after  the  way  of  the  urbane  and  superficial 
eighteenth  century;  in  "Mary"  Mr.  Jacks  appears 
to  be  taking  unchivairous  British  revenge  on  the 
New  Woman;  "That  Sort  of  Thing,"  for  all  its 
banter,  one  suspects,  is  chiefly  an  editorial  on  the 
shocking  state  of  British  schools.  There  are 
many  paragraphs  and  passages  that  would  do 
distinct  credit  to  a  book  of  essays ;  there  is  humor ; 
there  is  the  grace  of  wit;  there  is  distinction  in 
the  writing;  there  is  evidence,  even,  that  Mr. 
Jacks  easily  lays  his  hands  on  the  materials  of 
fiction ;  there  is  the  dispatch  so  necessary  to  mod- 
ern stories.  But  when  all  is  seen,  it  is  clear  that 
this  volume  lacks  what  most  of  us  understand 
by  fiction.  One  might  say  that  "Mary"  is  a 
novel  in  the  making — if  one  thereupon  hastened 
to  add  that  the  editor  of  "The  Hibbert  Journal" 
is  not  the  man  to  make  it.  Mr.  Jacks,  in  spite  of 
the  length  of  these  sketches,  evidently  lacks  the 
"breath"  requisite  for  a  novel;  and  he  has  the 
tone  of  a  man  too  long  committed  to  other  oppor- 
tunities than  those  of  fiction.  The  fifth  and 
sixth  pieces  seem  to  reveal  one  who  has  rather 
more  joy  in  the  exploits  of  the  essayist  than  in 
the  successful  mise-en-scene  which  makes  fiction. 
Ladies  between  the  ages  of  eighteen  and 
twenty-eight  would  do  well  to  move  very  pru- 
dently, these  days,  for  they  are  being  watched. 
Yet  some  of  the  heroines  of  printers'  ink  are 
enjoying  life  more  than  sensible  people  can  imag- 
ine. The  rules  of  the  game  are  few:  an  utter 
willingness,  even  a  fanaticism,  for  taking  a  bath 
is  the  first.  If  there  is  not  a  bathtub  around  the 
corner  at  the  end  of  an  affecting  scene,  the  whole 
business  will  go  wrong.  Then,  it  is  evident  that 
a  Latin  quotation  in  a  crisis  calms  the  nerves  as 
nothing  else  can.  Another  requirement  is  the 
presence  of  a  pittance,  left  by  a  dying  dotard,  of 
at  least  five,  if  not  ten,  thousand  a  year.  And 
last,  one  must  have,  like  all  other  paper  dolls,  an 
assortment  of  silk  nightwear,  for  early  morning 
walks  in  meadows  and  other  appropriate  occa- 
sions. Thus  provided,  the  heroine  proceeds  to 
trip  things  up  generally.  The  reader  will  see 
at  once  that  any  one  of  the  novels  of  Robert  W. 
Chambers — and  among  them  his  newest  one, 
"The  Restless  Sex  (Appleton;  $1.50) — complies 
with  all  requirements.  It  is  a  perfect  Soda 
Clerk's  Paradise  in  its  delightful  details  of  ele- 
gance and  aesthetics.  The  lady,  gray-eyed  and 
charming,  makes  a  marriage  of  pity  (although 
living  in  Greenwich  Village  she  really  need  not 
have  bothered)  but  lives  icily  chaste  until  the 


happy  suicide  of  her  gifted,  but  dowerless  and 
starving,  husband  catapults  her  into  the  arms  of 
the  hero,  the  dark  horse  from  the  first,  as  every- 
one knew.  At  this  point  all  those  who  are  not 
already  engaged  follow  the  example  of  the  happy 
pair ;  those  whose  marriages  are  unhappy  go  back 
into  the  repentant  and  forgiving  embraces  of 
their  mates  (unless  they  have  first  tidily  "ended 
everything")  ;  and  after  a  good  bath  everyone  is 
ready  for  dinner.  Anne  Warwick's  story 
"The  Best  People"  (Lane;  $1.50)  offers  just 
as  much  pure  joy  to  the  Dressmaker's  Apprentice. 
When  a  fascinating  widow  of  twenty-seven  takes 
the  boat  for  Japan  and  determines  to  write  her 
entire  set  of  experiences  in  letters  and  diary,  it 
is  really  only  fair  that  most  of  the  men  should 
wind  up  by  kissing  her  passionately,  or  otherwise 
showing  their  allegiance,  in  order  that  the 
quaintly  beautiful  settings  should  have  some 
reason  for  appearing.  Luckily  the  lady  learns 
one  of  the  oldest  lessons — that  people  are  just  the 
same  whether  you  meet  them  in  Brinsville,  or 
Japan,  or  Timbuctoo.  Sans  hope,  sans  purse, 
sans  wardrobe,  she  races  back  to  find  the  long- 
neglected  man  at  home. 

"The  Bag  of  Saffron,"  by  Bettina  von  Hutten 
(Appleton;  $1.50),  by  reason  of  its  fine  work- 
manship and  careful  detail  presents  a  more  plausi- 
ble as  well  as  a  more  interesting  case.  The  story 
is  that  of  a  young  girl,  brought  by  a  somewhat 
renegade  and  certainly  dying  father  to  be  cared 
for  by  her  maiden  aunts.  Her  gift  is  charm,  not 
beauty;  and  her  passion  is  that  of  acquisition. 
Her  worldly  sense  rarely  deserts  her,  and  when 
it  does,  it  is  brought  back  again  in  haste.  So 
strongly  has  she  resolved  upon  a  rich  husband 
that  when  she  has  at  last  discovered  herself  to 
have  been  moved  by  an  irresistible  inclination — 
one  cannot  call  it  love — and  married  to  a  man 
who  has  next  to  nothing,  she  takes  advantage  of 
circumstances  and  runs  off  with  the  magnificent 
heart-eater  who  can  give  her  what  she  must  have. 
There  seems  however  to  be  a  weak  point.  After 
the  scandal  has  been  quenched,  and  everyone  in 
London  is  at  the  lady's  door,  does  it  seem  quite 
fair  to  suppose  that  upon  hearing  of  the  mortal 
illness  of  the  unhappy  youth  who  failed  to  satisfy 
her  cravings,  she  should  plunge  into  the  night 
to  reach  his  side — and  suddenly  discover  that  she 
knows  at  last  what  love  is?  Her  former  selfish- 
ness can  hardly  have  been  changed  permanently, 
one  would  say.  The  result  of  her  impulse  is  to 
settle  everybody  happily  down  in  a  warm  climate, 
where  the  generous  husband  pays  the  bills,  pre- 
sumably, and  watches  the  two  young  creatures 
beginning  over  again.  Granted  he  is  given  a 
former  ladylove — one  of  the  aunts — it  is  a  little 
too  much  to  imagine  his  acquiescence.  The  work- 
manship, as  has  been  said,  is  delightful — no 
clogging  lists  of  tiresome  details,  yet  a  distinct 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


547 


picture  of  the  Yorkshire  country.  The  characters 
of  the  aunts  are  exceedingly  well  done,  without 
overdrawing,  and  the  connections  of  the  valley 
folk,  their  manners  and  speech,  satisfy  the  reader. 
It  is  of  course  true  that  American  soil  is  too  new 
to  have  acquired  a  deep-rooted  affiliation  to  its 
dwellers,  but  that  is  not  the  whole  reason  why 
so  many  English  novels  charm  us  by  their  rich- 
ness of  detail  and  color  of  atmosphere.  Con- 
vincing or  not  as  the  book  may  seem,  there  is  so 
much  beside  the  lady  errant  in  it  that  it  compels 
attention. 

It  is  rather  unfortunate  that  the  publishers  of 
"Days  of  Discovery,"  by  Bertram  Smith  (Dut- 
ton;  $1.50),  should  have  made  comparison  to 
that  delightful  classic,  "The  Golden  Age."  Mr. 
Smith's  group  of  greedy  vengeful  little  tyrants, 
unconnected — save  by  an  occasional  gold-crossed 
palm — with  their  remote  elders,  do  indeed  sug- 
gest mischievously  distorted  shadows  of  our 
friends  in  "The  Golden  Age."  Not  that  the 
book  is  unreal.  There  is  adventure,  and  sur- 
prise ;  the  smell  of  bonfires,  and  the  elvish  experi- 
ments of  curious  childhood;  there  is  whimsical 
outlook  clothed  in  fantastic  description.  But 
through  all  the  detail — "deliberately  literary," 
in  spite  of  the  publishers — one  cannot  hold  these 
dogged  discoverers  to  one's  bosom.  In  fact  one 
cannot  give  them  a  civil  glance  until  the  first 
four  chapters  have  been  forgotten. 

A  swashbuckling  romance  in  the  setting  of  the 
time  of  the  French  Revolution,  with  enough 
scheming  and  plotting  and  hairbreadth  'scapes  to 
meet  the  most  exacting  requirements,  is  "Lord 
Tony's  Wife"  by  the  Baroness  Orczy  (Doran; 
$1.35).  It  is  another  successful  adventure  of 
The  Scarlet  Pimpernel,  where  that  invincible 
hero  defrauds  the  guillotine  of  its  prey,  and 
revenge  of  its  accomplishment.  The  story  pre- 
sents a  very  clear  picture  of  the  bloody  days  of 
'93,  but  there  is  an  unfortunate  adeptness  on  the 
part  of  the  French  peasants  and  bourgeoisie  to  fall 
readily  into  the  Elizabethan  idiom  in  moments  of 
stress. 

"The  Pawns  Count,"  by  E.  Phillips  Oppen- 
heim  (Little,  Brown;  $1.50),  is  a  story  of  inter- 
national intrigue  with  the  complications  ingeni- 
ously managed  in  the  author's  best  manner.  The 
plot  seems  a  bit  pallid  however  at  a  time  when 
the  daily  press  furnishes  war  news  as  dramatic 
as  any  romance.  A  beautiful  American  girl  in 
the  role  of  a  secret  service  agent  successfully 
matches  her  wits  against  pro-German  plotters. 
Japan  and  England  as  well  as  Germany  and 
America  are  involved  in  a  search  for  the  formula 
of  a  new  explosive  which  is  juggled  about 
mysteriously  among  the  intrigants.  There  are 
thrilling  incidents,  a  casual  love  interest,  and  a 
denouement  which  piques  interest. 


CASUAL,  COMMENT 


THE  DIAL  NATURALLY  TAKES  GREAT  INTER- 
est  in  the  dispatch  from  London  of  May  21, 
printed  in  our  newspapers,  stating  that  Mr. 
Robert  Dell,  long  correspondent  of  the  "Man- 
chester Guardian"  and  since  recently  a  contribut- 
ing editor  of  THE  DIAL,  had  been  asked  to  leave 
France.  For  a  considerable  period  letters  from 
Mr.  Dell  on  literary  and  political  subjects  have 
been  appearing  regularly  every  month  in  our 
columns,  and  the  obvious  displeasure  of  the 
French  Government  towards  a  responsible  and 
well  known  foreign  correspondent  comes  as  some- 
thing of  a  shock.  It  hardly  accords  with  our 
conceptions  of  the  generous  attitude  of  France 
towards  complete  freedom  of  expression  (an  atti- 
tude in  which  Mme.  Fischbacher — in  her  letter 
printed  on  another  page — takes  a  just  pride). 
Yet  in  view  of  Mr.  Dell's  expulsion,  we  are 
showing  our  respect  for  the  desires  of  the  French 
Government,  as  we  understand  them,  by  with- 
holding from  this  current  issue  the  political  por- 
tion of  Mr.  Dell's  Paris  letter,  written  and 
mailed  to  us  only  a  few  days  before  the  order 
for  his  expulsion  was  signed — "a  purely  political 
expulsion,"  the  dispatches  state.  We  wish  to 
make  it  clear  that  our  decision  does  not  reflect 
on  Mr.  Dell,  who  is  in  our  judgment  a 
true  friend  of  France,  desirous  only  of  assisting 
her  cause.  Good  relations  between  associated 
peoples  are,  we  believe,  best  promoted  by  allowing 
every  possible  latitude  to  responsible  foreign  cor- 
respondents, and  in  general  the  more  fearlessly 
they  tell  the  truth,  the  better.  Of  course  states- 
men may  be  sometimes  annoyed  at  this  frankness, 
but  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  balance  the  respective 
advantages  of  giving  pleasure  to  statesmen  as 
against  the  good  which  comes  from  a  genuine 
understanding  and  rapprochement  between  peo- 
ples. In  the  final  analysis,  that  understanding 
and  rapprochement  can  come  only  from  both 
countries'  knowing  the  truth  about  each  other, 
and  it  is  that  task  of  fearless  mediation  which 
Mr.  Dell  has  in  our  opinion  honestly  and  sin- 
cerely attempted  to  perform. 

•          •          • 

IN  NOT  PUBLISHING  THE  POLITICAL   PORTION 

of  Mr.  Dell's  letter,  we  do  not  feel  that  we  are 
dealing  unfairly  with  our  readers.  Mr.  Dell's 
attitude  has  been  made  clear  in  the  "Manchester 
Guardian,"  from  which  great  organ  of  liberal 
opinion  in  Britain,  the  "Evening  Post"  of  New 
York  has  reprinted  'the  offending  disclosures  in 
extenso.  The  facts  are  thus  known  in  England 
and  America.  Since  Mr.  Dell  based  his  articles 
mainly  on  what  has  already  appeared  in  the 
French  press,  it  follows  that  he  has  said  little,  if 
anything,  which  is  not  equally  well  known  in 
Paris. 


548 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


THE  WHOLE  QUESTION  OF  POLICY  REVOLVING 

about  the  now  famous  Prince  Sixtus  note  will 
evoke  as  bitter  controversies  among  future  his- 
torians as  among  present-day  publicists.  For  our 
part,  we  cannot  but  feel  that  Mr.  Dell  did  a  real 
service  to  the  world  in  presenting  all  the  facts 
to  the  open  light  of  public  opinion.  Many  will 
say  that  an  honorable  basis  of  peace  was  pre- 
sented and  recklessly  thrown  away  (as,  for 
instance,  the  London  "Nation"  already  says  very 
plainly) ;  others  will  assert  that  the  offer  was 
a  mere  insincere  trap..  But  we  do  know  that 
President  Wilson  himself  tried  to  detach  Austria- 
Hungary  from  Germany:  his  failure  for  the 
moment  so  to  do  is  of  course  attributed  by  dif- 
ferent people  to  different  causes.  Some  claim 
that  the  thing  was  on  the  face  of  it  impossible; 
others,  that  the  President  did  not  receive  adequate 
information  or  support  from  the  three  leading 
European  Allies.  M.  Clemenceau  was  clearly 
among  the  skeptics.  He  turned  down  Austria- 
Hungary,  bluntly  and  with  characteristic  deci- 
sion. He  may  have  been  right — he  may  have 
been  wrong.  It  is  obvious  that  not  all  French 
statesmen  agreed  with  his  procedure.  It  is  equally 
obvious  that  his  manner  was  not  President  Wil- 
son's. All  that  we  can  presume  to  say  at  this 
distance  is  that  the  Prime  Minister  of  France  is 
a  better  judge  than  we  can  be  of  what  was  the 
best  handling  of  French  psychology. 

THE    ISSUE    REALLY    NEED    NOT    BE    PURSUED 

further  because  it  has  immeasurably  broadened. 
President  Wilson  has  announced  that  he  stands 
by  Russia  as  well  as  by  France — which  means 
that  Asia  is  involved  with  Europe  and  that 
America  is  involved  in  Asia*  The  fate  of  Alsace- 
Lorraine  is  properly  an  international  and  hence 
world-  question,  yet  after  all  what  convinced 
President  Wilson  of  Teutonic  insincerity  was  less 
Germany's  dubious  proposals  about  the  lost  prov- 
inces than  her  open  and  flagrantly  predatory  and 
cynical  treatment  of  the  Ukraine,  Rumania,  and 
the  Soviets.  Against  this  background  of  avowed 
and  cruel  imperialism,  the  alleged  desire  by 
France  to  secure  the  left  bank  of  the  Rhine  seems 
trivial.  Yet  with  all  due  respect  to  M.  Clemen- 
ceau we  are  bound  to  say  that  we  agree  with 
President  Wilson  and  Mr.  Balfour.  It  seems  to 
us  that  the  formal  or  informal  presentation  of 
this  demand  was  unfortunate,  coming  at  the  time 
it  did.  The  Rhine  boundary  doubtless  presents 
military  advantages  which  appeal  strongly  to 
French  strategists.  Nevertheless  there  are  French 
statesmen  who  hold,  as  Mr.  Dell  holds,  that  such 
an  annexation  of  German  soil  would  leave 
two  neighboring  nations  still  at  daggers  drawn. 
Indeed,  it  is  far  from  certain  that  on  this  par- 


ticular matter  France  is  unanimously  behind  M. 
Clemenceau.  It  is  even  less  certain  that  the  true 
interests  of  France  would  be  served  by  annexa- 
tions of  large  German-speaking  territories.  Cer- 
tainly the  answers  of  Mr.  Balfour  in  the  House 
of  Commons  recently  to  the  persistent  question- 
ing of  Mr.  Asquith  gave  the  impression  that  such 
ambitions  no  longer  constituted  any  part  in  the 
present  war  aims  of  France. 


THE  FUTURE  OF  FRANCE  is  STILL  IN  PERIL. 
She  cannot  live  beside  a  power  so  treacherous 
and  cruel  as  Germany  without  the  security  of 
some  form  of  international  organization.  And 
the  elements  of  that  international  organization 
are  already  rallying  to  her  aid.  Outside  the 
Central  Empires  and  disorganized,  helpless  Rus- 
sia, the  whole  world  is  rushing  to  her  help.  May 
we,  therefore,  make  one  suggestion  for  the  con- 
sideration of  our  French  comrades?  Hitherto, 
nationalism  in  France  has  burned  with  a  white 
heat.  But  is  that  the  whole  story  today? 
Can  we  ever  forget  Edith  Cavell's  last  words: 
"Patriotism  is  not  enough"?  The  real  guarantee 
for  all  Republics  in  the  future  will  be  interna- 
tional— a  League  of  Nations.  It  will  assuredly 
not  be  any  secret  treaty,  a  confidential  scrap  of 
paper,  the  writing  on  which  fades,  like  certain 
inks,  with  daylight.  Slowly  but  surely  British 
diplomacy  is  facing  West  and  escaping  from  nar- 
row entanglements.  French  diplomacy,  so  quick 
to  appreciate  a  large  and  abstract  principle,  has 
nothing  to  lose  and  everything  to  gain  by  admit- 
ting the  influence  of  Washington.  With  the 
particular  relations  between  President  Poincare, 
M.  Clemenceau,  and  the  French  Parliament  and 
people  we  of  course  have  nothing  to  do,  although 
it  is  clear  that  there  has  never  been  a  greater 
need  than  there  is  today  for  solidarity.  But  the 
entrance  of  the  United  States  into  the  struggle 
as  an  unexhausted  factor  suggests  that  the  orig- 
inal Allies,  who  have  fought  so  gallantly,  can 
safely  take  a  broad  view  of  their  destinies.  Hard 
bargains  in  advance  of  victory  do  no  good.  They 
may  do  harm  and  create  misunderstanding.  It 
is  the  armies  of  herself  and  her  friends  which 
secure  a  certainty  of  justice  for  France,  not  a 
private  pact  with  a  Russia  that  has  collapsed. 
While,  therefore,  we  much  regret  the  loss  of 
Mr.  Dell's  services  as  our  Paris  correspondent 
(he  will  continue  to  be  one  of  our  regular  con- 
tributors), we  cannot  but  think  that  the  incident 
will  do  good  in  so  far  as  it  removes  ignorance 
of  what  is  really  happening  amid  the  mysteries  of 
European  statecraft.  It  helps  clear  the  ground 
for  a  straight  fight  between  the  democratic  and 
the  autocratic  principles. 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


549 


Books  for  Summer  Reading 


THE  DIAL  offers  herewith  a  list  of  outstanding  books  published  during  the  spring  of  1918,  as- 
suming that  it  will  be  understood  that  such  lists  are  suggestive  rather  than  final. 


GENERAL   LITERATURE. 

The    Book    of   Job    as    a    Greek    Tragedy    Restored. 

By  H.  M.  Kallen.     Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.;  $1.50. 

India  and  the  Future.  By  William  Archer.  Alfred 
A.  Knopf;  $3. 

Per  Arnica  Silentia  Lunae.  By  William  Butler 
Yeats.  The  Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50. 

Appreciations  and  Depreciations.  By  Ernest  A. 
Boyd.  The  Talbot  Press;  Dublin. 

Some  Modern  Novelists.  By  Helen  Thomas  Follett 
and  Wilson  Follett.  Henry  Holt  &  Co.;  $1.50. 

On  Contemporary  Literature.  By  Stuart  P.  Sher- 
man. Henry  Holt  &  Co.;  $1.50. 

Platonism.  By  Paul  Elmer  More.  Princeton  Uni- 
versity Press;  $1.75. 

The  Oxford  Stamp,  and  Other  Essays.  By  Frank 
Aydelotte.  Oxford  University  Press;  $1.20. 

A  Boswell  of  Baghdad.  By  E.  V.  Lucas.  George  H. 
Doran  Co.;  $1.35. 

Diaries  of  Leo  Tolstoy — Youth,  4  vols.  Vol.  1. 
1847-1852.  E.  P.  Button  &  Co.;  $2. 

Letters  of  John  Holmes  to  James  Russell  Lowell 
and  Others.  Edited  by  William  Roscoe  Thayer. 
Houghton  Mifflin  Co.;  $2.50. 

HISTORY   AND   PHILOSOPHY. 

The  Expansion  of  Europe.  By  Wilbur  Cortez  Ab- 
bott. 2  vols.  Henry  Holt  &  Co.;  $6.50. 

National  Progress,  19O7-1917.  By  Frederic  A.  Ogg. 
Harper  &  Bros.;  $2. 

The  History  of  Germany  in  the  Nineteenth  Century. 
By  Heinrich  von  Treitschke.  Translated  by 
Eden  and  Cedar  Paul.  Vol.  4.  Robert  M.  Mc- 
Bride;  $3.25. 

Mysticism  and  Logic,  and  Other  Essays.  By  Bertrand 
Russell.  Long-mans,  Green  &  Co.;  $2.50. 

The  Psychology  of  Conviction.  By  Joseph  Jastrow. 
Houghton  Mifflin  Co.;  $2.50. 

Totem  and  Taboo.  By  Sigmund  Freud.  Translated 
by  A.  A.  Brill.  Moffat,  Yard  &  Co. 

Reflections  on  War  and  Death.  By  Sigmund  Freud. 
Translated  by  A.  A.  Brill  and  Alfred  B.  Kuttner. 
Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.;  75  cts. 

Logic  as  the  Science  of  the  Pure  Concept.  By 
Benedetto  Croce.  Translated  by  Douglas  Ains- 
lie.  The  Macmillan  Co.;  $3.50. 

The  Philosophy  of  Benedetto  Croce.  By  H.  Wildon 
Carr.  The  Macmillan  Co.;  $2.25. 

On  Reading  Nietzsche.  By  Emile  Faguet.  Trans- 
lated by  George  Raffalovich.  Moffat,  Yard  & 
Co.;  $1.25. 

Philosophy  and  the  Social  Order.  By  Will  Durant. 
Macmillan;  $1.50. 

Man's  Supreme  Inheritance.  Conscious  Guidance 
and  Control  in  Relation  to  Human  Evolution  in 
Civilization.  By  F.  Matthias  Alexander.  With 
an  introductory  word  by  John  Dewey.  E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co.;  $2. 

An  Ethical  Philosophy  of  Life.  By  Felix  Adler. 
D.  Appleton  &  Co.;  $3. 

POETRY. 

Posthumous  Poems.  By  Algernon  Charles  Swin- 
burne. Edited  by  Edmund  Gosse  and  Thomas 
James  Wise.  John  Lane  Co.;  $1.50. 

Moments  of  Vision.  By  Thomas  Hardy.  The  Mac- 
millan Co.;  $2. 

Poems.    By  Edward  Thomas.     Henry  Holt  &  Co.;  $1. 

Reincarnations.  By  James  Stephens.  The  Macmil- 
lan Co.;  $1. 

Nocturne  of  Remembered  Spring,  and  Other  Poems. 
By  Conrad  Aiken.  The  Four  Seas  Co.;  J1.25. 

Pavannes  and  Divisions.  By  Ezra  Pound.  Alfred 
A.  Knopf;  $2.50. 

Toward  the  Gulf.  By  Edgar  Lee  Masters.  The 
Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50. 

Sonnets,  and  Other  Lyrics.  By  Robert  Silliman 
Hillyer.  Harvard  University  Press;  75  cts. 

Mid-American  Chants.  By  Sherwood  Anderson. 
John  Lane  Co.;  $1.25. 

Georgian  Poetry:  1910-1917.  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons; 
$2. 


DRAMA  AND  THE  STAGE. 

Artists'  Families.  By  Eugene  Brieux.  Translated 
by  B.  H.  Clark.  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.;  75  cts. 

The  Miracle  of  St.  Anthony.  By  Maurice  Maeter- 
linck. Translated  by  Alexander  Teixeira  de 
Mattos.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.;  $1.75. 

The  Harlequinade.  By  Dion  Clayton  Calthrop  and 
Granville  Barker.  Little,  Brown  &  Co.;  $1.25. 

Representative  Plays  by  American  Dramatists. 
1765-1819.  Edited  by  Montrose  J.  Moses.  E.  P. 
Dutton  &  Co.;  $3, 

Harvard  Plays.  Edited  with  introductions  by  Pro- 
fessor George  P.  Baker.  2  vols.  Brentano;  $1 
per  vol. 

Essays  on  Modern  Dramatists.  By  William  Lyon 
Phelps.  The  Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50. 

How's  Your  Second  Act?  By  Arthur  Hopkins. 
Philip  Goodman. 

BOOKS    ON    WAR    AND    PEACE 

Men  In  War.     By  Andreas  Latzko.      Translated   by 

Adele  Seltzer.     Boni  &  Liveright;  $1.50. 
Our  Revolution.     By   Leon  Trotzky.     Collected   and 

translated  by  Moissaye  J.  Olgin.     Henry  Holt  & 

Co.;  $1.25. 
"The    Dark    People":     Russia's    Crisis.      By    Ernest 

Poole.     The  Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50. 
Deductions   from    the    Great    War.      By    Baron    von 

Freytag-Loringhoven.     G.   P.   Putnam's    Sons. 
Face  to  Face  with  Kaiserism.     By  James  W.  Gerard. 

George  H.  Doran  Co.;   $2. 
Topography  and  Strategy  in  the  War.    By  Douglas 

W.  Johnson.     Henry  Holt  &  Co.;  $1.75. 
Militarism  and  Statecraft.     By  Munroe  Smith.    G.  P. 

Putnam's  Sons.;  $1.50. 
The   End   of  the   War.      By   Walter   E.    Weyl.      The 

Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50, 
The  Structure  of  Lasting  Peace.     By  H.  M.  Kallen. 

Marshall  Jones  Co. 
The  Aims  of  Labor.     By  Arthur  Henderson.     B.  W. 

Huebsch;  paper,  50  cts. 
Freedom.    By  Gilbert  Cannan.     Frederick  A.  Stokes 

Co.;  $1. 

Liberty    and    Democracy.      By    Hartley    Burr   Alex- 
ander.    Marshall  Jones  Co. 
America    Among    the   Nations.      By    H.    H.    Powers. 

Macmillan  Co.;  $1.50. 
Credit   of  the   Nations.     By   L.   Laurence   Laughlin. 

Charles  Scribner's  Sons;  $3.50. 

FICTION. 

On  the  Stairs.  By  Henry  B.  Fuller.  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co.;  $1.50. 

The  Return  of  the  Soldier.  By  Rebecca  West.  The 
Century  Co.;  $1. 

The  Threshold  of  Quiet.  By  Daniel  Corkery.  Fred- 
erick A.  Stokes  Co.;  $1.50. 

Nocturne.  By  Frank  Swinnerton.  With  an  intro- 
duction by  H.  G.  Wells.  George  H.  Doran  Co.; 
$1.40. 

Old  People  and  the  Things  That  Pass.  By  Louis 
Couperus.  Translated  by  Alexander  Teixeira  de 
Mattos.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $1.50. 

South  Wind.  By  Norman  Douglas.  Dodd,  Mead  & 
Co.;  $1.60. 

The  Stucco  House.  By  Gilbert  Cannan.  Gorge  H. 
Doran  Co.;  $1.50. 

Pilgrimage:  III.  Honeycomb.  By  Dorothy  Rich- 
ardson. Alfred  A.  Knopf.;  $1.50. 

The  Tree  of  Heaven.  By  May  Sinclair.  Macmillan 
Co.;  $1.60. 

His  Second  Wife.  By  Ernest  Poole.  The  Macmillan 
Co.;  $1.50. 

Aliens.  By  William  McFee.  Doubleday,  Page  & 
Co.;  $1.50. 

Gudrid  the  Fair.  By  Maurice  Hewlett.  Dodd,  Mead 
&  Co.;  $1.40. 

The  Unwilling  Vestal.  By  Edward  Lucas  White. 
E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.;  $1.50. 

The  Wife,  and  Other  Stories.  By  Anton  Chekhov. 
Translated  by  Constance  Garnett.  The  Macmil- 
lan Co.;  $1.50. 


550 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


COMMUNICATION 


"LE  DROIT  DE  REPONSE" 
(To  the  Editor  of  THE  DIAL.) 

I  have  several  times  been  unhappily  surprised  at 
reading  Mr.  Robert  Dell's  letters  from  Paris  in  THE 
DIAL  and  have  been  tempted  to  write,  either  to  the 
author  or  the  editor  of  these  letters.  I  refrained 
from  doing  this  with  the  thought  that  an  intelli- 
gent and  sincere  American  (as  no  doubt  the  cor- 
respondent of  this  magazine  must  be)  could  not 
live  very  long  in  France  without  learning  to  under- 
stand something  of  the  character  of  our  country 
and  that  he  would  soon  escape  from  the  little  circle 
of  "defeatists"  which  had  quite  evidently  shut  him 
in  at  first.  And  I  would  have  thought  myself  pre- 
sumptuous to  interpose,  even  by  a  letter,  between 
this  stranger  who  came  to  judge  my  country  and 
the  people  and  conditions  he  met  here. 

However,  his  last  letter,  published  in  THE  DIAL 
of  March  14,  which  has  just  reached  me,  awakens 
in  me  such  deep  surprise  and  indignation  that  it 
seems  impossible  to  keep  silent  any  longer;  I  can- 
not refrain  from  trying,  in  such  measure  as  I  can, 
to  put  you  and  your  readers  on  guard  against  so 
wrong  and  unjust  a  picture  of  my  country.  Par- 
don me  for  this  interference.  You  cannot  imagine 
what  a  blow  it  is,  at  the  very  hour  when  we  hear 
the  shells  falling  on  Paris,  at  the  very  hour  when 
we  are  in  agony  for  our  men  at  the  Front,  from 
whom  in  these  last  days  we  have  had  no  word,  to 
open  an  American  magazine  and  find  there  depict- 
ing Paris  this  phrase:  "Four  months  ago  I  said 
that  the  war  was  nearly  forgotten  here.  That  is 
still  more  true  now." 

I  have  not  the  faintest  intention  of  discussing  the 
details  of  this  letter  from  Mr.  Dell.  The  "affaire 
Caillaux"  forms  the  basis  of  it  and  whatever  your 
correspondent  may  say,  the  "affaire  Caillaux"  has 
little  interest  either  for  French  women  or  for  the 
French  men  who  are  at  war.  They  regret  it, 
because  of  the  shadow  which  some  persons  are  try- 
ing, without  much  success,  to  cast  over  the  country 
by  its  means,  and  they  wait  for  the  verdict  which 
will  be  given.  Those  who  are  interested  in  it — 
passionately,  I  admit — are  some  politicians  of  the 
rear  who  hope  to  reap  a  profit  from  it  and  those 
men  who,  having  lacked  the  courage  to  remain  in 
active  service,  are  truly  very  desirous  to  hear  some- 
thing else  talked  of  besides  that  which  is  happening 
in  the  army,  in  which  they  have  no  share  whatever. 
These  men  make  up  a  very  small  group — rather 
despised  by  us — but  a  strangei1  who  comes  to  France 
in  war  time  can  very  easily  be  made  their  dupe. 

Our  best  men  left  Paris  four  years  ago.  They 
went  away  in  the  first  days  of  August,  1914  and 
many,  many  of  them  sleep  in  the  fields  of  the 
Marne  and  the  Yser,  of  Champagne  and  Verdun. 
And  those  who  survive  are  also  far  away — in  a 
land  where  Mr.  Dell  will  never  meet  them,  for  if 
he  should  ever  risk  himself  there,  it  would  be  only 
as  an  amused  stroller,  on  a  carefully  chosen  day, 
in  a  "quiet  sector." 

So   Mr.   Dell  does  not  know  the    real   French- 


man. And  neither  has  he  been  able,  since  he  is  a 
stranger,  to  enter  into  the  families  where  he  would 
have  found  the  wives,  the  sisters,  the  children,  the 
fathers  and  mothers  who  no  longer  have  sons,  and 
where  he  would  hear  them  speak  not  of  Caillaux 
and  Clemenceau,  but  sometimes  of  the  spirit  and 
always  of  the  memory  of  those  who  are  gone.  Evi- 
dently Mr.  Dell  has  not  known  how  to  see  this; 
so  what  is  there  left  for  him?  Only  some  little 
political  circles  where  he  finds,  naturally,  those 
who  have  nowhere  else  to  go — the  "defeatists"  and 
the  "embusques." 

It  is  a  shame!  And  be  sure,  Monsieur,  that  you 
understand  the  meaning  of  my  protest.  I  do  not 
for  a  moment  accuse  Mr.  Dell  of  treachery  (al- 
though there  is  sometimes  a  very  disturbing  resem- 
blance between  his  remarks  and  the  arguments  of 
the  German  and  neutral  pro-German  journals). 
I  believe  that  up  to  a  certain  point  he  can  give 
proofs  and  quote  articles  (more  or  less  correctly 
understood)  in  support  of  each  of  his  affirmations, 
but  what  he  has  written  is  much  worse  than  a 
direct  slander.  It  is,  if  you  like,  a  hideous  cari- 
cature instead  of  a  portrait.  The  features  which 
he  has  chosen  belong  to  his  subject — and  it  is  an 
honor  to  France  that  even  in  her  most  vital  hours 
all  types  of  opinion  can  be  expressed  here — but  he 
seems  to  have  chosen  the  most  unworthy  and  dis- 
cordant features  to  the  exclusion  of  all  others.  We 
ourselves  scarcely  know  them;  they  are  such  a  petty 
factor  in  the  composition  of  our  country.  What 
he  has  given  you  is  not  the  semblance,  but  the 
frightful  distortion,  of  a  beautiful  face  whose  true 
nobility  he  has  not  wished,  to  see. 

If  it  were  simply  a  question  of  Mr.  Dell  himself, 
I  would  not  be  so  insistent.  Rather  I  would  almost 
wish  (if  he  is  sincere)  to  try  to  meet  him  and  teach 
him  to  know  a  little  about  the  true  France  of 
which  he  is  so  ignorant — not  the  France  of  cafes  and 
halls  which  he  seems  to  frequent  exclusively,  but 
the  France  of  the  soldiers  and  their  families.  But 
it  is  not  simply  a  question  of  Mr.  Dell,  whose  opin- 
ions, after  all,  are  of  only  secondary  importance. 
It  is  a  question  of  your  readers,  who  form  a  part, 
and  I  believe  an  enlightened  part,  of  the  opinion 
of  that  great  country,  America,  which  is  in  this 
tense  hour  the  supreme  hope  of  the  world.  That 
is  why  I  write  to  you.  We  have  in  France  a  privi- 
lege called  the  "right  to  respond,"  by  virtue  of 
which  any  one  who  considers  himself  slandered  in 
a  publication  can  compel  the  editor  of  the  article 
to  accept  hist  protest  and  to  print  it  in  the  very  place 
in  which  the  slander  appeared.  Here  it  is,  naturally, 
a  question  neither  of  right  nor  compulsion;  but  I 
consider,  Monsieur  1'Editeur,  that  it  would  be  an 
act  of  high  justice  on  your  part  to  receive  and  make 
known  to  your  readers,  in  whatever  form  you  think 
best,  this  protest  which  comes  from  France.  The 
person  addressing  you  is  neither  a  journalist  nor  a 
professional  writer.  She  is  just  a  woman — whose 
only  brother  fell  near  Rheims;  whose  husband  has 
been  away  since  August,  1914;  and  who  is  bring- 
ing up  her  children  alone,  in  memory  of  those  who 
are  fallen  and  with  profound  faith  in  the  future 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


551 


of  her  land.  It  is  because  she  does  not  speak  to 
you  in  her  own  name,  but  in  the  name  of  the  thou- 
sands and  thousands  of  French  women  who  are 
living  the  same  lives  and  thinking  the  same  thoughts, 
that  she  does  not  despair  of  being  heard. 

MARGUERITE  FISCHBACHER. 

Paris,  France. 

[EDITOR'S  NOTE:  Mme.  Fischbacher  should  have 
observed  that  the  date  line  of  the  particular  letter 
of  Mr.  Dell's  which  aroused  her  eloquent  protest 
showed  that  Mr.  Dell  was  writing  before  the  begin- 
ning of  the  German  offensive  of  March  21.  His 
next  letter  was  cut  for  reasons  of  space,  but  its 
first  sentence  was  to  the  effect  that  his  own  words — 
now  that  Paris  talked  of  nothing  but  the  military 
situation — had  come  as  a  blow  in  the  face.  Mr. 
Dell  is  not  a  recent  arrival  in  Paris;  neither  is  he 
an  American.  For  many  years  he  has  been  the 
cori  espondent  of  the  Manchester  "Guardian"  in  the 
French  capital,  and  as  such  has  had  exceptional 
opportunities  to  learn  conditions  at  first  hand.  He 
has  personal  friends  among  practically  all  of  the  re- 
cent Ministries.  Mme.  Fischbacher  may  also  be 
surprised  to  learn  that  no  one  has  written  with  such 
bitterness  towards  the  "embusque"  as  Mr.  Dell 
himself,  who,  whatever  may  be  his  faults  of  observa- 
tion, does  know  the  French  soldier  and  is  well 
acquainted  with  his  feelings.  THE  DIAL'S  confi- 
dence in  Mr.  Dell  is  expressed  at  some  length  in 
the  "Casual  Comment"  pages.] 


NOTES  AND 


The  index  to  the  current  volume  is  now  ready 
and  will  be  sent  post  paid  to  those  readers  who 
wish  to  receive  it,  provided  they  will  send  in  their 
request  within  thirty  days.  This  index  is  included 
in  the  library  copies  of  THE  DIAL,  but  it  is  the 
publisher's  impression  that  few  others  will  be  in- 
terested in  receiving  an  index  and  he  feels  justified 
in  saving  white  paper  under  existing  conditions. 

P.  W.  Wilson,  author  of  "Pilgrim  Sons  of  1920" 
in  this  issue  of  THE  DIAL,  is  the  American  corre- 
spondent of  the  London  "Daily  News,"  of  which 
he  was  formerly  the  Parliamentary  correspondent. 
He  was  a  member  of  Parliament  from  1906  to 
1910.  Mr.  Wilson's  book  "The  Christ  We  Forget" 
is  published  by  the  Fleming  H.  Revell  Co. 

Scofield  Thayer,  who  reviews  Frank  Harris's 
"Oscar  Wilde"  for  this  number,  now  joins  the  edi- 
torial staff  of  THE  DIAL.  After  receiving  the 
degrees  A.B.  and  A.M.  from  Harvard,  where  he 
was  Secretary  of  "The  Harvard  Monthly,"  Mr. 
Thayer  studied  for  two  years  at  Magdalen  Col- 
lege, Oxford.  He  has  since  been  writing  in  New 
York  City. 

Annette  Wynne  is  a  graduate  of  New  York 
University  (M.A.  1916).  She  is  about  to  bring 
out  a  book  of  child  verse. 

The  other  contributors  to  this  number  have 
previously  written  for  THE  DIAL. 

"The  Muse  in  Arms,"  an  anthology  of  war  poems 
edited  by  E.  B.  Osborn,  the  English  edition  of  which 


SUMMER  READING 

TO  CHEER 

"A  Prose  Epic  of  Heroism" 

THE  GLORY  OF  THE 
TRENCHES 

By  LT.  CONINGSBY  DAWSON,  author  of  "Carry 
On,"  etc.  Frontispiece.  Cloth.  $1.00  net 

"From  beginning  to  end,  'The  Glory  of  the 
Trenches'  is  &  happy  book.  It  is  happy,  not  because 
the  author  has  escaped  suffering  or  even  horror, 
but  because- — whether  or  not  he  puts  it  into  plain 
words  of  literal  statement — he  has  grasped  some- 
thing beyond  those  things." — New  York  Times. 

A  Message  of  Comfort  and  Good  Cheer  for 
Fathers  and  Mothers  of  "Soldier  Boys" 

THE  FATHER  OF  A 
SOLDIER 

By  W.  J.  DAWSON,  author  of  "Robert  Shenstone," 
etc.  Cloth,  $1.00  net 

"This  book  comes  from  the  heart  and  goes  to  it. 

It  is  the  effort  of  a  father  who  has  reached  a  great 

height  to   make  others   realize   that   no   lesser   height 

is  possible." — New  York  Evening  Post. 

TO  INFORM 

How  Haig  Fights  and  Feeds  His  Armies 

THE  BUSINESS  OF  WAR 

By  ISAAC  F.  MARCOSSON,  author  of  "The  Rebirth 
of  Russia,"  "The  War  After  the  War,"  etc. 

16  Illustrations.  Cloth,  $1.50  net 
"The  only  book  of  its  kind  in  the  field  of  war 
literature.  It  presents  a  huge  area  of  intricate  and 
humanly  fascinating  energies  co-ordinated  in  effort 
for  a  mighty  end,  and  it  covers  the  whole  territory 
with  an  economy  of  text  little  short  of  being  mar- 
velous."— Philadelphia,  Record. 

The  "Black  Monk"  of  Russia 

RASPUTIN  AND  THE 
RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION 

By   PRINCESS   CATHERINE   RADZIWILL    ("Count 
Paul  Vassili")  16  Illustrations.   8vo.   Cloth,  $3.00  net 
Here    the    author    of    "Behind    the    Veil    at    the 
Russian   Court"   presents   the   details   of  the   extraor- 
dinary   career    of    that    sinister    personage — Gregory 
Rasputin — with  truth   and   accuracy. 

"Uneasy  Lies  the  Head" 

MY  EMPRESS 

By  MARFA  MOUCHANOW. 

16  Illustrations.  Svo.  Cloth,  $2.50  net 
Twenty-three  years  of  intimate  life  with  Her  Former 
Majesty,  the  Czarina  Alexandra  of  Russia,  from  her 
marriage  to  the  day  of  her  exile,  written  by  her 
First  Maid  in  Waiting.  An  intimate  glimpse  behind 
the  purple  curtain. 

Secrets  in  the  Lives  of  the  German  Princes 

LOVE  INTRIGUES  OF  THE 
KAISER'S  SONS 

Chronicled   by   WILLIAM    LE    QUEUX 

Illustrated.    Crown  Svo.    Cloth,  $2.00  net 
Here  the  veil  is  lifted  from  the  private  lives  of  the 
Kaiser's  sons,  showing  how  they  were  frequently  in- 
volved in  affairs  of  the  heart  with  girls  in  all  classes 
of  society. 


JOHN  LANE  CO.  NEW  YORK 

Order  From  Your  Bookseller 


552 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


"AT  McCLURG'S" 

It  is  of  interest  and  importance 
to  Librarians  to  know  that  the 
books  reviewed  and  advertised 
in  this  magazine  can  be  pur- 
chased from  us  at  advantageous 
prices  by 

Public  Libraries,  Schools, 
Colleges  and  Universities 

In  addition  to  these  books  we 
have  an  exceptionally  large 
stock  of  the  books  of  all  pub- 
lishers—a more  complete  as- 
sortment than  can  be  found  on 
the  shelves  of  any  other  book- 
store in  the  entire  country.  We 
solicit  correspondence  from 
librarians  unacquainted  with 
our  facilities. 

LIBRARY  DEPARTMENT 

A.C.McClurg  &  Co.,  Chicago 


"The  most  comprehensive,  thorough, 
and  systematic  presentation  of  German- 
American  relations." — N.  Y.  Evening 
Post. 

A  Survey  of 

INTERNATIONAL  RELATIONS 

between  the 

UNITED  STATES  and  GERMANY 

August  1, 1914— April  6,  1917 

(Based  on  Official  Documents) 
By  JAMES  BROWN  SCOTT,  Major,  U.  S.  R. 

"A  record  which,  if  all  other  books  in  the 
world  were  to  be  destroyed,  would  itself  alone 
be  an  abundant  condemnation  of  Germany  and 
an  abundant  vindication  of  our  present  course  in 
warring  against  the  Hun." — AT.  Y.  Tribune. 

"An  invaluable  book  of  reference  concerning 
the  events  leading  up  to  the  participation  of  the 
United  States  in  the  greatest  war  in  history." — 
N.  Y.  Sun. 

"It  is  the  most  damning  array  of  evidence 
yet  adduced."— Phila.  Bulletin. 

Royal  800,  cloth,  506  page*,  net  $5.00 

At  all  Bookseller*  or  from  the  Publishers 


Oxford  University  Press,  American  Branch 


35  West  32nd  Street 


New  York 


was  reviewed  in  Mr.  Shanks's  letter  from  London 
in  THE  DIAL  for  January  31,  is  now  announced 
in  this  country  by  the  Frederick  A.  Stokes  Co. 

Small,  Maynard  &  Co.,  who  published  the  1917 
"Anthology  of  Magazine  Verse,"  have  taken  over 
Mr.  Braithwaite's  previous  anthologies,  1914-1916. 
The  1918  volume  is  now  announced. 

Paintings  and  works  of  art  which  have  been 
donated  for  the  benefit  of  the  Permanent  Blind 
Relief  War  Fund  will  be  on  sale  at  the  Anderson 
Galleries,  New  York,  June  5-7. 

D.  L.  Stevens,  of  the  American  Telephone  and 
Telegraph  Co.,  has  prepared  "A  Bibliography  of 
Municipal  Utility  Regulation  and  Municipal  Own- 
ership," which  is  published  by  the  Harvard  Uni- 
versity Press  at  $4. 

For  June  publication  Houghton  Mifflin  announce 
"Life  in  a  Tank,"  by  Captain  Richard  Haigh,  and 
"High  Adventure,"  a  new  book  by  Captain  James 
Norman  Hall,  the  American  aviator  who  was  re- 
cently reported  dead,  but  is  now  reported  wounded 
and  a  prisoner. 

Late  May  issues  from  Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.  in- 
cluded: "The  Book  of  Job  as  a  Greek  Tragedy 
Restored,"  by  H.  M.  Kallen;  "On  Reading  Nietz- 
sche," by  Emile  Faguet,  translated  by  George  Raf- 
falovich;  "Totem  and  Taboo,"  translated  from 
Freud  by  A.  A.  Brill;  and  "Personality  and  Con- 
duct," by  Maurice  Parmelee. 

The  early  June  Lane  list  includes:  "Messines, 
and  Other  Poems,"  by  Emile  Cammaerts;  "Raspu- 
tin and  the  Russian  Revolution,"  by  Princess  Radzi- 
will  (Count  Vassili)  ;  "Love  Intrigues  of  the 
Kaiser's  Sons,"  by  William  Le  Queux;  "Flower 
Name  Fancies,"  a  series  of  drawings  illustrating 
flower  nicknames,  by  Guy  Pierre  Fauconnet;  and 
a  special  issue  of  "The  International  Studio"  de- 
voted to  "The  Development  of  British  Landscape 
Painting  in  Water-Colors." 

Two  more  magazines  have  recently  issued  their 
first  numbers.  "The  Hispanic  American  Historical 
Review,"  a  quarterly,  is  published  from  1422  Irving 
Street,  N.E.,  Washington,  D.  C.  The  editors  are: 
Charles  E.  Chapman,  Isaac  J.  Cox,  Julius  J.  Klein, 
William  R.  Manning,  William  Spence  Robertson, 
and  James  A.  Robertson  (Managing).  "The  Arbi- 
trator," which  is  published  monthly  by  the  Free 
Religious  Association  of  America,  devotes  each 
number  to  a  pro-and-con  debate  of  some  question 
of  "political,  social,  and  moral  interest,"  the  first 
issue  discussing  the  prohibition  of  the  liquor  traffic. 
An  appended  questionnaire  is  designed  to  elicit  the 
opinions  of  readers  for  summary  in  a  subsequent 
number.  The  address  of  "The  Arbitrator"  is  Box 
42,  Wall  Street  Station,  New  York  City. 

Among  the  early  June  publications  of  the  George 
H.  Doran  Co.  are:  "The  Real  Colonel  House," 
by  Arthur  D.  Howden  Smith;  "The  New  Revela- 
tion," by  A.  Conan  Doyle;  "Across  the  Flood,"  by 
Lord  Reading;  "Germany  as  It  Is  To-day,"  by 
Cyril  Brown;  "When  the  Somme  Ran  Red,"  by 
Captain  A.  Radclyffe  Dugmore;  "The  Merchant 
Seaman  in  War,"  by  L.  Cope  Cornford;  "A 
Canadian  Twilight,"  by  Bernard  Freeman  Trotter; 
"The  Warp  and  the  Woof,"  by  Rev.  George 
Steven;  and  Harold  Begbie's  "Albert,  Fourth  Earl 
Grey." 


1918] 


THE    DIAL 


553 


LIST  or  NEW  BOOKS 


\The  following   list,   containing  6l   titles,   includes 
books  received  by  THE   DIAL  since  its  last  issue.} 


THE  WAR. 

Tales    from    a    Famished    Land.      By    Edward    Eyre 

Hunt.     12mo,  193  pages.     Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 

$1.25. 
Under  the  German  Sheila.     By  Emmanuel  Bourcier. 

Translated  by  George  Nelson  Holt  and  Mary  R. 

Holt.      Illustrated,     12mo,    217    pages.      Charles 

Scribner's  Sons.     $1.50. 
A  Surgeon  In  Arms.     By   Robert   J.  Manion.     "With 

frontispiece,  12mo,  310  pages.     D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

$1.50. 
The  New  Book  of  Martyrs.     By  Georges  Duhamel. 

Translated    by    Florence    Simmons.       12mo,    221 

pages.     George  H.  Doran  Co.     $1.35. 
The    Heart    of    a    Soldier.      By    Lauchlan    MacLean 

Watt.      12mo,    258    pages.      George   H.    Doran  Co. 

$1.35. 
A  General's  Letters  to  His  Son:     On  Obtaining  His 

Commission.     16mo,  111  pages.     Houghton  Mifflin 

Co.     $1. 

"Winged  Warfare.  By  Major  W.  A.  Bishop.  Illus- 
trated, 12mo,  272  pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co. 

$1.50. 

The  Merchant  Seaman  In  "War.  By  L.  Cope  Corn- 
ford.  With  a  Foreword  by  Admiral  Sir  John 

Jellicoe.      12mo,    320    pages.      George    H.    Doran 

Co.     $1.50. 
The    Fighting    Engineers.      By    Francis    A.    Collins. 

Illustrated,    12mo,    200    pages.      The    Century   Co. 

$1.30. 
Trucking   to   the   Trenches.      By   John    Iden    Kautz. 

12mo,  173  pages.     Houghton  Mifflin  Co.     $1. 
A  Prophecy  of  the  "War.     By  Lewis  Einstein.     With 

a    foreword    by    Theodore    Roosevelt.      12mo,    94 

pages.     Columbia  University  Press. 
The  War-Whirl   In   Washington.      By   Frank   Ward 

O'Malley.      Illustrated,     12mo,    298    pages.      The 

Century   Co.     $1.50. 
Keeping  Our  Fighters  Fit.   By  Edward  Frank  Allen. 

12mo,   207  pages.     The  Century  Co.     $1.25. 
"Across    the    Flood."      Addresses    at    the    dinner    in 

honor  of  the  Earl  of  Reading  at  the  Lotos  Club, 

New    York,    March    27,    1918.      12mo,    90    pages. 

George  H.  Doran  Co. 
"Wake  Up  America!     By  Mark   Sullivan.     16mo,   101 

pages.     The  Macmillan  Co.     60  cts. 

FICTION. 

YOU  No  Longer  Count.  By  Rene  Boylesve.  Trans- 
lated by  Louise  Seymour  Houghton.  12mo,  270 
pages.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  $1.50. 

The  Pretty  Lady.  By  Arnold  Bennett.  12mo,  352 
pages.  George  H.  Doran  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Promise  of  Air.  By  Algernon  Blackwood.  12mo, 
279  pages.  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Graftons.  By  Archibald  Marshall.  12mo,  337 
pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.  $1.50. 

Foe-Farrell.  By  "Q"  (Quiller-Couch).  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  358  pages.  The  Macmillan  Co.  $1.50. 

Caste  Three.  By  Gertrude  M.  Shields.  With  frontis- 
piece, 12mo,  450  pages.  The  Century  Co.  $1.40. 

Over  the  Hills  and  Far  Away.  By  Guy  Fleming. 
12mo,  325  pages.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

The  "Way  Out.  By  Emerson  Hough.  Illustrated, 
12mo,  313  pages.  D.  Appleton  &  Co.  $1.50. 

The  Man  from  Bar-2O.  By  Clarence  E.  Mulford. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  319  pages.  A.  C.  McClurg  & 
Co.  $1.40. 

Shot  "With  Crimson.  By  George  Barr  McCutcheon. 
Illustrated,  12mo,  161  pages.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 
$1. 

The   Rose-Bnsh    of   a    Thousand    Years.      By    Mabel 

Wagnalls.      Illustrated,    12mo,    77    pages.      Funk 

&  Wagnalls  Co.     75  cts. 
Her  Country.    By  Mary  Raymond  Shipman  Andrews. 

12mo,  81  pages.    Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     50  cts. 
Ransom!      By    Arthur    Somers    Roche.      12mo,    312 

pages.     George  H.   Doran  Co.     $1.35. 
Czech  Folk  Tales.     Collected  and  translated  by  Dr. 

Josepf    Baudis.      Illustrated,    12mo,     196    pages. 

The  Macmillan  Co.     $1.75. 
Great    Ghost    Stories.      Selected    by    Joseph    Lewis 

French.      12mo,    365    pages.      Dodd,    Mead   &   Co. 

$1.50. 


Sea  Power  and 

Freedom.     A  Historical  Study 

By  Gerard  Flennes.    Introduction  by 

Bradley  Allen  Fiske,  Rear-Admiral, 

U.  S.  N.   8°.   32  Illustrations.  $3.5O  net 

Until  Admiral  Mahan  published  his  epochal 
book,  "The  Influence  of  Sea  Power  upon  His- 
tory," in  1890,  few  had  realized  what  a  dis- 
tinctive influence  sea  power  has  had  on  history. 
But  Admiral  Mahan  only  took  up  the  period 
between  1660  and  1873.  This  most  important 
and  readable  volume  discusses  the  question 
throughout  all  the  ages,  including  actions  in  the 
present  war.  A  volume  that  cannot  fail  to  be 
of  greatest  interest  to  the  intelligent  reader. 

First,  the  readers  of  the  "Bystander"  were  seen 
to  go  about  their  daily  affairs  with  a  broad 
grin,  then  London  began  to  chuckle,  and  then 
the  Empire  began  to  rock  with  laughter.  And 
all  because 

Captain  Bruce 
Bairnsfather 

out  there  in  the  trenches,  had  begun  to  make 
little  sketches  on  odd  scraps  of  paper.  Now 
the  world  is  chortling  over  these  Bairnsfather 
books: 

Fragments  from  France,  8  ,  143  plates, 
15  smaller  Illustrations,  $1.75.  Frag- 
ments from  France,  Part  V.  4°,  paper,  32 
plates,  SO  cents.  Bairnsfather — A  Few 
Fragments  from  His  Life.  Large  8°  text 
by  a  friend,  26  full  pages,  26  text  Illus- 
trations, $1.25.  Bullets  and  Billets— 
His  Experiences  In  the  Trenches,  with 
18  full  page  and  23  text  illustrations, 
$1.5O. 


In  Flanders  Fields 

By  John  McCrae 

John  McCrae,  physician,  soldier  and  poet,  died 
in  France,  a  Lieutenant-Colonel,  in  January 
1918,  but  his  memory  will  live  for  many  a  day 
through  these  war  verses  which  are  thought 
by  many  critics  to  be  the  best  poetry  so  far 
produced  by  the  war.  The  exquisite  poem  that 
gives  the  book  its  title  has  been  widely  reprinted 
in  the  newspapers,  but  most  of  the  others  are 
unknown  to  American  readers. 

All  Booksellers 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


554 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6 


GREAT    WAR,    BALLADS 

By  Brookes  More 

Readers  of  the  future  (as  well  as  today)  will 
understand  the  Great  War  not  only  from  pe- 
rusal of  histories,  but  also  from  Ballads — having 
a  historical  basis— and  inspired  by  the  war. 

A  collection  of  the  most  interesting,  beauti- 
ful and  pathetic  ballads.— 

True  to  life  and  full  of  action. 
$1.50  Net 

For  Sale  bj!  Brentano's;  The  Baker  *•  Taylor  Co.,  New 

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1918]  THE    DIAL  555 


NOTABLE  ARTICLES  IN  THE  JULY 

YALE    REVIEW 

Should  We  Build  the  Channel  Tunnel? 

BY  MAJOR  GENERAL  GREENE,  U.S.V. 

A  Proposal  for  the  Immediate  Building  by  the  United  States  Government  of  this 
Long-discussed  Bond  between  England  and  France  as  a  Military  Necessity  to  Win  the 
War. 

Illusions  of  the  Kaiser  and  the  Allies 

BY  E.  J.  DILLON,  British  War  Critic 

A  Stirring  Attack  on  the  Preoccupation  by  the  Allies  with  the  Military  Situation  in 
the  West  to  their  Serious  Neglect  of  the  German  Tactical  Development  in  Russia  and 
the  Orient. 

Why  Holland  has  Kept  Neutral 

BY  HENDRIK  W.  VAN  LOON,  Historian  and  War  Correspondent 

An  Effective  Statement  of  the  Consistent  Efforts  of  the  Dutch  Nation,  while  Pro-Ally 
in  Public  Sentiment,  to  Remain  Neutral. 

The  New  International  Order 

BY  ARTHUR  HENDERSON,  M.P. 

A  Timely  and  Highly  Important  Public  Discussion  of  the  New  Social  Order  which 
is  Emerging  from  the  World  Struggle,  by  the  Chairman  of  the  Parliamentary  Labor  Party 
and  Former  Member  of  the  British  War  Cabinet.  This  Article  may  well  become  one  of 
the  most  Significant  Papers  of  the  Times. 

and 
A  delightful  essay  by  Meredith  Nicholson,  in  a  new  vein. 

"Jerusalem  Delivered,"  a  poem  interpreting  Jewish  Ideals,  by  Louis   Untermeyer. 
"The  Valleys  of  the  Blue  Shrouds/'  a  war  poem  by  John  Finley. 
The  American  Soldier's  Social  Problems  in  Europe. 

The  Airplane,  American  Women  and  the  War,  Etc.,  Etc. 

Special  Notice  to  DIAL  Readers 

This  exceptionally  interesting  number  of  The  Yale  Review,  America's  leading  quar- 
terly, will  be  mailed  free  to  anyone  subscribing  for  the  year  beginning  with  the  next  (Octo- 
ber) number.  Price,  $2.50  a  year;  75  cents  the  copy.  On  sale  at  all  important  bookstores 
in  the  country. 

THE  YALE  REVIEW,  New  Haven,  Conn. 

When   writing  to  advertisers  please  mention   THE   DIAL. 


556 


THE    DIAL 


[June  6,  1918 


"Unquestionably  the  Best" 

The  Boston  Transcript:  Of  all  the  books  that  have  come  to  our  notice, 
works  dealing  primarily  with  the  problem  of  Bagdad,  Prof.  Morris  Jastrow's 
"The  War  and  the  Bagdad  Railway,"  with  its  illustrative  map,  is  un- 
questionably the  best. 

THE  WAR  AND  THE  BAGDAD 
RAILWAY 

By  MORRIS  JASTROW,  Jr..  Ph.D..  LL.D. 
14  illustrations  and  a  map.    Cloth,  $1.50  net 

Hon.  Oscar  S.  Straus,  Ex.-U.  S.  Ambassador  to  Turkey:  "My  purpose 
was  to  congratulate  you  upon  this  excellent  study  and  valuable  contribu- 
tion to  possible  terms  of  peace." 

The  New  Republic:  "Hard  to  match  for  brevity  and  clearness.  As  an 
Oriental  scholar,  Prof.  Jastrow  is  singularly  well  equipped  to  set  forth 
in  the  light  of  history  the  conditions  that  have  made  Asia  Minor  such  a 
disastrous  breeder  of  strife,  and  this  is,  in  fact,  his  most  interesting 
contribution." 

THE  WAR  AND  THE  COMING  PEACE 

By  MORRIS  JASTROW.  Jr.,  Ph.D.,  LL.D.    $1.00  net 

A  companion  volume  to  the  author's  "The  War  and  the  Bagdad  Rail- 
way," which  has  taken  its  place  among  the  valuable  books  called  forth  by 
the  war.  Prof.  Jastrow  in  this  book,  carrying  out  the  spirit  of  his  other 
work  and  applying  himself  to  the  deeper  aspects  of  the  war,  the  "under- 
currents," as  the  author  puts  it,  shows  how  both  the  great  conflict  and 
the  coming  peace  must  be  looked  at  from  the  angle  of  the  moral  issue. 

It  is  written  for  those  who  wish  to  pass  from  a  consideration  of  sur- 
face events  to  a  deeper  interpretation  of  the  great  conflict ;  it  aims 
especially  to  provide  a  basis  on  which  a  structure  of  enduring  peace 
can  be  erected. 

A  Remarkable  Biography 

THE  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  STEPHEN 
GIRARD 

MARINER  AND  MERCHANT 

By  JOHN  BACH  McMASTER.    7  illustrations,  2  volumes.  Octavo.    $5.00  net 

It  seems  strange  that  there  has  never  been  an  adequate  biography  of 
the  famous  Stephen  Girard,  but  the  subject  has  now  been  handled  by  a 
master  hand.  From  the  immense  mass  of  material  available,  John  Bach 
McMaster  has  been  able  to  build  up  a  great  story,  told  in  large  part  by 
Girard  himself,  through  his  letters,  papers  and  memoranda  concerning 
events  and  peop_le.  It  is  not  only  the  story  of  a  noted  man,  who  left  his 
impress  upon  history,  but  also  of  the  times  in  which  he  lived. 

What  Did  We  Get  for  $25,000,000? 
THE  VIRGIN  ISLANDS 

Our  New  Possessions  and  the  British  Islands 

By  THEODOOR  DE  BOOY  and  JOHN  T.  FARIS 

Profusely  Illustrated.    $3.00  net 

Describes  everything  one  would  wish  to  know  about  these  Islands,  which 
were  formerly  the  Danish  West  Indies  and  recently  purchased  by  our 
Government.  Special  features :  Five  magnificent  maps  made  especially 
for  this  volume ;  over  100  original  photographs ;  hints  and  suggestions 
to  investors  ;  complete  information  for  travelers  ;  entertaining  sketches  and 
stories  of  the  history  and  romance  of  the  Islands. 

By  the  Author  of  the  Very  Popular  "HOW  TO  LIVE  AT  THE  FRONT" 


OVER  HERE 


By  HECTOR  MACQUARRIE.  Lieutenant  Royal   Field  Artillery.    $1.35  net 

Serious  and  sprightly  snap  shots  of  our  country  which  Americans 
will  read  with  keen  delight.  "A  contribution  to  the  foreign  school  of 
personal  impression  which  is  so  kindly  in  its  point  of  view  and  so 
interesting  and  informal  in  its  style  that  the  American  reading  public 
will  doubtless  take  it  immediately  to  their  hearts  as  well  as  their  book 
shelves.  .  .  This  rapid  synopsis  of  some  of  the  topics  touched  upon  by 
the  gallant  author  does  not  give  any  idea  of  the  humor,  the  zest,  the 
delightful  quality  of  his  book." — New  York  Morning  Telegraph. 

OVER  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  WAR 

Personal  Experiences  of  the  Great  European  Conflict 

By  NEVIL  MONROE  HOPKINS.  Ph.D..  Major,  Ordnance  Reserve  Corps. 
United  States  Army.  70  illustrations.  Many  from  snapshots  by  the  author. 
Drawings,  documents  and  colored  proclamations.  $5.00  net. 

Written  in  a  charming  narrative  style  from  a  truly  remarkable  diary 
of  the  first  few  months  of  the  great  World  War,  taking  the  reader  into 
the  feverish  atmosphere  of  Europe  during  the  dark  days  of  the  gather- 
ing war  clouds,  and  in  the  early  months  of  the  crash  which  followed. 
The  proceeds  from  the  sale  of  this  book  will  be  donated  by  the  author  to 
the  fund  of  the  Belgian  Scholarship  Committee  of  which  he  is  Chairman. 


LIPPINCOTT 
BOOKS 


1792 


1918 


FOR   SALE  AT  ALT. 

BOOKSTORES 

•J.   B.    LlPPINCOTT     COMPANY 

MONTUKAI.       PHILADELPHIA        LONDON 


Officially  Authorized  by  the  SECRE- 
TARY OF  WAR 

OFFENSIVE  FIGHTING 

By 
MAJOR  DONALD  McRAE,  U.S.A. 

This  book  tells  how  the  actual 
fighting  is  done.  Major  McRae  saw 
a  year  of  hard  fighting.  He  gives 
specific  detailed  instructions  on  the 
officers'  work  of  the  armies  in 
France.  16  original  sketches  to 
illustrate  the  text.  $2.00  net 

THE  ENCHANTED 
BARN 

By  GRACE  L.  H.  LUTZ,  Author  of 
"The   Best   Man,"  "Marcia   Schuy- 
ler,"  etc.     Frontispiece  in  color. 
$1.35  net 

"A  clean,  sweet  story  told  with 
fine  art ;  a  story  to  leave  a  pleasant 
taste  lingering  on  one's  mental  pal- 
ate. There  are  thrills  in  the  story, 
too,  and  enough  of  mystery  to  sat- 
isfy and  hold  attention  of  any  right- 
minded  reader." — The  New  York 
Herald. 

For  Boys  and  Girls 

AMERICAN  BOYS' 

BOOK  OF  SIGNS, 

SIGNALS  AND 

SYMBOLS 

By    DAN    BEARD,    National    Scout 

Commissioner,  Boy  Scouts  of  Amer- 
ica. 350  illustration*  by  the  au- 
thor. Octavo.  $2.00  net. 

A  fascinating  subject  and  who 
better  qualified  could  be  selected 
than  Dan  Beard  to  write  about  the 
signs  and  signals  of  the  Indians, 
foresters  and  animals  in  the  woods, 
tramps  and  secret  organizations  in 
the  towns  and  cities,  the  Morse 
Telegraph  code,  the  wigwagging  of 
the  navy,  the  deaf  and  dumb  lan- 
guage? These  are  all  here,  care- 
fully illustrated,  most  intelligently 
decribed. 

WINONA'S  WAR 
FARM 

By  MARGARET  WIDDEMER 
Illustrated.     $1.25  net 

Winona  and  her  friends  of  the 
Camp  Fire  Girls,  together  with  a 
party  of  Boy  Scouts  and  a  Society 
of  little  girls  called  "The  Blue 
Birds,"  have  great  fun  in  war 
farming. 


PRESS    OF    THE    BLAKELY-OSWALD    PRINTING    CO.,    CHICAGO. 


7